Articles and Book Reviews by Fergus M. Bordewich
Friends and Foes of the 19th Amendment
Rabble rousers, politicos and earnest reformers assembled in Nashville in the heat of July 1920 to decide the fate of women’s suffrage.
[Book review] The Woman’s Hour by Elaine Weiss
Reviewed By Fergus Bordewich in The Wall Street Journal, June 2018. [Draft Version]
TWO YEARS AGO, (in 2016) more than 73 million women cast votes for the president of the United States, and for decades women have consistently outnumbered male voters in national elections. It is almost impossible now to imagine the country without women voters or candidates. But today’s reality was no more than a gleam in the eye of the suffragists who descended on Nashville, Tenn., in July 1920 for the climactic battle of the decades-long struggle to win the vote for women.
(Above) Alice Paul unfurling her ‘ratification banner’ after Tennessee became the 36th state to approve the women’s suffrage amendment, 1920. Photo: Alamy Stock Photo
They composed a talented and indefatigable brigade, and the campaign they waged ranks among the most politically skillful in American history. Among them were Democrats and Republicans, radicals and conservatives, rabble rousers and club women, the flamboyant and the staid. There were bound together—though not always amicably—to lobby the Tennessee legislature to ratify the 19th Amendment. President Woodrow Wilson had endorsed the amendment, and Congress had approved it in June 1919. Thirty-six states were needed to ratify it. Thirty-five had done so, but several had flatly rejected it, and in other states the legislation had stalled. The amendment now depended on Tennessee.
Elaine Weiss gives us political history at its riveting best. She tells this bravura dramatic but strangely neglected story with verve and color at an often racing pace that captures the events and is a peerless example of political history as high drama, and of the legislative craft as a form of high art.
The roots of the amendment lay more than seventy years in the past, at the Seneca Falls Conference of 1848, which issued the first public declaration of equal rights for women. By XX of 1920, the United States Congress had passed what was often called the "Susan B. Anthony Amendment," in honor of the Quaker-born abolitionist and lifelong advocate of women's rights, who had died in … To become law, it required ratification by thirty-six states. By XX 1920, thirty-five had done so. XX had rejected the amendment. Of those that remained, Tennessee was the best bet for passage, but passage was by no means assured.
Both major parties hoped to capitalize on the "women's vote" in the November presidential election, which pitted Republican Warren Harding against Democrat John Cox, both Ohioans. Although both men endorsed the amendment, neither was willing to fight hard for it for fear of alienating the powerful anti-suffrage movement which recognized the urgency of defeating the amendment in Tennessee, and threw all its considerable resources into the battle.
The contest in Tennessee had even international significance. President Wilson and Democratic nominee Cox supported the measure in part because they believed that a women's bloc vote would ensure passage of congressional approval of Wilson's cherished League of Nations. (Indeed, when the measure did pass in Tennessee, Cox exclaimed, "The civilization of the world is saved.")
Both sides played hardball. Suffs boldly dogged every member of the state legislature, following them everywhere, inviting their designated targets to lunch and dinner, for rides in the country, games of cards, movies, cajoling, coddling, and amusing them, "anything to keep them out of the hands of Anti workers, corporate lobbyists, or a bender in the Jack Daniels suite." The Antis harangued them with warnings that ratification would mean the enfranchisement of Negro women and the dispatch of black policemen from Washington to enforce the amendment, and that a vote for suffrage was "a Vote for Organized Female Nagging Forever," as one handout put it. …warned that women suffrage "means a reopening of the entire Negro Suffrage question; loss of State rights; and another period of reconstruction horrors." Vulnerable members were threatened with political ruin, the loss of their jobs, foreclosure on homes and loans, and plagued with phony telegrams urging them to rush home to a sick wife or injured child.
Ms. Weiss ably and painfully reveals the festering foul racism that poisoned the anti-suffrage movement, but also tainted many of the suffragists themselves.
Ms. Weiss presents a teeming human landscape of "Suffs" and "Antis," and Tennessee politicians of all stripes, as well as Harding and Cox. But she builds her narrative mainly around three figures: the national generalissimo of the Suffrage movement Carrie Chapman Catt; Sue White, the native Tennesseean representing the more confrontational National Women's Party based in Washington; and XX, Pearson, the head of the Anti forces, which were backed by a well-heeled alliance of conservative business interests - the liquor industry, for example, feared that women voters would put them out of business - and reactionary states rights groups that saw votes for women as an open door for the admission of black women to polling booths. Portraits of these, and many other women and men, are painted with a vivid brush…
The outcome was in doubt until literally the last moment. It would spoil the pivotal surprise that anchors Ms. Weiss's bravura climax to describe it here. Suffice it to say that she delivers the high drama of the moment with edge-of-the-seat prose that is fully justified by… Suffice it to say that it involves an unexpected letter and an act of remarkable political courage.
Ms. Weiss describes the moment vividly: "There was a long moment of silence, silence and shock. Then an explosion, a roar never before heard in the old statehouse. The chamber shook with screams and cries, with thumping and whooping. Those who could dance in the jammed chamber did, and there was weeping among both men and women. The winners frantically waved hundreds of tiny yellow flags and threw yellow flowers down onto the heads of the legislators on the floor."
To the women voters of the nation, Carrie Catt said: "The vote is a power, a weapon of offense and defense, a prayer. Use it intelligently, conscientiously, prayerfully. Progress is calling you to make no pause. Act!"
The Suffs' triumph… But the "women's vote" proved to be a phantom. Only one-third of the eligible women voted in the presidential election. And John Cox, whose vigorous support in the final days of the Tennessee campaign helped to push the Suffs over the finish line, lost to the more non-committal Harding. Most women who did vote, at least in the early years, tended to vote like their husbands. Wilson's League of Nations failed to win Americans' support. Politics became no cleaner, Americans no more pacifistic.
Black Americans pointed out that it was only once lawmakers felt assured that it would be as easy to disenfranchise black women as it was to intimidate black men that they became willing to permit the passage of suffrage legislation.
If the campaign failed in its most idealistic hopes, it wholly succeeded in its fundamental goal: to open the American political system democracy to the disenfranchised populations. Whether one favors Hillary Clinton or Sarah Palin, Nikki Haley or Nancy Pelosi, or simply the many tens of thousands of women who have won jobs in state and local government across the country over these ninety-eight years, they owe it to the consummate female idealists, lobbyists who swarmed Tennessee's towering granite Statehouse ninety-eight years ago. Too long neglected by historians, they have found a consummate poet laureate in Ms. Weiss.