In
1890 the National Woman
Suffrage Association (NWSA) and the American
Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) merged in 1890 to form the National
American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). The leaders of this
new organisation include Elizabeth Cady
Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Carrie
Chapman Catt, Frances Willard, Matilda
Joslyn Gage and Anna Howard Shaw.
Some younger members of the NAWSA became impatient
about the progress the organisation was making. While studying at
the School of Economics and Political Science
(LSE) in London, Alice Paul, joined the
militant Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU).
Like other members of the WSPU, Paul's activities resulted in her
being arrested and imprisoned three times. Like other suffragettes
she went on hunger strike and was forced-fed.
When Alice
Paul returned home to the United States
and in 1913 she joined with Lucy Burns,
Mabel Vernon, Olympia
Brown, Mary Ritter Beard, Belle
LaFollette, Doris
Stevens,
Helen Keller, Maria
Montessori, Dorothy Day and Crystal
Eastman to form the Congressional
Union for Women Suffrage
(CUWS) and attempted to introduce the militant methods used by the
Women's Social and Political Union in Britain.
This included organizing huge demonstrations and the daily picketing
of the White House. Over the next couple of years the police arrested
nearly 500 women for loitering and 168 were jailed for "obstructing
traffic". Alice
Paul was sentenced
to seven months imprisonment but after going on hunger strike she
was released.
By 1914 the CUWS had a membership of 4,500 and had raised more than
$50,000 for its campaign. The CUWS also had its own magazine, the
Suffragist and published articles
by leading members such as Alice Paul, Lucy
Burns and Inez Milholland. Its main
cartoonist was the outstanding artist, Nina
Allender. The journal also published cartoons produced by Cornelia
Barns, Boardman Robinson, Marrietta
Andrews and Van Loon.
In 1916 the Congressional Union for Women Suffrage
became the National Woman's Party. This new organization was
criticised by pressure groups such as the National
Association for the Advancement of Coloured People for
not supporting voting rights of black women. At one demonstration
outside of the White House leaders of the party asked the black suffragist,
Ida Wells-Barnett, not to march with other
members. It was feared that identification with black civil rights
would lose the support of white women in the South. Despite pressure
from people like Mary White Ovington,
leaders of the CUWS such as Alice
Paul and Lucy
Burns refused to publicly state that she endorsed black female
suffrage.
In January, 1918, Woodrow Wilson announced
that women's suffrage was urgently needed as a "war measure".
The House of Representatives passed the federal woman suffrage amendment
274 to 136 but it was opposed in the Senate and was defeated in September
1918. Another attempt in February 1919 also ended in failure.
In May 1919 the House of Representatives again passed the amendment
(304 to 89) and on 4th June 1919 the Senate finally gave in and passed
it by 66 to 30. On 26th August 1920 the Nineteenth
Amendment
was certified by the Secretary of State, when Tennessee, the thirty-sixth
and final state needed, signed for ratification.
(1)
Doris
Stevens, Jailed
for Freedom (1920)
Finding that a suffrage committee in the House and a report in the
Senate had not silenced our banners, the administration cast about
for another plan by which to stop the picketing. This time they turned
desperately to longer terms of imprisonment. They were, indeed, hard
pressed when they could choose such a cruel and stupid course.
Our answer to this policy
was more women on the picket line on the outside, and a protest on
the inside of prison. We decided, in the face of extended imprisonment,
to demand to be treated as political prisoners. We felt that, as a
matter of principle, this was the dignified and self-respecting thing
to do, since we had offended politically, not criminally. We believed
further that a determined, organized effort to make clear to a wider
public the political nature of the offense would intensify the administration's
embarrassment and so accelerate their final surrender.
It fell to Lucy Burns,
vice-chairman of the organization, to be the leader of the new protest.
Miss Burns is in appearance
the very symbol of woman in revolt. Her abundant and glorious red
hair burns and is not consumed - a flaming torch. Her
body is strong and vital. It is said that Lucy Stone had the "voice"
of the pioneers. Lucy Burns without doubt possessed the "voice"
of the modern suffrage movement. Musical, appealing, persuading -
she could move the
most resistant person. Her talent as an orator
is of the kind that makes for instant intimacy
with her audience. Her emotional quality
is so powerful that her intellectual capacity,
which is quite as great, is not always
at once perceived.
She had no sooner begun
to organize her comrades for protest than the officials sensed a "plot"
and removed her at once to solitary confinement. But they were too
late. Taking the leader only hastened the rebellion. A forlorn piece
of paper was discovered on which was written their initial demand.
It was then passed from prisoner to prisoner through holes in the
wall surrounding leaden pipes, until a finished document had been
perfected and signed by all the prisoners.
(2) Leaflet written and distributed
by Alice
Paul
outside of the White House.
President Wilson and Envoy Root
are deceiving Russia. They say "We are a democracy. Help us to
win the war so that democracies may survive." We women of America
tell you that America is not a democracy. Twenty million women are
denied the right to vote. President Wilson is the chief opponent of
their national enfranchisement. Help us make this nation really free.
Tell our government that it must liberate its people before it can
claim free Russia as an ally.
(3) Alice
Paul,
letter to Doris
Stevens (November,
1917)
At night, in the early morning,
all through the day there were cries and shrieks and moans from the
patients. It was terrifying. One particularly meloncholy moan used
to keep up hour after hour with the regularity of a heart beat. I
said to myself, "Now I have to endure this. I have got to live
through this somehow. I pretend these moans are the noise of an elevated
train, beginning faintly in the distance and getting louder as it
comes nearer." Such childish devices were helpful to me.
(4) Rose Winslow was in prison
with Alice
Paul
in November 1917.
