VOTES FOR WOMEN
Although Woman Suffrage has been for a number of years a part of the
program of the International Council of Women, the American Branch,
represented by the General Federation of Women's Clubs, at first
displayed little interest in the subject. Although many of the club
women were strong suffragists, there were many others, notably women
from the Southern States, who were violently opposed to suffrage. Early
in the club movement it was agreed that suffrage, being a subject on
which there was an apparently hopeless difference of opinion, was not a
proper subject for club consideration.
The position of the women in regard to suffrage was precisely that of
the early labor unions toward politics. The unions, fearing that the
labor leaders would use the men for their own political advancement,
resolved that no question of politics should ever enter into their
deliberations.
In the same way the club women feared that even a discussion of Woman
Suffrage in their state and national federation meetings would result in
their movement becoming purely political. They wanted to keep it a
non-partisan benevolent and social affair.
[Illustration: SUFFRAGETTES IN LONDON ADVERTISING A MEETING]
Somehow, in what mysterious manner no one can precisely tell, the
reserve of the club women towards the suffrage question began some years
ago to break down. At the St. Louis Biennial of 1904 part of a morning
session was given up to the suffrage organizations. Several remarkable
speeches in favor of the suffrage were made, and there is no doubt that
a very deep impression was made, even upon those women openly opposed to
the movement. Six years later, at the biennial meeting held in
Cincinnati, Ohio, in June, 1910, an entire evening was given up to an
exhaustive discussion of both sides of the question.
Dating from that evening a stranger visiting the convention might almost
have thought that the sole object of the gathering was a discussion of
the right of women to the ballot. Women floated through the corridors of
the hotel talking suffrage. They talked suffrage in little groups in the
dining-room, they discussed it in the street cars going to and from the
convention.
The local suffrage clubs had planned a banquet to the visiting
suffragists and had calculated a maximum of one hundred and fifty
applications for tickets.
Three days before the banquet they had had nearly three hundred
applications, and when the hour for the banquet arrived every available
seat, the room's limit of three hundred and seventy-five, was occupied.
Outside were women offering ten dollars a plate and clamoring for the
privilege of merely listening to the after-dinner speakers. Something
must have happened in the course of those eight years to make such an
astounding change in the attitude of the club women.
The fact is that until the club women had been at work at practical
things for a long period of years, they did not realize the social value
of their own activities. They thought of their work as benevolent and
philanthropic. That they were performing community service, _citizens_'
service, they did not remotely dream. There is nothing surprising in
their _naïveté_. It is a fact that in this country, although every one
knows that women own property, pay taxes, successfully manage their own
business affairs, and do an astonishing amount of community work as
well, no one ever thinks of them as citizens.
American men are accustomed to women in almost all trades and
professions. It doesn't astonish a New Yorker to see a hospital
ambulance tearing down the street with a white-clad woman surgeon on the
back seat. A woman lawyer, architect, editor, manufacturer, excites no
particular notice. In the Western States men are beginning to elect
women county treasurers, county superintendents of schools, and in
Chicago, second largest city in the country, a Board of Education,
overwhelmingly masculine, recently appointed a woman City Superintendent
of Schools.
Yet to the vast majority of American men women do not look like
citizens.
As for the majority of American women they have always until recently
thought of themselves as a class,--a favored and protected class. They
cherished a sentimental kind of delusion that the American man was only
too anxious to give them everything that their hearts desired. When they
got out into the world of action, when they began to ask for something
more substantial than bonbons, the club women found that the American
man was not so very generous after all.
A typical instance occurred down in Georgia. A few years ago the women
of Georgia found a way to introduce into the legislature a child-labor
law. It was really a very modest little bill and it protected only a
fraction of the pitiful army of cotton-mill children, but still it was
worth having. The women worked hard and they got some very powerful
backing and a barrel or two of petitions. Nevertheless, the bill was
defeated. One legislative orator rose to explain his vote.
