Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State
316
Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State
316eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
Women Will Vote celebrates the 2017 centenary of women’s right to full suffrage in New York State. Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello highlight the activism of rural, urban, African American, Jewish, immigrant, and European American women, as well as male suffragists, both upstate and downstate, that led to the positive outcome of the 1917 referendum. Goodier and Pastorello argue that the popular nature of the women’s suffrage movement in New York State and the resounding success of the referendum at the polls relaunched suffrage as a national issue. If women had failed to gain the vote in New York, Goodier and Pastorello claim, there is good reason to believe that the passage and ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment would have been delayed.
Women Will Vote makes clear how actions of New York’s patchwork of suffrage advocates heralded a gigantic political, social, and legal shift in the United States. Readers will discover that although these groups did not always collaborate, by working in their own ways toward the goal of enfranchising women they essentially formed a coalition. Together, they created a diverse social and political movement that did not rely solely on the motivating force of white elites and a leadership based in New York City. Goodier and Pastorello convincingly argue that the agitation and organization that led to New York women’s victory in 1917 changed the course of American history.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781501713194 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Three Hills |
| Publication date: | 09/15/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 316 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Susan Goodier is Lecturer in History at SUNY Oneonta. She is the author of No Votes for Women. Karen Pastorello is Professor of History at Tompkins Cortland Community College (SUNY). She is the author of The Progressives and A Power Among Them.
Read an Excerpt
Women Will Vote
Winning Suffrage in New York State
By Susan Goodier
Cornell University Press
Copyright © 2017 Cornell UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5017-1319-4
CHAPTER 1
Tenuous Ties
Creating a Woman Suffrage Movement in New York State
In September 1852, at the Woman's Rights
Convention in Syracuse, twenty-six year old Matilda Joslyn Gage clasped the hand of her five-year-old daughter and asked the chair's permission to speak. In her first public speech, Gage boldly articulated principles she would expound upon her entire life: "I do not know what all the women want, but I do know what I want myself, and that is, what men are most unwilling to grant; the right to vote. That includes all other rights. I want to go into the Legislative Hall, sit on the Judicial Bench, and fill the Executive Chair." She made an indelible impression on both Susan B. Anthony and the chair of the meeting, Lucretia Mott. Her visionary ideas surely stirred her audience.
Gage was the daughter of reform-minded and progressive parents, and her Fayetteville home served as a station on the Underground Railroad. Gage's connection to the abolition movement, her patriotic commitment to the Civil War (1861-1865), and her membership in the American Equal Rights Association informed her commitment to citizenship rights for women, a relationship common to many early women's rights activists. The impetus for the founding of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association came directly from Gage. She and other New York suffragists pushed past women's traditional boundaries to try to block political candidates who refused to support women's rights, including the right to vote in school elections. Women like Matilda Joslyn Gage inspired the building of a state-level movement for woman suffrage.
Women began agitating for rights long before the Civil War. Ernestine Rose, Paulina Wright (Davis), and Elizabeth Cady Stanton presented petitions to New York State legislative committees in the 1840s seeking to reform the legal status of married women. In 1846, three groups of women, including six women from Depauville in Jefferson County, submitted petitions to delegates considering changes to the state constitution demanding "equal ... civil and political rights with men." Although the demand for suffrage fell flat, two years later, on April 7, 1848, the governor of New York signed the "Act for the More Effectual Protection of the Property of Married Women" into law. Just one month earlier, forty-four married women in the western counties of Wyoming and Genesee had penned a caustic statement regarding their political rights to the New York State Assembly: "When women are allowed the privileges of rational and acceptable beings, it will be soon enough to expect from them the duties of such." The women maintained that they owed no allegiance to the government since that body deprived them of their political rights. Despite these few isolated instances of women demanding their rights, state and local governing officials only reluctantly granted minor property rights to women.