Yesterday was a bad day for me in feeding. I was vomiting continuously
during the process. The tube has developed an irritation somewhere
that is painful. Don't let them tell you we take this well. Miss Paul
vomits much. I do, too, except when I'm not nervous, as I have been
every time against my will. We think of the coming feeding all day.
It is horrible.
(5) Crystal
Eastman, The
Liberator
(December, 1920)
Many
feminists are socialists, many are communists, not a few are active
leaders in these movements. But the true feminist, no matter how far
to the left she may be in the revolutionary movement, sees the woman's
battle as distinct in its objects and different in its methods from
the workers' battle for industrial freedom. She knows, of course,
that the vast majority of women as well as men are without property,
and are of necessity bread and butter slaves under a system of society
which allows the very sources of life to be privately owned by a few,
and she counts herself a loyal soldier in the working-class army that
is marching to overthrow that system. But as a feminist she also knows
that the whole of woman's slavery is not summed up in the profit system,
nor her complete emancipation assured by the downfall of capitalism.
Woman's freedom, in the
feminist sense, can be fought for and conceivably won before the gates
open into industrial democracy. On the other hand, woman's freedom,
in the feminist sense, is not inherent in the communist ideal. All
feminists are familiar with the revolutionary leader who "can't
see" the woman's movement. "What's
the matter with the women? My wife's all right," he says. And
his wife, one usually finds, is raising his children in a Bronx flat
or a dreary suburb, to which he returns occasionally for food and
sleep when all possible excitement and stimulus have been wrung from
the fight. If we should graduate into communism tomorrow this man's
attitude to his wife would not be changed. The proletarian dictatorship
may or may not free women. We must begin now to enlighten the future
dictators.
(6)
Mary
White Ovington, letter
to Lucy Burns
of the National Woman's Party
(17th December, 1920)
I am writing to you as an advisory member of the
National Woman's Party asking if you will arrange that at the meeting,
February fifteenth, a colored woman be invited to speak. I would suggest
as the speaker, Mrs. Mary B. Talbert, until last June president of
the Federation of Colored Women, and this
summer one of the ten official members of the International Council
of Women which met at Christiana. Mrs. Talbert is able, liberal in
thought, and perhaps the best known colored woman in the United States
today.
There was little voting and much terrorizing
of Negroes in the South during the past elections and at Ocoee, Florida,
there was a massacre. But equally sinister was the refusing to register
women at such a place as Hampton, Virginia, where Hampton Institute
has through many years endeavored to maintain kindly feelings between
the two races, and yet where colored women were so insulted when they
attempted to register that one woman said: "I could kill the
clerk who questioned me; I could kill his wife and children."
If the South means to awaken a spirit like this
it will eventually have war to face. But I believe that the Negro
woman can win her right to vote if she is upheld by the rest of the
country. The thinking southern woman is generally more fairminded
than the southern man, but she cannot secure justice for the colored
woman without she has the backing of all of us.
Will you not therefore, endeavor to have a committee
appointed out of your great meeting in February which shall investigate
and take some action regarding the status of the colored woman? The
Woman's Party must have in its membership, South as well as North,
women of broad enough vision and deep enough purpose to attack this
problem. And if the women attack it, it will be solved.
(7)
Mary
White Ovington, letter to Alice
Paul of the National Woman's
Party (4
January 1921)
Not being a member of the National Woman's Party, I wrote to the members
of the National Advisory Council whom I knew asking them if they would
interest themselves in having a colored woman appear on the program
of the Woman's Party Conference in Washington in February. Mrs. Brannan
wrote me enthusiastically that the New York State Branch of the Woman's
Party unanimously decided in favor of a colored speaker upon the program,
but she telephoned me yesterday that you did not find this possible
and asked me to address my communication directly to you.
The difficulty, as I understand it, seems to be that
it has been necessary for the Woman's Party to restrict its program
to representatives from organizations which have undertaken a more
or less distinct feminist program and that Mrs. Talbert, whose name
I suggested as today the most distinguished colored woman speaker
in the country and as an ex-President of the National Association
of Colored Women, would not be able to speak at your session because
she does not represent a feminist organization.
May I point out, however, that Mrs. Talbert does
represent the colored women of the United States and that no white
woman can today represent the colored women of this country. Owing
to our caste system, these women are little known by white women and
carry on their organization largely distinct from the organizations
of your and my race. This being the case, it is surely eminently proper
that a meeting which has as one of its objects the honoring of the
great feminists of the nineteenth century should have on its program
a representative colored woman. Indeed, I think when your statue of
Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton is unveiled
and it is realized that no colored woman has been given any part in
your great session, the omission will be keenly felt by thousands
of people throughout the country.
(8)
Rebecca
West,
reviewed Jailed for Freedom by Doris
Stevens in
Time
and Tide
on 24th March, 1922.
They (members
of the Congressional Union for Women Suffrage) found that the police
while constantly
arresting them for minute technical offences, would not interfere
when they were assaulted by hooligans, and later on led Government-organised
crowds of uniformed soldiers and sailors against them. They went to
prison and, in an interesting penal institution called the Occoguan
workhouse, were fed on worm-crawling food and exposed in insanitary
conditions and when they denounced this state of affairs, not only
on their own account but (as has always been the gentlemanly suffragist
way), on behalf of the ordinary offenders, the administration called
to mind a penitentiary in a swamp, which had been declared unfit for
human habitation nine years before, and put them there. All this they
endured and thereby, without any doubt at all, acquired the vote.
With extraordinary naivety the United States Government failed to
cover up its tracks and left it patent that it gave women the franchise
not because of any consideration of justice, but because they were
a nuisance. There was no such magnificent exhibition of the art of
climbing down in the grand manner (with classical quotation from Mr.
Asquith) as our Parliamentary debate on the passing of the Act. A
crude, new country America; but no doubt it will learn.
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