"Mr. Speaker," he said eloquently, "I am devoted to the good women of my
State. If I thought that the women of my State wanted this bill passed
I would vote for it; but, sir, I have every reason to believe that the
good women of my State are opposed to this bill, and therefore;"
At this juncture another member handed to the orator a petition bearing
the name of five thousand of the best known women in Georgia. The orator
stammered, turned red, felt for his handkerchief, mopped his brow, and
continued: "Mr. Speaker, I deeply regret that I did not see this
petition yesterday. As it is, my vote is pledged."
Incidents of this kind have occurred too frequently for the women of the
United States to escape their meaning. They have learned that they
cannot have everything they want merely by asking for it. Also they have
learned, or a large number of them have learned that the old theory of
women being represented at the polls by their husbands is very largely a
delusion.
The entrance of women in large numbers into labor unions, and into
membership in the Women's Trade Union League is another factor in the
increasing interest of American women in suffrage. After a decision of
the New York Court of Appeals that the law prohibiting night work of
women was unconstitutional, nearly one thousand women book-binders in
New York City made a public announcement that they would thenceforth
work for the ballot. They had been indifferent before, but this close
application of politics to their industrial situation--bookbinding is
one of the night trades--made them alive to their own helplessness.
The shirt-waist strike and the garment workers' strike in New York and
Philadelphia, waged so bitterly in 1910, brought great numbers of women
into the suffrage ranks. Not only were the women strikers convinced that
the magistrates and the police treated them with more contempt than they
did the voting men, but they perceived the need of securing better labor
laws for themselves. The conviction that women of the wealthier classes
would stand by them in securing favorable laws, as they stood by the
strikers in the industrial struggle, was a strong lever to turn them
towards the suffrage ranks.
[Illustration: MRS. HARRIOT STANTON BLATCH]
The Women's Trade Union League building, used as strike headquarters in
all strikes involving women workers, is a veritable center of suffrage
sentiment in New York! One floor houses the offices of the Equality
League of Self Supporting Women, of which Harriot Stanton Blatch is
founder and president. This society, which is entirely made up of trade
and professional workers, claims an approximate membership of twenty-two
thousand. A number of unions belong to the League, and there is also a
very large individual membership.
In Chicago the suffrage movement and the labor movement is more closely
associated than in any other American city. In Chicago, it will be
remembered, the Teachers' Federation is a trade union and is allied to
the Central Labor Union. Teachers, almost everywhere denied equal pay
with men for equal work, are eager seekers for political power. When, as
in Chicago, they are associated with labor, they become convinced
suffragists.
Organized labor has always been friendly to woman suffrage, but in
Chicago not only the union women but the union men are actively friendly
towards the cause. The original moving spirit in the Chicago
organization was a remarkable young working girl, Josephine Casey. Miss
Casey sold tickets at one of the stations of the Chicago Elevated, and
she formed her first woman suffrage club among the women members of the
Union of Street and Elevated Railway Employees. Later she organized on a
larger scale the Women's Political Equality Union, with membership open
to men and women alike. The interest shown in the union by workingmen,
many of whom had never before given the matter a moment's thought, was,
from the first, extraordinary. During the first winter of the society's
existence, union after union called for Woman Suffrage speakers.
Addresses were made before fifty or more. Some of the more popular
speakers often made four addresses in an evening. Mrs. Raymond Robins,
president of the National Women's Trade Union League, and Miss Alice
Henry, secretary of the Chicago branch of the League, won many converts
by their expositions of the exceedingly favorable labor laws of
Australia and New Zealand, where women vote.
[Illustration: MEETING A RELEASED SUFFRAGETTE PRISONER.]
Unquestionably the mighty battle which is waging in England made a deep
impression on American women of all classes. The visits made in this
country by Mrs. Cobden Sanderson, Mrs. Borrman Wells, Mrs. Philip
Snowden, and, most of all, Mrs. Pankhurst, leader of the militant
English Suffragists, aroused tremendous enthusiasm from one end of the
country to the other. Never, until these women appeared, telling, with
rare eloquence, their stories of struggle, of arrest and imprisonment,
had the vote appeared such an incomparable treasure. Never before,
except among a few enthusiasts, had there existed any feeling that the
suffrage was a thing to fight for, suffer for, even to die for.
