A Short History of the Women’s Suffrage Movement in the United States

The following is a short speech often titled “Ain’t I a Woman?” by ex-slave Sojourner Truth delivered by at the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio.

Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that ‘twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what’s all this here talking about?

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?

Then they talk about this thing in the head; what’s this they call it? [member of audience whispers, “intellect”] That’s it, honey. What’s that got to do with women’s rights or negroes’ rights? If my cup won’t hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn’t you be mean not to let me have my little half measure full?

Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, ’cause Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.

If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back , and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.

Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner ain’t got nothing more to say. 

The word suffrage is derived from the Latin suffragium, which to the Romans meant a “voting tablet” of a “ballot.”  It is remarkable that in almost every country in the world prior to 1869 that women nowhere were allowed to vote; that the 15^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution extending the right to vote to every man regardless of race was ratified in 1870, while the 19^th amendment giving women the right to vote was approved fifty years later in 1920. Why was women’s suffrage so long in coming; 144 years after the Declaration of Independence and 130 years after the French Revolution brought the world the Rights of Man and Citizen?

The following history comes from Wikipedia.  The first province in the world to award and maintain women’s suffrage continuously, was Wyoming Territory in 1869, and the first sovereign nation was Norway in 1913. In the years after 1869, a number of provinces held by the British and Russian empires conferred women’s suffrage, and some of these became sovereign nations at a later point, like New Zealand, Australia, and Finland. Women who owned property gained the right to vote in the Isle of Man in 1881, and in 1893, women in the then British colony of New Zealand were granted the right to vote. In Australia, non-Aboriginal women progressively gained the right to vote between 1894 and 1911 (federally in 1902). Prior to independence, in the Russian Grand Duchy of Finland women were the first in the world to gain racially-equal suffrage, with both the right to vote and to stand as candidates in 1906. Most major Western powers extended voting rights to women after WWI, including Canada (1917), Britain and Germany (1918), Austria and the Netherlands (1919) and the United States (1920). Notable exceptions in Europe were France, where women could not vote until 1944, Greece (1952), and Switzerland (1971)!

In the United States, the women’s suffrage movement traces its roots to the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, the first women’s rights convention, which passed a resolution in favor of women’s suffrage despite opposition from some of its organizers, who believed the idea was too extreme. By the time of the first National Women’s Rights Convention in 1850, however, suffrage was becoming an increasingly important aspect of the movement’s activities.

Perhaps the real origin of women’s rights was the publishing of A Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft in 1972. However, her flaunting of sexual norms resulted in her being more celebrated for her unconventional life than for her unconventional writings.

Over the next 72 years the suffrage movement in America was undermined by internecine conflict, by its ambiguity with respect to racial justice (Susan B. Anthony campaigned against the 15^th Amendment, calling for negroes and women to be enfranchised together) as well as by its sometimes support for sexual liberation. This was clearly a minority position, but for some years, both Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cody Stanton made a temporary alliance with “free love” advocate Victoria Woodhall, who said, “Yes, I am a Free Lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may… ; to change that love every day if I please, and…neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere.”

Why were men so opposed to allowing women to vote? First, because women’s rights would undermine men’s complete dominance of the household.  According to William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, an authoritative commentary on the English common law on which the American legal system is modeled, “by marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage“, referring to the legal doctrine of coverture that was introduced to England by the Normans in the Middle Ages. In 1862, the Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court denied a divorce to a woman whose husband had horsewhipped her, saying, “The law gives the husband power to use such a degree of force necessary to make the wife behave and know her place.” Married women in many states could not legally sign contracts, which made it difficult for them to arrange for convention halls, printed materials and other things needed by the suffrage movement. Restrictions like these were overcome in part by the passage of married women’s property laws in several states, supported in some cases by wealthy fathers who didn’t want their daughters’ inheritance to fall under the complete control of their husbands.

