League of
Women Voters of the Upper Valley
Hanover,
NH, Norwich, VT and neighboring towns
updated
7/27/04 Home Page
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Out of the
Sweatshop, Into the Voting Booth: Working Women and the Struggle for
Suffrage
Then
came America's entry into the First World War.
Women would
have gotten the vote anyway. It was going to happen. But the war
hastened the inevitable. The war made it nearly impossible for anyone
to continue opposing giving women full political rights. They played
too large a role in supporting the war effort.
Women
purchased war bonds, knitted socks for soldiers, planted gardens, and
cut back on the use of scarce goods in their homes. They also performed
more direct service. Middle class women volunteered as ambulance
drivers; the Salvation Army set up canteens at military bases where
Salvation Army "lassies" made donuts for homesick servicemen; nurses
served close to the front lines. And in the factories on the home
front, girls and women who had been making corsets and shirtwaists, or
who had worked in department stores or as domestic servants, began
making weapons and ammunition. They built the biplanes that trained
young American aviators. They canned the meat that fed the army. They
assembled the gas masks that protected American soldiers from the new
horror of chemical warfare. Women also began to work in government
agencies assigned to looking after the welfare of women in war
industries.
While serving
their country in all of these ways, women continued to insist that they
needed--and deserved--full political rights. During the war, a militant
group of suffragists picketed the White House, holding up signs
pointing out that while Americans fought for democracy abroad, they did
not have full democracy at home. They kept a fire burning in the park
across the street from the White House, and there they burned every
speech that Wilson made about liberty or democracy or
self-determination of peoples. The protesters were beaten by onlookers,
arrested by the police, and sentenced to time in the Occoquan
workhouse. Among these picketers was a group of munitions workers from
Bridgeport, Connecticut, who left their factory jobs making cartridges
to join the protest in Washington. They were arrested alongside the
wealthy matrons and wives of politicians.
The more
moderate suffragists disapproved these tactics of picketing the White
House and denouncing the president, but they continued to work in their
own way. In 1916, Carrie Chapman Catt had outlined her strategy for
passage of a federal suffrage amendment. Suffrage in a few key states
would come first, before the big push for a federal amendment. One key
state was New York: "If New York wins in 1917, the backbone of the
opposition will be largely bent if not broken."
In 1917 the
voters of New York would consider a referendum on the enfranchisement
of women. The leaders of the suffrage movement had by this time fully
realized that the votes of immigrant, laboring men could help them win.
And so instead of arguing that votes for middle class women would
dilute the effect of the immigrant vote, they made a strong appeal to
those immigrant working men. Rose Schneiderman was one of the suffrage
workers who knew how to talk to these men. She attended union meetings
and held her own street meetings. When she spoke to them about the
miserable working conditions of women and children, they knew she was
telling the truth. When she urged them to give their wives, sisters,
and daughters the vote, they finally began to listen. The night before
the election, as workers were going home, Rose Schneiderman went to the
Brooklyn Bridge and other places around the city, handing out thousands
of circulars addressed "To the Working Men of New York State."
"New York men
are called upon to fight for democracy as against autocracy on the
battlefields of Europe. Surely you, our Bothers, will not then refuse
to vote for democracy at home, by enfranchising your sisters in
factories, mills and shops in the greatest industrial state in America!
In your struggle against industrial oppression we organized women have
stood by you with unfaltering courage. Brothers, with unfaltering faith
will you now give to us in like spirit the freedom we need and so
ardently desire?"
In the
morning, Rose Schneiderman and a group of friends campaigned at polling
places. She wrote in her autobiography "It was an interesting
experience, for none of us had ever seen the inside of a voting place."
She had worked in factories, had organized strikes, had led street
meetings and marched in demonstrations, and had gone into bars to speak
at meetings of men's unions; but she had never before been inside a
polling place.
In much of New
York state, the vote was fairly evenly split. But in NYC, the working
classes helped provide the margin of victory. Women would now be voting
in all New York elections, including the presidential election that
would be coming up in 1920.
In January
1918, nine months after the U.S. had entered the war, the Washington
Post reported that the president had finally changed his mind about
woman suffrage. On the eve of a vote in the House, twelve democratic
members of Congress visited Wilson at the White House to ask his view.
"He earnestly advised us to vote for the amendment," one of them
reported to the Post. The next day, the measure passed 274 to 136. The
Senate, however, defeated it. That was January. In September, now 17
months into the war, the president went before the Senate with a strong
appeal:
"We have made
partners of the women in this war; shall we admit them only to a
partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a
partnership of privilege and right?" He cited women's efforts in
industry "Wherever men have worked," as well as in Europe "upon the
very skirts and edges of the battle itself." Approval of woman
suffrage, Wilson urged, was "vital to the winning of the war and to the
energies alike of preparation and of battle." The Senators were
unconvinced, and defeated woman suffrage again.
Gradually,
however, individual states were giving women the right to vote. Within
those states, suffrage workers campaigned for pro-suffrage candidates,
and helped elect them and send them to Congress. In 1919, a newly
elected U. S. House of Representatives re-passed the federal suffrage
amendment by an even larger margin than it had before, and the newly
elected Senate finally passed it as well.
The
notion--popular in the Victorian era--that women would clean up
politics, prevent war, and create more programs of social justice
turned out to be mistaken. As we now recognize, women are neither more
nor less morally upright than men. Those who argued that working women
needed the vote in order to protect themselves were not entirely right
either. True, politicians today don't dare to ignore the needs of women
the way the mayor of New York quite openly admitted he did back in
1910. It's also true that the presence of women in hazardous industries
during the war helped create safer working conditions for all. But that
happened independently of having the vote.
The suffrage
workers were right, however, in understanding the importance of the
vote as a symbol. Woman suffrage finally recognized that women are
human beings with a range of faculties, responsibilities, and rights no
different from those of men. Woodrow Wilson believed that women earned
the right to vote through their patriotism and hard work during the
war. The suffragists would have argued that they deserved it all along.
Whichever way you look at it, the vote is a recognition of the
political rights and intellectual abilities of women, as well as a
recognition of their contributions to the welfare of the nation in war
and in peace.
I would like
to leave you with two main thoughts today:
(1) Political
action does have a powerful effect. It was the slow but steady gaining
of voting rights in the states that finally forced the Congress to pass
a federal amendment. And it was the campaigning and finally the voting
of women in some states that created a Congress willing to pass it.
It took more
than 100 years for women to win the right to vote. My message today is
that over the course of that 100 years, the hard work and courageous
acts of individual people created change.
(2) In the
struggle for woman suffrage in America, it was the collaboration
between well-educated, middle class women and un-educated but
street-smart working women that finally brought about the victory. It
was when native-born white women recognized the power of the immigrant
vote, and found ways to work with immigrant women of the working class,
that they achieved success. And so, finally, it was embracing diversity
and democracy within the woman suffrage movement that brought the
victory of the woman suffrage amendment.
For more on
these topics:
Annelise
Orleck, Common Sense and a Little
Fire: Women and Working Class Politics in the United States, 1900-1965.
Carrie Brown, Rosie's Mom: Forgotten Women Workers of
the First World War.
Eleanor
Flexner and Ellen Fitzpatrick, Century
of Struggle: The Woman's Rights Movement in the United States.
C. Brown, May
2003
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