Gathering Forces for the Suffrage Movement
A few select rights for married women did not satisfy female or male proponents of equal rights in New York State. In 1846, the Unitarian minister Samuel J. May of Syracuse, an abolitionist and friend of many early women's rights activists, asked why "half of the people have a right to govern the whole" and wove calls for equal rights into his sermons. By 1853, his tract "The Rights and Condition of Women" had been broadly disseminated by the nascent women's movement as part of its tract series. John Fine, a judge and, later, a Democratic congressman from St. Lawrence County, argued that women and men had the right to property, voting, and office holding, as he informed his Ogdensburg lyceum audience in 1847. Meanwhile, five upstate New York women, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Quakers Lucretia Mott, Martha Coffin Wright, Jane Hunt, and Mary Ann M'Clintock, decided to take matters into their own hands. They made plans to hold a women's rights convention in Seneca Falls on July 19 and 20, 1848. Stanton and M'Clintock penned a document based on the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration of Sentiments laid out women's restricted rights pertaining to marriage, guardianship of their children, divorce, wages earned, religion, politics, and taxation without representation. The women issued a call for the two-day convention in Seneca County newspapers and to African American anti-slavery activist Frederick Douglass's Rochester-based North Star. The announcement called for women attendees only on the first day in order to afford them the comfort of speaking freely. Elizabeth Cady Stanton read the Declaration twice that first day. The resolutions sought to elevate women's position in legislation, industry, the church, and the public and private spheres. The second time Stanton read the Declaration, she included the eleven resolutions, eliciting discussion from the audience about ways to improve women's lives. Lucretia Mott also spoke on the first day, as did Mary Ann M'Clintock's daughter Elizabeth.
Word about the convention spread, drawing an even larger crowd the second day. James Mott, the husband of Lucretia Mott, presided over the morning meeting as the secretary read the previous day's minutes. Stanton reread the Declaration of Sentiments, which the audience unanimously voted to adopt. The audience then voted separately on each of the resolutions. The lengthy list of "repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman" culminated with the ultimatum "that it is the duty of women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise." When Stanton introduced the demand forwomen's right to vote, controversy erupted. Frederick Douglass brilliantly defended Stanton, rescuing the resolution from near defeat. Stanton and others appreciated the irony of the only black man at the convention saving the suffrage plank. Sixty-eight women signed separately from the thirty-two men who affixed their signatures to the document.
The historic resolutions passed at Seneca Falls sparked a series of women's rights conventions and meetings at the local, state, and national levels. Some of the people in attendance at Seneca Falls held a second convention at the Unitarian Church in Rochester the following month, with Abigail Bush presiding. Building on the momentum of the success of the first two conventions, Stanton wrote to the radical Quaker and abolitionist Amy Kirby Post in Rochester, posing the question: "How shall we get possession of what rightfully belongs to us?" The prolonged discussion concerning women's rights and the 1854 petition campaign for increased property rights for women and woman suffrage influenced state-level legislation. By 1860, the New York State legislature passed the Earnings Act, giving married women full rights of contract over their personal, financial, and real property. It also made them joint guardians of their children, with the same inheritance rights as a man if a spouse died intestate. Clearly the men in power began to consider seriously the merit of women's citizenship rights. Women's rights conventions, most often held in New York State, took place annually until the Civil War.
A Divisive War
When war erupted in April 1861, patriotic women's rights activists set aside their personal goals for equality and enfranchisement to show their support for the Union cause. In May 1863, Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who joined the women's rights movement in 1852, founded the Women's Loyal National League, headquartered at the Cooper Institute in New York City, to petition for hundreds of thousands of signatures and lobby for a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery Membership in the league offered women their valuable first opportunity to engage in congressional politicking. Their experiences in soldiers' aid and relief societies and in coordinating sanitary fairs during the war enhanced their administrative and collaborative talents. The women honed many of the skills they would use later to win woman suffrage in New York State when they returned to their women's rights activism at the end of the war.