Up to this time the suffrage was a theory, an academic question of right
and justice. After the visits of the English women, American suffragists
everywhere began to view their cause in the light of a political
movement. They began to adopt political methods. Instead of private
meetings where suffrage was discussed before a select audience of the
already convinced, the women began to mount soap boxes on street corners
and to talk suffrage to the man in the street.
The first suffrage demonstration was held in New York in February, 1908.
The members of a small but enthusiastic Equal Suffrage Club announced
their intention of having a parade. Most of the women being wage earners
they planned to have their parade on a Sunday. When they applied at
Police Headquarters for the necessary permit they found to their disgust
that Sunday parades were forbidden by law.
"Not unless you are a funeral procession," said the stern captain of the
police.
The woman replied that they were anything but a funeral procession, and
threatened darkly to hold their parade in spite of police regulations.
They got plenty of newspaper publicity in the succeeding days, and on
the following Sunday a huge crowd of men, a sprinkling of women, a
generous number of plain clothes men, and New York's famous "camera
squad" assembled in Union Square, where all incendiary things happen.
The dauntless seven who made up the suffrage club were there, and at the
psychological moment one of the women ran up the steps of a park
pavilion and spoke in a ringing voice, yet so quietly that the police
made no move to stop her.
"Friends," she said, "we are not allowed to have our parade, so we are
going to hold a meeting of protest at No. 209 East 23d Street. We invite
you to go over there with us." She and the others walked calmly out of
the square, and the crowd followed. They turned into Fifth Avenue, and
the crowd grew larger. Before three blocks were passed there were
literally thousands of people marching in the wake of ingenious
suffragists.
The sight aroused the indignation of many respectable citizens.
"Officer," exclaimed one of these, addressing an attendant policeman, "I
thought you had orders that those females were not to parade."
"That ain't no parade," said the policeman, serenely; "them folks is
just takin' a quiet walk."
The suffragists have taken more than one quiet walk since then. Street
speaking has become an almost daily occurrence. At first there was some
rioting, or, rather, some display of rowdyism on the part of the
spectators and some show of interference from the police. The crowds
listen respectfully now, and the police are friendly.
The most practical move the New York Suffragists have made was the
organization, early in 1910, of the Woman Suffrage Party, a fusion of
nearly all the suffrage clubs in the greater city into an association
exactly along the lines of a regular political party. At the head of the
party as president is Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the
International Woman Suffrage Association. Each of the five boroughs of
the city has a chairman, and each senatorial and assembly district is
either organized or is in process of organization.
[Illustration: THE WOMEN'S TRADES PROCESSION TO THE ALBERT HALL MEETING,
APRIL 27, 1909]
Absolutely democratic in its spirit and its organization, the party
leaders are drawn from every rank of society. The chairman of the
borough of Manhattan is Mrs. James Lees Laidlaw, wife of a prominent
Wall Street banker. Mrs. Frederick Nathan, president of the New York
State Consumers' League, is chairman of the assembly district in which
she lives. Mrs. Melvil Dewey, whose husband is head of a department at
Columbia University, is chairman of her own district. Other chairmen are
Helen Hoy Greeley, lawyer; Lavinia Dock, trained nurse; Anna Mercy, an
East Side physician; Maud Flowerton, buyer in a department store;
Gertrude Barnum, sociologist and writer. Practically every trade and
profession are represented in the party's ranks.
The object of the Woman Suffrage Party is organization for political
work. Last winter the party made the first aggressive move towards
forcing the Judiciary Committee of the Assembly to report on the bill to
give women votes by constitutional amendment. They succeeded in getting
a motion made for the discharge of the committee, sixteen legislators
voting for the women.
New York is the present center of the progressive suffrage movement,
with Chicago not very far behind.
In rather amazing fashion are women in many American communities
beginning to realize that politics are as much their business as men's.
In Salt Lake City when a city council undertakes to give away a valuable
water franchise, or extend gamblers' privileges, or otherwise follow the
example of many another city council in bending before the god of greed,
the women of Salt Lake send the word around. When the council meets the
women are in the room. They don't say anything. They don't have to say
anything. They can vote, these women. More than once the deep-laid plans
of the most powerful politicians in Salt Lake City have been completely
frustrated by a silent warning from the women. The city council has not
dared to pass grafting measures with a roomful of women looking on.
