Table Of ContentBibliographical Note
This Dover edition, first published in 2020, is an unabridged republication of the work originally
printed by Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, in 1923.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Catt, Carrie Chapman, 1859–1947 author. | Shuler, Nettie Rogers, 1865–1939 author.
Title: Woman suffrage and politics : the inner story of the Suffrage Movement / Carrie Chapman Catt
and Nettie Rogers Shuler.
Description: Mineola, New York : Dover Publications, Inc., [2020] | Includes index. | Summary: “With
the approach of the one hundredth anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, this
book offers an important aid to understanding how women won the right to vote and the extensive
debt we owe to those who fought for it for seventy years. Written by Carrie Chapman Catt and
Nettie Rogers Shuler, two leaders of the movement, this landmark work reveals the inside story,
tracing the struggle for women’s suffrage from 1848 to 1922. They argue that there was not a lack
of public sentiment supporting woman suffrage, rather that certain interests in the American
political system controlled public sentiment and deflected information in order to delay the
passage of the amendment that would give women the right to vote. They note that twenty-six
other countries gave women the right to vote before the United States and offer their own insights
as to why this might have been the case”— Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019041084 | ISBN 9780486842059 (trade paperback) | ISBN 0486842053
Subjects: LCSH: Women—Suffrage—United States.
Classification: LCC JK1896 .C3 2020 | DDC 324.6/230973—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019041084
Manufactured in the United States by LSC Communications
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2020
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED
ON BEHALF OF THE WOMEN
WHO HAVE GONE BEFORE
TO
THE WOMEN WHO COME AFTER
Contents
WHY THE BOOK IS WRITTEN
1. HOW THE WOMAN SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT BEGAN
2. THEAVERTED TRIUMPH
3. HAT ADJECTIVE MALE
4. THE NEGRO’S HOUR
5. NEGRO SUFFRAGE AS A POLITICAL NECESSITY
6. THE FIRST VICTORY
7. POLITICS AFTER THE WAR
8. TWO AMENDMENTS AND MANY WOMEN
9. THE WOMAN’S HOUR THAT NEVER CAME
10. THE INVISIBLE ENEMY
11. SPECIAL HANDICAPS AND HAZARDS
12. A NEW IMPULSE
13. ILLINOIS: A TURNING POINT
14. THE STORY OF OHIO
15. THE STORY OF IOWA
16. WOMAN SUFFRAGE BY FEDERAL AMENDMENT
17. THE CRISES OF 1916
18. THE FIGHTING FORCES
19. THE DECISIVE BATTLE
20. MORE VICTORIES AND MORE DEFEATS
21. THE CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES SURRENDERS
22. CAMPAIGNING FOR RATIFICATION
23. HARD WORK FOR SPECIAL SESSIONS
24. THE LEGAL TESTS BEGIN
25. ADDING UP THE RATIFICATION COLUMN
26. LAST OF ALL SUFFRAGE CONVENTIONS
27. THE OPPOSITION GROWS GRIMMER
28. THE STRUGGLE FOR THE THIRTY- SIXTH STATE
29. THE SUPREME CURT SPEAKS
30. TENNESSEE
31. THE STATES THAT DID NOT RATIFY
32. CONCLUSION
CHRONOLOGICAL RECORD OF THE WINNING OF WOMAN SUFFRAGE BY FEDERAL
AMENDMENT
NOTES
INDEX
Why the Book Is Written
The campaign for woman suffrage in America long since ended. Gone are the days of
agitating, organizing, educating, pleading, and persuading. No more forever will
women descend on State Legislatures and the national Congress in the effort to wrest
the suffrage from State and national legislators. The gates to political enfranchisement
have swung open. The women are inside.
In the struggle up to the gates, in unlocking and opening the gates, women had some
strange adventures. They learned some strange things. Especially startling became their
experiences and their information when woman suffrage once crossed the devious trail
of American politics. It is with that point of intersection that this book concerns itself. We
have left it to others to write the details of suffrage history. Those details fill six huge
volumes. We have left it to others to tell the immortal story of the services of individual
suffragists. Here we eliminate names to emphasize work. We have left it to others, too, to
synthesize American politics. This book’s essential contribution must be sought in its
revelation of the bearing of American politics upon the question of woman suffrage.
It is impossible to make that revelation adequately without a summary of the seventy-
two years of campaign for the enfranchisement of women in the United States, together
with a survey of American politics for the last fifty-five years of that period. The two are
interlocked, neither story is complete without the inclusion of the other, and this story is
not comprehensible without the inclusion of both. But our summary of the woman
movement will be brief. Our survey of American politics will be brief. Our emphasis will
lie where woman movement and American politics met in mutual menace. Our
revelations will illumine political crises with which the suffrage cause was closely
identified and over whose motivation suffragists had to keep sharp watch.