When the Civil War ended in April 1865, legislators set the terms of Union victory with amendments to the Constitution. Discussions relating to a fourteenth amendment suggested adding the word "male" to the definition of a citizen, despite the efforts of women's rights activists. Articulating the sense of betrayal these women suffered, Stanton lamented that "as our constitution now exists, there is nothing to prevent women or Negroes from holding the ballot, but state legislation, but if that word 'male' be inserted as now proposed ... it will take us a century at least to get it out again." Wendell Phillips, orator, reformer, and a leader in the abolition movement, claimed reluctance to "mix the movements," as he wrote to Stanton in May 1865, because it "would lose for the negro far more than we should gain for the woman." The public resisted recognizing the full citizenship rights of women, although northerners more readily accepted the notion of citizenship for African American men.
The controversy related to a fourteenth amendment spilled over into the first postwar women's rights convention held at Steinway Hall, New York City, in May 1866. The attendees, drawn from the ranks of abolitionists and women's rights activists, prepared an address to Congress to express their interest in universal suffrage. To agitate more effectively toward that goal, Martha Coffin Wright proposed the establishment of a national American Equal Rights Association, with a "human rights platform" guaranteeing universal suffrage. Members of the association also intended to set a precedent for state action at the 1867 constitutional convention in New York by convincing the delegates to strike from the state constitution the words "white male." This would enfranchise all New York State citizens over the age of twenty-one and "make the Empire State the first example of a true republican form of government." Members of the association engaged in lobbying and petition efforts to "remove racial and sexual restrictions" and prevent the insertion of the word "male" into state constitutions as well as the fourteenth amendment.
Women and men, black and white, joined the American Equal Rights Association. Members elected Lucretia Mott as president, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass, and Henry Ward Beecher as vice presidents. Susan B. Anthony and Henry B. Blackwell served as secretaries. Black women who joined the association included the former New York slave Sojourner Truth, the author and social reformer Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, the civil rights and suffrage activist Harriet Forten Purvis, and Louisa Jacobs, the daughter of Harriet Jacobs, the author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Already, white activists disregarded black women's rights, as Truth asserted in an 1867 speech before the association: "There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women." Her impassioned plea foreshadowed the shifting divide between black and white women throughout the suffrage movement. Meanwhile, the association's work failed to alter the wording of the Fourteenth Amendment, which the states ratified two years after the founding meeting. Turning its attention away from national debates for the time being, the Equal Rights Association continued state level agitation through lobbying and petitioning.
Their labors did not pay off in New York, where white women as well as black women experienced legislative neglect. Members of the Equal Rights Association had canvassed the state in 1866, inundating members of the legislature and constitutional convention delegates with literature in their efforts to gain support for universal suffrage. Although woman suffrage failed, the delegates did approve suffrage and the elimination of property requirements for black men in 1867. However, voters defeated the proposed change to the state constitution in 1869. In addition to retaining the word "male," thereby keeping women disenfranchised, the state constitution kept large numbers of African American men from voting by demanding stricter property and residency requirements for them.
It would necessitate the ratification of yet another amendment before black men obtained equal voting rights in New York State. Outraged by the power of states to keep black men disenfranchised, Radical Republicans proposed a fifteenth amendment in late 1868. It asserted that voting rights would not be "denied or abridged" by "race, color, or previous condition of servitude." While some suffrage supporters accepted the omission of the word "sex" for the promise of future Republican support for federal action on votes for women, Anthony and Stanton harshly criticized the proposed amendment for its intentional exclusion of women. The passage of the amendment secured voting rights for black men at the federal level and sent women back to the states to argue for themselves. Essentially, the split in ideology between those who supported black men's rights and those who sought universal rights fractured the women's movement for more than two decades. And, with the greater national focus on voting rights, women's rights activists shifted their focus to the singular demand for woman suffrage. The pivotal moment of opportunity failed in the United States, and these national discussions strongly influenced New York State-level legislation.
The historian Sally Roesch Wagner attributes much of the early suffragists' radical vision of women's rights to an "indelible native influence." In addition to reading about Haudenosaunee activities in local papers, early suffragists had sometimes close associations with native women. The Quaker missionary Lucretia Mott traveled to the Seneca Falls Convention after visiting a Seneca settlement at Cattaraugus, where she had witnessed Seneca women's "political, spiritual, social, and economic power." Elizabeth Cady Stanton often encountered Oneida women when she visited her wealthy abolitionist cousin, Garrit Smith, at his home in Peterboro. In 1893, the Mohawk Nation would adopt Matilda Joslyn Gage into the Wolf Clan, bestowing on her all the voting rights of native women. Although rarely acknowledged in today's suffrage literature, the higher status of native women within their own culture offered an example of the possibilities of increased respect and equality for all women.
