November 18,
2021
Troy D.
Smith
“History of
Voting, Part 3: Women’s Suffrage”
We’ve been talking about voting rights the last couple of
weeks, and have mostly focused on how class and race determined which men could
vote. Now we’ll turn our attention to the other half of the population: women.
Specifically, we will discuss women’s suffrage. “Suffrage” means being allowed
to do something. Remember, in the King James wording Jesus said “suffer the
little children to come to me”…he didn’t mean make them suffer, he meant allow
them. This wording is, in itself, significant: the question was not whether
women had the right to vote, it was whether the men should “allow” them to do
so, which speaks volumes.
Women were already asserting their rights as this country
was being formed. In March of 1776, while John Adams was away from his
Massachusetts home to help hammer out a declaration of independence in
Philadelphia, his wife Abigail made her thoughts clear in her letters to him.
“And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it
will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and
be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such
unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be
tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the
ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves
bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”
A few years later, in 1792, English philosopher Mary
Wallstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the
Rights of Woman, in which she argued that women are the equals of men. In
fact, her daughter, Mary Shelley, would essentially found the modern
science-fiction and horror genres in 1818 with her novel Frankenstein.
Nonetheless, these were individuals, not a movement. Women
started to get actively involved in American social and reform movements in the
1820s and 1830s, initially in defense of others. Many women, especially in the
North, contributed to the movement protesting Indian Removal and the Trail of
Tears. Quite a few of them moved from that action to joining the drive to
abolish slavery. Quite a few women were prominent figures in abolition, from
Harriet Beecher Stowe to the Southern-born Grimke sisters. In the process of
defending the rights of minorities, more and more women came to realize that
they, too, were treated as second class citizens.
Some argue that the women’s movement started in 1840, when
the American abolitionists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott traveled to
London for an anti-slavery convention- and were not allowed in because they
were women. They organized the first women’s rights convention, at Seneca
Falls, New York, in 1848. Soon joined by Susan B. Antony, they began organizing
to gain the vote for women. At the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in Ohio in
1851, an ex-slave and feminist named Sojourner Truth gave a powerful speech
called “Ain’t I a Woman?” She asked the audience, where did Jesus come from? God,
and a woman. “Man ain’t had nothin’ to do with it.”
It was a long, hard-fought process… and a slow one.
Interestingly, many Western states allowed women to vote in state and local
elections, beginning with Wyoming in 1869 and Utah in 1870. But in most of the
country women had to keep protesting. The 19th Amendment, passed in
1919, finally guaranteed women the right to vote (Tennessee’s ratification of
the amendment was the one which officially passed it). Former slaves got the
right to vote soon after the Civil War, so for half-a-century black men could
vote while all women could not.
From that first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls to
the 1920 national election, the first in which women could vote, 72 years had
passed. 72 years of tireless work, inconvenience, incarceration, and sometimes
enduring physical violence.
May they never be forgotten.
--Troy D. Smith,
a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech.
His words do not necessarily represent TTU.
A complete list of Liberal Dose columns can be found HERE
A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE
Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com
The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE
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