Throughout the suffrage struggle, America’s history, her principles, her traditions
stood forth to indicate the inevitability of woman suffrage, to suggest that she would
normally be the first country in the world to give the vote to women. Yet the years went
by, decade followed decade, and twenty-six1 other countries gave the vote to their
women while America delayed.
Why the delay?
It is a question that was the despair of two generations of American women. It is a
question that students of history and national psychology will ponder through
generations to come.
We think that we have the answer. It was, not an antagonistic public sentiment, nor
yet an uneducated or indifferent public sentiment—it was the control of public
sentiment, the deflecting and the thwarting of public sentiment, through the trading and
the trickery, the buying and the selling of American politics. We think that we can prove
it. Suffragists consider that they have a case against certain combines of interests that
systematically fought suffrage with politics and effectively delayed suffrage for years. We
think that we can make that case.
We find it difficult to concede to the general opinion that, because of the tendency to
overestimate the importance of events with which they are most familiar, those who have
been a part of a movement are disqualified to write its history. We are sure that history
would be worthless if it took no account of the observations made within a movement by
those who have been a part of it. That is why we, who have had an opportunity to
become acquainted with facts which throw light upon the political aspects of the woman
suffrage question, feel impelled to pass our knowledge on to others.
The sources of all our information when not otherwise indicated are the archives of
the National American Woman Suffrage Association, which contain continuous reports
and other data from 1848 to 1922. Documents of this kind decline in interest for the
general public as the movement they chronicle recedes into the past, but the facts and
deductions drawn from them, and here assembled, should prove of significance to the
advocates, perhaps especially the women advocates, of each recurring struggle in the
evolution of democracy.
CARRIE CHAPMAN CATT.
NETTIE ROGERS SHULER.
CHAPTER 1
How the Woman Suffrage Movement Began
When, during the last decade, the great suffrage parades,—armies of women with
banners, orange and black, yellow and blue and purple and green and gold,—went
marching through the streets of the cities and towns of America; when “suffrage
canvassers,” knocking at the doors of America, were a daily sight; when the suffragist on
the soap box was heard on every street corner; when huge suffrage mass meetings were
packing auditoriums from end to end of the country; when lively “suffrage stunts” were
rousing and stirring the public; when suffrage was in everybody’s mouth and on the front
page of every newspaper, few paused to ask how it all started, where it all came from. It
was just there, like breakfast.
To the unimaginative man on the street corner, watching one of those suffrage
parades, the long lines of marching women may have seemed to come out of nowhere, to
have no starting place, no connection with his grandmother and his great grandmother.
To the same man the insistent tapping of those suffrage canvassers, the commotion of
the suffrage mass meetings, the repetition of those suffrage stunts, the incessant news of
suffrage in the daily press, may have seemed unrelated acts, irrelevant to social history.
Yet it was all part of social history, and had immediate connection with other phases of
social history. For the demand for woman suffrage was the logical outcome of two
preceding social movements, both extending over some centuries: one, a man movement,
evolving toward control of governments by the people, the other a woman movement,
with its goal the freeing of women from the masculine tutelage to which law, religion,
tradition and custom bound them. These movements advanced in parallel lines and the
enfranchisement of woman was an inevitable climax of both.
Neither the man movement nor the woman movement had a dated beginning. In the
struggle upward toward political freedom, men were called upon to overthrow the
universally accepted theory of the Divine Right of Kings to rule over the masses of men;
women, the universally accepted theory of the Divine Right of Men to rule over women.
The American Revolution forever destroyed the Divine Right of Kings theory in this
country, but it left untouched the theory of the Divine Right of Man to rule over woman.
Men and women believed it with equal sincerity, the church taught it, customs were
based upon it, the law endorsed it, and the causes which created the belief had been so
long lost in obscurity that men claimed authority for it in the “laws of God.” All
opposition to the enfranchisement of women emanated from that theory.
Students of human progress might have predicted at the inception of the American
Republic that, should it continue, universal manhood and womanhood suffrage would
become inevitable. The official announcement of the causes that led the American
patriots into revolution emphasized two maxims as explanatory of all their grievances,
namely, “Taxation without representation is tyranny” and “Governments derive their just
powers from the consent of the governed.” Although in the minds of the Colonists these
aphorisms undoubtedly were limited in application to the relation which the Colonies
bore to their Mother Country, it was as clear to individual men and women then, as to
hundreds of thousands of them a hundred and forty years later, that a nation that
proclaimed these principles upon the one hand and denied them upon the other, applied
them to men and refused to apply them to women, presented so untenable an
inconsistency that sooner or later professions and deeds would have to be squared.
Yet not only was the battle for woman suffrage fought longer in the United States, it
was fought harder. It engaged the lifelong energies of a longer list of women, called into
action a larger organization in proportion to population, and involved a greater cost in
money, personal sacrifice and ingenuity, than the suffrage campaign of any other land.