Legislative Exclusion Divides New York Suffragists
Women's rights advocates faced virtually insurmountable obstacles as they sought to alter the course male legislators promoted. The situation exploded during the third annual meeting of the American Equal Rights Association at Steinway Hall, New York City, in May 1869, as arguments erupted over the proposed fifteenth amendment. Chaired by Lucretia Mott, the convention hosted speakers who highlighted issues that would divide suffragists for the duration of the movement. Elizabeth Cady Stanton called for a determined effort on the part of the association to push for a sixteenth amendment to enfranchise women; Susan B. Anthony proposed a motion to refuse support for a fifteenth amendment without a sixteenth amendment enfranchising women. Following the defeat of Anthony's motion, Frederick Douglass, among others, promoted the immediate acceptance of black suffrage and a continuation of work for woman suffrage. In spite of calls from the audience for women speakers, according to Anthony's biographer, men "wrested the control of the meeting from the hands of women and managed it to suit themselves." Tempers flared, heated arguments ensued, and the membership as a whole could not find any resolution.
This rupture on Wednesday, May 12, 1869, also marks a major division in the ranks of women's rights activists. That evening, Stanton, Anthony, and representatives from nineteen states met at the offices of the Women's Bureau at 49 East 23rd Street. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps had purchased the building and rented space to women's societies and businesses. One of the few public meeting spaces open for women reform activists, it housed the Revolution, a weekly women's rights newspaper published by Stanton and Anthony from 1868 through 1870. They established the National Woman Suffrage Association at the bureau. After a debate, they voted down a proposal to exclude men from the new organization. The most outspoken New York women dominated the national association and worked to gain suffrage rights for women at the federal level. At odds with the national association's strategies, Lucy Stone and her husband, Henry Blackwell, established the Boston-based American Woman Suffrage Association at a convention held in Cleveland, Ohio, in November 1869. The American Woman Suffrage Association supported black suffrage and sought enfranchisement for women on a state-by-state basis rather than at the national level. This lack of cohesion at the national level, lasting for another twenty years, allowed New York suffragists to dominate the national movement.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Women Will Vote by Susan Goodier. Copyright © 2017 Cornell University. Excerpted by permission of Cornell University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Timeline
Introduction
1. Tenuous Ties
2. "Ruffling the Somewhat Calm Comain"
3. The Quest for Industrial Citizenship
4. A Fundamental Component
5. Persuading the "Male Preserve"
6. Radicalism and Spectacle
7. The Great Interruption
8. Rising from the Ashes of Defeat
Conclusion
Appendixes
Notes
Bibliography
Index
What People are Saying About This
This fascinating narrative of the struggle to expand women’s rights in New York is a timely reminder about the crucial role grassroots activism has played in changing national politics. Women Will Vote is an important and splendid book.
Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello’s new book is a timely and deeply moving history of the several-decade-long struggle women and their male allies undertook in New York State to win the right to vote. Goodier and Pastorello utilize a cornucopia of primary source material to shed light on a chapter of New York’s history that is vital in understanding the national story of women’s suffrage. And, in doing so, Goodier and Pastorello elevate the personal stories of the New York women and their allies whose heroic efforts were finally realized in 1917. An important and compelling piece of scholarship.
Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello's Women Will Vote is a well-researched, well-conceived, and well-written study of the long struggle in New York State for women's right to vote. New York has long been acknowledged as having special historical significance to the suffrage movement. But no one has studied its evolution. Now this excellent book, full of new information, fills in the gaps and extends our understanding of women suffrage.
At last! We have a fine history of the women’s suffrage movement in New York State. Women Will Vote will make you think about how democracy really works. Read it!
Women Will Vote is an important book that fills in a glaring absence in the literature, ensuring that students and scholars today will have a really strong sense of New York's suffrage experience.