[Illustration: HELEN HOY GREELEY]
Even the non-voting woman has discovered the power which attaches to her
presence, in certain circumstances. In San Francisco during the second
Ruef trial, when the decent element of the city was fighting to down one
of the worst bosses that ever cursed a community, the women, under the
leadership of Mrs. Elizabeth Gerberding, performed this new kind of
picket duty. The courtroom where the trial was held was, by order of the
boss's attorney, packed with hired toughs whose duty it was to make a
mockery of the prosecution. Every point against the Ruef side was
received by these toughs with jeers and hootings. The district attorney
was insulted, badgered, and openly threatened with violence.
Mrs. Gerberding, whose husband is editor of a newspaper opposed to boss
rule, attended several sessions, and induced a large number of women of
social importance to attend with her. These women went daily to the
courtroom, occupying seats to the exclusion of many of the tough
characters, and by their presence doing much to preserve order and to
assist the efforts of the district attorney. When the assassin's bullet
was fired at the district attorney a number of the women were present.
Out of the horror and detestation of this crime was organized the
Women's League of Justice, which soon had a membership of five hundred.
The league fought stoutly for the reelection of Heney as district
attorney. Heney was defeated, and the league became the Women's Civic
Club of San Francisco, pledged to work for political betterment and a
clean city government.
In four States of the Union, Washington, Oregon, South Dakota, and
Oklahoma, the voters will this autumn vote for or against constitutional
amendments giving women the right to vote. It is not very probable that
the Suffragists will win in any of these States, not because the voters
are opposed to suffrage, but because they are, for the most part,
uninformed. The suffrage advocates have not yet learned enough political
wisdom to further their cause through education of the voters.
Although enormous sums of money have been spent in suffrage campaigns,
in no one has enough money been available to do the work thoroughly. In
the four States where the question is at present before the voters,
complaint is made that there is not enough money in the treasuries
properly to circulate literature.
Many of the wisest leaders in the National Woman Suffrage Association,
including Dr. Anna Shaw, Ida Husted Harper, and others, are advising an
altogether new method of conducting the struggle for the ballot. They
advocate selecting a State, possibly Nebraska, where conditions seem
uncommonly favorable, and concentrating the entire strength of the
national organization, every dollar of money in the national treasury,
all the speakers and organizers, all the literature, in a mighty effort
to give the women of that one State the ballot. The vote won in
Nebraska, the national association should pass on to the next most
favorable State and win a victory there. The moral effect of such
campaigns would no doubt be very great.
One of the principal reasons why men hesitate in this country to give
the voting power to women is that they do not know, and they rather fear
to guess, how far women would unite in forcing their own policies on the
country. If an Irish vote, or a German vote, or a Catholic vote, or a
Hebrew vote is to be dreaded, say the men, how much more of a menace
would a woman vote be. I heard a man, a delegate from an anti-suffrage
association, solemnly warn the New York State Legislature, at a suffrage
hearing, against this danger of a woman vote. "When the majority of
women and the minority of men vote together," he declared, "there will
be no such thing as personal liberty left in the United States."
[Illustration: SUFFRAGETTES IN MADISON SQUARE.]
Under certain conditions a woman vote is not an unthinkable contingency.
It has even occurred.
For the edification of the possible reader who is entirely uninformed,
it may be explained that women are not entirely disenfranchised in the
United States. Women vote on equal terms with men, in four States. They
have voted in Wyoming since 1869; in Colorado since 1894; in Utah and
Idaho since 1896. They vote at school elections and on certain questions
of taxation in twenty-eight States.
While it is true that in the States which have a small measure of
suffrage the women show little interest in voting, in the four so-called
suffrage States, they vote conscientiously and in about the same
proportion as men.
But here is a notable thing. The women of the suffrage States differ so
little from the women of other States, and women in general, that the
chief concerns of their lives are the home, the school, and the
baby,--the Kaiser's "Kirche, Küche, und Kinder" over again. They vote
with enthusiasm on all questions which relate to domestic interests,
that is, which directly relate to them and their children. Aside from
this, the woman vote has made a deep impression on the moral character
of candidates and that is about all it has meant. In general politics
women have counted scarcely more than have the women of other States.
