"Women's Hour" for equality still arriving

Women finally winning the vote with the passage of the 19th Amendment in August 1920 increased the franchise, the voting population, by 50%. That 72 year fight is perhaps the single most significant social advance toward a fuller democracy in our nation’s history.

Elaine Weiss, author of “The Women’s Hour” a 2017 telling of the history of women earning the vote, recounted highlights to an appreciative audience at Western Washington University’s Performing Arts Center last Thursday.

She criticized textbooks that summarize the three-generation long movement in one inaccurate sentence: “In 1848 women met at Seneca Falls, New York and called for the vote and in 1920 women were given the vote.”

Women were not given the vote. “Women won the vote. They had to fight for it bitterly for a very long time,” Weiss said. “This is a story of how change can be made in a democracy,” she told the almost full auditorium that had more elders than students. “It was much more. It needed a societal change. Women created a shift in the rights and roles of women in society.

She credited the abolitionist Frederick Douglass with igniting the movement at the 1848 Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls. His speech, coming from an escaped slave who could not vote, carried the day: a slim majority of delegates voted to propose the vote for women.

Weiss said race – racism, the fear of Blacks’ equality – is always at the center of advancing political rights, historically and presently. Women gaining the vote meant African American women would be franchised at a time that southern states had effectively denied the vote to Black men. Weiss showed a 1920 photo of women anti-franchise organizers posing with the Confederate battle flag and an army veteran as an example of the intertwining of the two.

That many women were against the vote, “would oppose their sisters, was quite shocking to me when I learned it,” Weiss said. The “Antis” led a strong, committed and significant opposition against suffrage.

Weiss showed slides of magazine covers and political cartoons lampooning and mocking pro-vote women as masculine and destroyers of domestic stability. In one, a rooster stands over a clutch of eggs while a hen walks out. It is labeled “Suffragist-Feminist Ideal Family Life” and was produced by the Southern Woman’s League for Rejection of the Susan B. Anthony Amendment.

Corporations, led by textile manufacturers and the liquor industry, were opposed: Abolishing child labor, cheap women factory labor and prohibition were at stake.

There is more historical fact and fascinating stories based in every state, including Washington, and the nation’s Capitol, where President Woodrow Wilson adamantly opposed suffrage while advocating war to “make the world safe for democracy.” There are heartbreaking accounts of picketing the White House, jailings, beatings and hunger strikes.

In August 1920 Tennessee’s legislature became the final stand, the needed 36th state to pass or defeat the Amendment.

All sides marshalled their forces. If women gained the vote, they would use it in the fall’s presidential election and, like now, clear choices for change or stasis would be made.

The decision came down to a young legislator and a letter his mother sent the day of the vote. District interests wanted him to vote against. His mother wrote “vote for suffrage.” He did.

On August 18, probably all women and most men will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment. Many will call for the resurrection of the Equal Rights Amendment, the only proposed amendment that had a deadline for ratification, extended to 1982. Ironically, 35 states, of 38 needed, had ratified it by that year.