On This Day in the Old West January 10
On January 10, 1878, Joint Resolution, S.J. Res. 12, proposed an amendment to the US Constitution prohibiting suffrage on the basis of sex. This was the first proposed amendment to specify women’s suffrage.
The first convention for women’s rights, organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, was held in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848. This convention produced a list of demands called the Declaration of Sentiments, modeled on the Declaration of Independence. It called for broader educational and professional opportunities for women and the rights of married women to control their wages and properties. After this historic gathering, women’s voting rights became a central issue in the emerging debate about women’s rights in America
Many of the convention’s attendees were also abolitionists, whose goals included universal suffrage—the right to vote for all adults. The American Equal Rights Association was formed in 1866. This organization advocated for suffrage “irrespective of race, color, or sex.” In 1870, this goal was partially realized when the Fifteenth Amendment granted black men the right to vote. The AERA was split into two groups over disagreements about the Amendments.
New York’s National Women Suffrage Association (NWSA, formed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony) focused its efforts on federal legislation, while the Boston group, the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA, formed by Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson) targeted state legislation. The NWSA opposed the Fifteenth Amendment because it excluded women. In the year following the ratification of the Amendment, they sent a voting rights petition to the Senate and House of Representatives requesting that suffrage rights be extended to women and that women be granted the privilege of being heard on the floor of Congress.
The AWSA supported the Fifteenth Amendment and protested the confrontational tactics of the NWSA. They concentrated on gaining women’s access to the polls at state and local levels, in the belief that victories there would gradually build support for national action on the issue. The AWSA did, however, send an 1871 petition asking that women in DC and the territories be allowed to vote and hold office.
In 1869, new territory Wyoming passed a bill giving women full voting rights. It would be nearly a quarter of a century before any other state followed suit. The first federal legislation proposing equal suffrage for men and women on the basis of citizenship was in 1868, but the resolution was not debated. It “laid on the table.” The first federal legislation proposing equal voting rights specifically for women was the one in 1878, but it was not acted upon until 1887, when it was defeated in the Senate by a 16-to-34 vote.
In 1890, the NWSA and AWSA merged into the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), which became the largest woman suffrage organization in the country. They led much of the struggle for the vote through 1920, when the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified. The organization was led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton as president, Susan B. Anthony as vice-president, and Lucy Stone as chairman of the executive committee.
Suffragists did more than just send petitions to Congress. Susan B. Anthony registered and voted in the 1872 election in Rochester, New York. As planned, she was arrested for “knowingly, wrongfully and unlawfully voting for a representative to the Congress of the United States.” Anthony was convicted by the State of New York and fined $100, which she insisted she would never pay. On January 12, 1874, she petitioned Congress, requesting “that the fine imposed upon your petitioner be remitted, as an expression of the sense of this high tribunal that her conviction was unjust.”
Wealthy white women were not the only supporters of women's suffrage. Abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, formerly a slave, was also an advocate. He attended the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. In an editorial published that year in The North Star, the anti-slavery newspaper he published, he wrote, "...in respect to political rights,...there can be no reason in the world for denying to woman the elective franchise,..." By 1877, when he was U.S. marshal for the District of Columbia, Douglass's family was also involved in the movement. His son, Frederick Douglass, Jr.; daughter, Mrs. Nathan Sprague; and son-in-law, Nathan Sprague, all signed a petition to Congress for woman suffrage "...to prohibit the several States from Disfranchising United States Citizens on account of Sex."
A growing number of Black women actively supported women's suffrage during this period as well. They organized women’s clubs across the country to advocate for suffrage, among other reforms. Prominent African American suffragists included Ida B. Wells-Barnett of Chicago, a leading crusader against lynching; Mary Church Terrell, educator and first president of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW); and Adella Hunt Logan, Tuskegee Institute faculty member, who insisted in articles in The Crisis, a publication of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), that if white women needed the vote to protect their rights, then black women – victims of racism as well as sexism – needed the ballot even more.
Forty-one years later, when the Nineteenth Amendment is passed, it is worded exactly the same as the 1878 Amendment, laid before the Senate on January 10. Depending on when your characters lived, they were almost certainly aware of the fight for women’s votes. They may have known a suffragist or even had one in the family. The battle for women’s rights could make an interesting subplot in your next story.
No comments:
Post a Comment