But the new interest in suffrage, the new realization of themselves as
citizens that has been aroused all over the United States within the
past two years have seriously affected the women voters of at least one
suffrage State, Colorado.
The women of Colorado, especially the women of Denver, have for several
years taken an active part in legislation directly affecting themselves
and their children. The legislative committee of the Colorado State
Federation of Clubs has held regular meetings during the sessions of the
State Legislature, and it has been a regular custom to submit to that
committee for approval all bills relating to women and children. This
never seemed to the politicians to be anything very dangerous to their
interests. It was, in a manner of speaking, a chivalric acknowledgment
of women's virtue as wives and mothers.
But lately the women of Colorado have begun to wake up to the fact that
not only special legislation, but all legislation, is of direct interest
to them. It has lately dawned upon them that the matter of street
railway franchise affects the home as directly as a proposition to erect
a high school. Also it has dawned on them that without organization, and
more organization, the woman vote was more or less powerless. So, about
a year ago they formed in Denver an association of women which they
called the Public Service League. Nothing quite like it ever existed
before. It is a political but non-partisan association of women, pledged
to work for the civic betterment of Denver, pledged to fight the corrupt
politicians, determined that the city government shall be well
administered even if the women have to take over the offices themselves.
The League is, in effect, a secret society of women. It has an
inflexible rule that its proceedings are to be kept inviolable. There is
a perfect understanding that any woman who divulges one syllable of what
occurs at a meeting of the League will be instantly dropped from
membership. No woman has yet been dropped.
It may well be understood that this secret society of women, this
non-partisan league of voters, is a thing to strike terror into the
heart of a ward boss. As a matter of fact, the corrupt politicians and
the equally corrupt heads of corporations who had long held Denver in
bondage regard the Public Service League in mingled dread and
detestation. Equally as a matter of fact politicians of a better class
are anxious to enlist the good will of the League. Last summer a Denver
election involved a question of granting a twenty years' franchise to a
street railway company. Opposed to the granting of the franchise was a
newly formed citizens' party. Opposed also was the Women's Public
Service League. In gratitude for the co-operation of the League the
Citizens' Party offered a place on the electoral ticket to any woman
chosen by the League.
It was the first time in the history of Colorado that a municipal office
had been offered to a woman, and the League promptly took advantage of
it. They named as a candidate for Election Commissioner Miss Ellis
Meredith, one of the best known, best loved women in the State. As
journalist and author and club woman Miss Meredith is known far beyond
her own State, and her nomination created intense interest not only
among the women of her own city and State, but among club women
everywhere.
On the evening of May 3, 1910, there was a meeting held in the Broadway
Theater, Denver, the like of which no American city ever before
witnessed. It was a women's political mass meeting to endorse the
candidacy of a woman municipal official. The meeting was entirely in the
hands of women. Presiding over the immense throng was Mrs. Sarah Platt
Decker, formerly president, and still leader of the General Federation
of Women's Clubs. Beside her sat Mrs. Helen Grenfell, for thirteen years
county and State superintendent of schools, Mrs. Helen Ring Robinson,
Mrs. Martha A.B. Conine, and Miss Gail Laughlin, all women of note in
their community. The enthusiasm aroused by that meeting did not subside,
and on the day of the election Miss Meredith ran so far ahead of her
ticket that it seemed as if every woman in Denver, as well as most of
the men, had voted for her. She took her place in the Board of Election
Commissioners, and was promptly elected Chairman of the Board.
There is nothing especially attractive about the office of Election
Commissioner. In accepting the nomination Miss Meredith said frankly
that she was influenced mainly by two things: first a desire to test the
loyalty of the women voters, and second, because, while women had been
held accountable for elections which have disgraced the city of Denver,
they have never before been given a chance to manage the elections.
Nothing is more certain that women, when they become enfranchised, will
never, in any large numbers, appear as office seekers. It is probable
that office will be thrust upon the ablest of them. Mrs. Sarah Platt
Decker has been spoken of as a possible future Mayor of Denver, and it
is certain that she could be elected to Congress if she would allow
herself to be placed in nomination.
