Women’s Suffrage Blog, Part 5: Into a Progressive New Century

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

Matthew Morgan, “Which? A timely question [man labeled "popular vote" looking at Republican, Democratic, women suffrage, and temperance advocates], Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, vol. 65 (July 21, 1888), 357. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

The Industrial Revolution turned the world, as people knew it, upside down. Urbanization, mass migrations, cross-continental travel, new technologies, and heightened sensibilities about human rights comprise an incomplete list of the multiple foments in nineteenth-century America. The country suffered through a Civil War and its aftermath and religious foundations were shaken by naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-1882). If we were to get inside the minds of our great or great-great grandparents, there was a whole lot of shakin’ going on.  

To be kind to our ancestors regarding the issue of equity for women, we have tried to show that they, in large measure, simply thought differently than we do today about many things. Historian Wilfred McClay helps us here:

[E]ach of us is born into a world that we did not make, and it is only with the greatest effort, and often at very great cost, that we are ever able to change that world for the better. Moral sensibilities are not static; they develop and deepen over time, and general moral progress is very slow. Part of the study of history involves a training of the imagination, learning to see historical actors as speaking and acting in their own times rather than ours and learning to see even our heroes as an all-too-human mixture of admirable and unadmirable qualities, people like us who may, like us, be constrained by circumstances beyond their control.[1]

Securing the right of women to vote has been precisely such a story. The struggle is almost inextricably linked with deeply held views on family organization, property rights, enslaved people, and even temperance. And this list of factors is surely incomplete.

At the turn of the 20th century, the Industrial Revolution gave way to the Progressive Era, which roughly spanned the 1890s through Woodrow Wilson’s presidency (1913-1921). Caring deeply for the moral and material welfare of the nation—and their families—women began to see that their voting franchise was critical to their usefulness, not to mention their empowerment. And so, we see women at the forefront in the Progressive Era, as “many activists joined efforts to reform local government, public education, medicine, finance, insurance, industry, railroads, churches, and many other areas.”[2]

But nowhere were women more at the forefront than at the doorstep of the powerful liquor industry. According to sociologist Dr. Nicola Nice,

While men were deemed to be physically stronger, they were viewed as morally weaker. Saloon culture developed alongside the concept of leisure time. Men were drawn from their homes with the lure of inebriation, gambling and prostitution…In essence, it became the woman’s job to provide a counterbalance to the moral taint of the public sphere, and with it, the taint of liquor.[3]

Alcohol was perceived to be one of the biggest barriers to morals, as women watched their husbands squander their incomes and reputations away in the saloons from which they were excluded. “Women began to realize their political powerlessness and the male politicians were disinclined to do anything about it,” says Nice. “And so temperance and suffrage became one movement.”[4] While women led the charge for temperance, it wasn’t exactly drinking they were against. “They were ultimately campaigning against the terrible things drunk men did to women,” says social historian Jeannette Hurt.[5] Interestingly, the liquor industry aggressively opposed the woman’s right to vote. In his blog post on “Suffrage and Alcohol,” Sebastian Belcourt wrote, “The alcohol lobby thought if the government franchised women, they would make alcohol sales illegal…the alcohol lobby raised $1,000,000 (or $22,738,815.39 by today’s [2011] standards) for an anti-suffrage campaign in Kansas alone.”[6] 

Well, those expensive lobbying efforts did not succeed—at least for a time, due to the passage of the Eighteenth[7] and Nineteenth Amendments[8] in 1919 and 1920, respectively, on temperance and women’s voting. The “noble experiment”[9] of Prohibition ended with its repeal in 1933, but in 1920 there was no turning back on women’s full participation in citizenship.

The accounts of the suffragist heroines of the Victorian Age and Progressive Era are well documented. Elizabeth Cady Stanton died in 1902 and Susan B. Anthony died in 1906, four decades after they formed the American Equal Rights Association, dedicated to the woman’s right to vote. Others would follow their lead to agitate for women’s suffrage. Armed with the organizational skills honed through the WCTU[10] and countless networks of women’s clubs, and the sheer tenacity of new, younger, leadership, the suffragists took to “the streets.” They marched, picketed, were arrested, were beaten, and finally won over the sentiments of the public.  No doubt Alice Paul’s publicized hunger strike in 1917 while imprisoned for 60 days after a suffrage protest in front of the White House vexed many Americans of both sexes.

Again, to sharpen our historical and cultural imaginations, let us remember that women’s suffrage efforts coincided with “the war to end all wars” (WWI, 1914-1918), the Spanish flu pandemic,[11] and the slow, ongoing progress in women’s property rights,[12] to cite only three features of this era. We do well to consider the whole sweep of human history, and the tumultuous times of the turn of the 20th century in particular, to appreciate the opposing passions surrounding the voting rights that we take so for granted now. In the end, the Nineteenth Amendment passed and was ratified—notably by those who were the only people who could vote for its passage: men!

Next time, we will look at the dramatic climax to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, one hundred years ago this summer.

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Era.

[3] Dr. Nicola Nice, sociologist, quoted in “The Underground Spaces Where Drinking While Female Was a Radical Act,” by Ishay Govender at Wine Enthusiast Magazine, published on March 8, 2020:

https://www.winemag.com/2020/03/08/ladies-drinking-rooms-history/ [accessed April 1, 2020].

[4] Ibid.

[5] Jeanette Hurt, cocktail historian, quoted in “The Underground Spaces Where Drinking While Female Was a Radical Act,” by Ishay Govender at Wine Enthusiast Magazine, published on March 8, 2020:

https://www.winemag.com/2020/03/08/ladies-drinking-rooms-history [accessed April 1, 2020].

[6] Sebastian Belcourt, “Suffrage and Alcohol, March 25, 2011, https://alldrinksconsidered.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/suffrage-and-alcoho/ [accessed April 1, 2020].

[7] U.S. Const. amend XVIII:  § 1: After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all the territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.  §2: The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.  §3: This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress.

[8] U.S. Const. amend XIX:  The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

[9] A term credited to Herbert Hoover, U.S. President 1929 to 1933.

[10] Woman's Christian Temperance Union, organized in 1873.

[11] The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, the deadliest in history, infected an estimated 500 million people worldwide—about one-third of the planet’s population—and killed an estimated 20 million to 50 million victims, including some 675,000 Americans. https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-i/1918-flu-pandemic [Accessed April 1, 2020].

[12] Jone Johnston Lewis, “A Short History of Women’s Property Rights in the United States,” ThoughtCo.,  https://www.thoughtco.com/property-rights-of-women-3529578 [Accessed April 1, 2020].