Marina Koren, writing in The Atlantic, provided a profile of an important anti-suffragist scholar, William T. Sedgewick, a professor of biology at MIT. Sedgewick believed that no good would come of letting women vote. He said, “It would mean a degeneration and a degradation of human fiber which would turn back (?) the hands of time a thousand years,” Sedgwick said in 1914 (six years before the 19^th amendment was passed). “Hence it will probably never come, for mankind will not lightly abandon at the call of a few fanatics the hard-earned achievements of the ages.” He believed, as did other prominent scientists of the age that mental exertion could jeopardize reproductive health. And if the science of the day asserted that women could become infertile if they did too much thinking, no man would want to send his daughter, sister, or wife to college or the office—and certainly not to the ballot box.

Koren writes, “According to the mainstream science of the time, “Women simply had inferior brains, which made them unsuited to the rigors of voting,” says Cheryl Jorgensen-Earp, a professor at the University of Lynchburg who studies rhetoric in science and the British women’s-suffrage movement. “Anti-suffrage cartoons poked fun at women’s reasoning ability … which showed the interior of a woman’s head filled only with letters, puppies, hats, chocolates, and the faces of admiring young men.”

And if women overexerted their already inferior brains, the thinking went, their health could suffer.  Many of the attitudes of men are shown in some of the political cartoons of the time. They mainly are of two types: those which show what will happen in the household when women are allowed to vote and those which demean suffragettes as unable to get a husband.

Men, at the turn of the twentieth century, not only found biological reasons to refuse women the vote, but sociological reasons as well.  Lyman Abbott, writing in the September 1903 edition of The Atlantic argues as follows:

Historically the family is the first social organization. Organically it contains within itself all the elements of all future organization. Biologically, all future organization has grown out of it, by a process of duplication and interrelationship. In the family, therefore, we find all the elements of a later and more complicated social organization; in the family we may discover written legibly the laws which should determine the structure of society and should regulate its action; the family, rightly understood, will answer our often perplexing questions concerning social organization—whether it is military, political, industrial, or religious.

The first and most patent fact in the family is the difference in the sexes. Out of this difference the family is created; in this difference the family finds its sweet and sacred bond. This difference is not merely physical and incidental. It is also psychical and essential. It inheres in the temperament; it is inbred in the very fibre of the soul; it differentiates the functions; it determines the relation between man and woman; it fixes their mutual service and their mutual obligations. Man is not woman in a different case. Woman is not man inhabiting temporarily a different kind of body. Man is not a rough-and-tumble woman. Woman is not a feeble and pliable man.

Moreover, anti-suffragists believed that God and the Bible set out the proper roles of women, a subservient role to man.  Joanna Life, discussing J. W. Porter, editor of the Kentucky Southern Baptist newspaper, The Western Recorder, writes,

Against this backdrop, Kentucky’s Western Recorder printed an issue in 1919 devoted entirely to discussing women and the church.  Porter wrote an editorial called “What is Woman?” in which he defended the absolute authority of scriptural teachings on gender roles.   Porter wrote that any definition of woman and woman’s place had to harmonize with the creation account in Genesis.  “Man had the priority in creation,” Porter asserted, and anyone who challenged that claim could not truly believe in the authority and divine inspiration of scripture.   While he did not explicitly address woman suffrage in this editorial, Porter did allude to the debate.  Women were created to rear children, he insisted, not to rule or to govern.  Anyone who argued otherwise was not obedient to the plain truths set forth in scripture, Porter believed. 

Porter wrote another editorial seven months later in which he asserted that, at its core, the suffrage movement was a rejection of the sacred responsibilities God had given to women.  “[Suffragists] believe [God] made a mistake in restricting motherhood to women, and forbidding them the privilege of fatherhood,” Porter explained. The suffrage movement, Porter believed, reflected suffragists’ anger against God and the teachings in scripture.  Porter also warned that some suffragists intended to destroy Christian homes and families.  Porter believed it was clear that suffragists rejected motherhood because some supported the use of contraception.  Others, he believed, wanted to dissolve the institution of marriage altogether.  Porter closed this editorial with one of his most scathing attacks on suffragists, calling them “feminine demons” who were “pointing womankind to the path that leads to harlotry and to hell.”   

Which brings us back to Sojourner Truth.  Adam may have been created before Eve, but no man had a part in the birth of Jesus Christ –He was the result of a union between God (the Holy Spirit) and the young Hebrew girl Mary.