A few women have been elected to the legislatures in the suffrage
States, and they have held high office in educational departments. In
suffrage and nonsuffrage States they have been elected to many county
offices. Miss Gertrude Jordan is Treasurer of Cherry County, Nebraska.
In Idaho, Texas, Louisiana, and several other States women have filled
the same position. The State of Kansas is a true believer in women
office-holders, even though it refuses its women complete suffrage.
Women can vote in Kansas only at municipal elections, but in forty
counties men have elected women school superintendents. They are clerks
of four counties, treasurers of three, and commissioners of one. In one
county of Kansas a woman is probate judge. The good and faithful work
done by these women ought to go a long way towards educating men of
their community to the idea of political association with women.
The attitude of men towards suffrage has undergone an enormous change
within the past two years. A large number of the thinking men of the
country have openly enlisted in the Suffrage ranks. It is said that
almost every member of the faculty of Columbia University signed the
Suffrage petition presented to the Congress of 1909. Well-known
professors of many Western universities and colleges have spoken and
written in favor of equal suffrage. In New York City a flourishing
Voters' League for Equal Suffrage has been formed, with a membership
running into the hundreds.
[Illustration: THE "QUIET WALK" OF THE NEW YORK SUFFRAGISTS, WHOM THE
POLICE WOULD NOT PERMIT TO PARADE]
To the average unprejudiced man the old arguments against political
equality have almost entirely lost weight. The theory that women should
not vote because they cannot fight is now rarely argued. Municipal
governments certainly no longer rest on physical force. The same is true
of state governments, and it is probably true of national governments.
At all events we are sincerely trying to make it true. For the rest it
would be extremely difficult to prove that women would make undesirable
citizens. To the anxious inquiry, What will women do with their votes?
the answer is simple. They will do with their votes precisely what they
do, or try to do, without votes. This has been proven in every country
in the world where they have received the franchise. In Australia, New
Zealand, Finland, and in the English municipalities the ideal of the
common good has been reflected in the woman vote. Social legislation
alone interests women, and so far they have confined their efforts to
matters of education, child labor, pure food, sanitation, control of
liquor traffic, and public morals. The organized non-voting women of
this country have devoted themselves for years to precisely these
objects. Without votes, without precedents, and without very much money
they instituted the playground movement, and the juvenile court
movement, two of the greatest reforms this country has contributed to
civilization. They have instituted a dozen reforms in our educational
system. They practically invented the town and village improvement idea.
They have co-operated with every social reform advocated by men, and it
is to be noted that wherever their judgment has been in error they have
conscientiously erred in favor of a wider democracy, a more exalted
social ideal.
[Illustration: SUFFRAGE DEMONSTRATION IN UNION SQUARE, NEW YORK]
However long-deferred Woman Suffrage may prove to be, it is pretty
generally conceded that women will inevitably vote some day. The
evolution of society will bring them into political equality with men
just as it has brought them into intellectual and industrial equality.
The first woman who followed her spinning-wheel out of her home into the
factory was the natural ancestress of the first woman who demanded the
ballot.
The application of steam to machinery took women's trades out of the
home and placed them in the factory. The effect of this was that men
were confronted with a singular dilemma. They had to choose between two
courses; they had to support their women in idleness, or else they had
to allow them to leave the home and go where their trades had gone. The
first course involving the intolerable burden of doing their own and
their women's work, they were obliged to choose the second. The
jealously-guarded doors of the home were opened, and little by little,
grudgingly, the men admitted women to full industrial freedom.
Women's housekeeping, or most of it, has gradually been withdrawn from
the home and transferred to the municipality. There was a time when
women could ensure their families pure food, good milk, clean ice,
proper sanitation. They cannot do that now. The City Hall governs all
such matters. Again the men find themselves facing the old dilemma. They
must either support their women in idleness--do all their own as well as
the women's housekeeping--or they must allow their women to leave the
home and follow their housekeeping to the place where it is now being
done,--the polls.
Women are beginning to understand the situation. They are even beginning
to understand how badly the men are providing for the municipal family.
They are demanding their old housekeeping tasks back again. To this
point has the Suffrage movement, begun in 1848 by a band of women called
fanatics, arrived.