Women’s Suffrage Blog, Part 4: Post-Civil War America and the Turn of the Century

By Abby Tuomala, Blue Ridge Chapter,
National Society, Daughters of the American Revolution (NSDAR)

Votes for Women Broadside with graphic of men rocking cradle, with the caption, “men tell us, ‘the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world,’ if they really believed it, how some men would be rocking just now.” Women's Political Union, New York City, New York, January 21, 1911. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

The principle of “one person, one vote” is such an axiom in modern American thinking and discourse, it is hard to grasp that this idea was hardly posited before the last half of the 19th Century. As we saw in Blog Post 2, our colonial forebears tied the voting franchise to property ownership (as evidence of responsibility and public virtue) and family headship—the husband-father being the representative voter for his own charges.

Further, when the people of the new nation had crafted their government, a prized right complemented the exercise of the vote: “the right of the people . . . to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” This much-ignored clause in our Constitution’s First Amendment extended far back into English Common law (even to the 1215 Magna Carta!).[1] The expectation was that when a grievance was proffered to the government, whether Crown or Parliament, the government was obligated to respond. A reading of the Declaration of Independence will show that the British government’s unresponsiveness to petitions of grievances was one of the Declaration’s chief planks. This may help us to understand why the right to vote was not the only hot-button issue for two centuries, during which time active American citizenship was exercised in various ways.

The first Industrial Revolution, which spanned the 1760s in England through the 1840s in America, had much to do with how women perceived themselves and how society perceived them. Given most white men’s preoccupations with progress and the challenges of urbanization, women were becoming the nation’s important moral arbiters. Before the Civil War, the abolition of human enslavement activated many American women. Discussed in Blog Post 3, it was around the time of the Seneca Falls, NY, Convention in 1848 that women were awakening to the idea that being effective change agents meant access to the ballot box.

The Civil War halted non-wartime priorities as women focused on supporting their brothers, husbands, and sons during those dark years. After the Civil War, amendments to the U.S. Constitution were proposed to remediate the legacies of enslavement.[2] Some women vehemently opposed ratification to Amendment XV, which guaranteed the right to vote to black men but not to any women, black or white.

Activists bitterly fought about whether to support or oppose the Fifteenth Amendment.  [Elizabeth Cady] Stanton and Susan B. Anthony objected to the new law. They wanted women to be included with black men. Others—like Lucy Stone—supported the amendment as it was. Stone believed that women would win the vote soon. The emphasis on voting during the 1860s led women’s rights activists to focus on woman suffrage. The two sides established two rival national organizations that aimed to win women the vote.[3]

After the war, massive population shifts, technological advancements, and upheavals of all sorts were taking place. The idea that “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle Is the Hand That Rules the World”[4] was becoming embedded in the psyche of the American culture.  Women’s clubs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman%27s_club_movement proliferated,[5] with interests and activism ranging from child labor to public libraries. 

Charlotte Perkins Gilman [social reformer, 1860-1935] hailed the club movement as one of the “most important sociological phenomena of the century,—indeed of all centuries,—marking…the first time steps toward social organization of those so long unsocialized members of our race…Now the whole country is budding into women’s clubs.”[6]

Because widespread drunkenness had been devastating families from before these paradigm-shifting times, temperance was quite naturally a “woman’s issue” worth promoting. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was founded in 1874 and still exists today. Its mission became intertwined with women’s suffrage because voting meant the power to make change. Among the most strenuous opponents of women’s voting rights were politically powerful producers and distributors of alcohol. The Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, prohibiting the manufacture, sale, and distribution of intoxicating liquors was ratified in 1919.

Indeed, Prohibition pairs up nicely with the Nineteenth Amendment, ratified in 1920, which gave women the right to vote, since temperance had, ever since the antebellum period, been a ‘women’s issue,’ championed by women for the sake of women and their families.[7] 

Frances Willard (1839-1898), who was president of the WCTU from 1879 until her death, is an exemplar of an American woman who was a temperance reformer and, also a Suffragist.  Historian Page Smith wrote of her, “Frances Willard took the line that it was the function of the WCTU, above everything else, to protect the home. This, in her view, was best done by running the home on Christian principles and excluding liquor from the premises.”[8] Smith said later, “Under Willard’s firm guidance, [the WCTU] campaigned for kindergartens, police matrons, and child labor laws.  It sought to eliminate prostitution, and [called] all others to join in ‘the one pulse, a protected home and a redeemed America.”[9]

We shall see that in the first two decades of the Twentieth Century, all the forces of family values and, ironically, women’s independence came together to achieve women’s suffrage.

Next time: The Wilson-era climax to the Nineteenth Amendment and the conclusion to the women’s suffrage story.   

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[1] Richard L. Perry and John C. Cooper, Eds., Sources of Our Liberties 228-230 (American Bar Foundation, 1978).

[2] U.S. Constitution, Amendments XIII, XIV, and XV.

[3] https://www.womenshistory.org/resources/general/14th-and-15th-amendments.

[4] From the 1865 poem by William Ross Wallace, “What Rules the World.”

[5] See Woman’s Club Movement, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman%27s_club_movement.

[6] Page Smith, The Rise of Industrial America (1984), 668.

[7] Wilfred M. McClay, Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story (2019), 290.

[8] Page Smith, The Rise of Industrial America (1984), 663.

[9] Page Smith, The Rise of Industrial America (1984), 664.