And when, in 1920, the final victory came to the woman suffrage cause in the land of its
birth, the rejoicing was sadly tempered by the humiliating knowledge that twenty-six
other countries had outdistanced America in bestowing political liberty upon their
women. More, American suffragists knew that their victory had, even then, been virtually
wrung from hesitant and often resentful political leaders, while the vote had come to the
women of many other lands as a spontaneous and liberal concession to the common
appeal for justice; and that, too, without serious effort on the women’s part.
The delay in America was not due to the retarded growth of the general woman
movement, for the rate of progress of that movement had been more rapid in the United
States than in any other country, as a brief review will show.
Taking the year 1800 as a fixed point from which to measure progress, the
investigator will find the civil and legal status of women practically the same as that of
several preceding centuries, although there were signs of a coming revolt, and in North
America the personal liberty of women had been much extended under the influence of
the freer institutions of the Western Hemisphere. Married women at that date were not
permitted in any country except Russia to control their property nor to make a will; to all
intents and purposes they did not own property. The Common Law in operation in Great
Britain and the United States held husband and wife to be “one, and that one the
husband.” The legal existence of the wife was so merged in that of her husband that she
was said to be “dead in law.” Not only did the husband control the wife’s property, collect
and use her wages, select the food and clothing for herself and children, decide upon the
education and religion of their children, but to a very large extent he controlled her
freedom of thought, speech and action. The husband possessed the right to will the
children, even unborn children, to other guardians. If the wife offended the husband, he
possessed the legal right, upheld by public opinion, to punish her, the courts interfering
only when the chastisement exceeded the popular idea of appropriate severity. Humane,
affectionate husbands treated their wives as loved companions, and there were happy
wives and homes, but upon the wives of fickle, ignorant, brutal husbands, always
numerous, the oppression of the law fell with crushing force.
Although single women were legally as independent as men, it was contrary to
accepted form for them to manage their own business affairs. What women were
unaccustomed to do the world believed them incapable of doing, and they had in
consequence neither confidence in themselves nor public encouragement to attempt
ventures of independence. Very few occupations were open to women and these were
monopolized by the poor. It was accounted a family disgrace for women of the middle or
upper classes to earn money. The unmarried woman of such classes, dubbed “old maid,”
forbidden by public opinion to support herself, even were work and wages available,
became a dependent in the home of her nearest male relative. Pitied because she had
never “had a chance,” regarded with contempt as one of the world’s derelicts, she was
condemned to a life of involuntary service, and the fact that she legally possessed
property enough to insure her independence did not greatly alter her status.
In the church, then a far greater power in the making of opinion than now, women
with few exceptions were not allowed to preach, sing, pray, testify or vote. During church
services women were seated upon one side, and men upon the other in order that “men
might commend themselves to God without interruption.”
It was “indelicate” for a woman to appear upon a business street without a male
escort or to go to a bank to transact business, and any woman seen unattended upon the
street after dark was regarded with suspicion. No college in the world admitted women,
and there were no high schools for girls. It was the universal belief that Greek and
higher mathematics, then the two chief corner stones of the collegiate curriculum, were
utterly beyond the capacity of women. Convents and boarding schools wherein girls of
wealth were educated taught nothing more than the rudiments of learning, with so-
called “accomplishments.” The daughters of the poor received no education at all.
The recital of the legal and social disabilities of women at the beginning of the
Nineteenth Century is shocking to modern thought, but it conveys only a partial
understanding of the timid, self-distrustful, untrained character of the average woman of
the day. Taught that it was unwomanly to hold opinions upon serious subjects, that men
most admired clinging weakness in women, and that woman’s one worthy ambition was
to secure men’s admiration, it is no wonder that women made little effort to think for
themselves.
An English book which appeared at this time, Dr. Gregory’s “Legacy to My
Daughters,” and which was much read on both sides of the Atlantic and recommended by
the clergy as expressing the correct attitude for women, said: “If you happen to have any
learning, keep it a profound secret, especially from men, who look with a jealous,
malignant eye on a woman of great parts and a cultivated understanding.” The author
counseled girls “not to dance with spirit when gaiety of heart would make them feel
eloquent, lest men who beheld them might either suppose that they were not entirely
dependent on their protection for their safety or entertain dark suspicions as to their
modesty.”
The philosophy of Jean Jacques Rousseau, which had largely influenced the thought of
France during the closing years of the eighteenth century, was still representative of
thought and feeling in the beginning of the nineteenth. With regard to women Rousseau
had said: “The education of women should always be relative to that of man. To please
Us, to be useful to Us, to make Us love and esteem them, to educate Us when young, to
take care of Us when grown up, to advise, to console Us, to render Our lives easy and
agreeable; these are the duties of women at all times and what they should be taught
from their infancy.”
In reply “The Vindication of Women” was wrung from Mary Wollstonecraft. Her
eloquent appeal for larger opportunities for women was received in the hostile spirit
with which the world receives all new ideas, and Horace Walpole doubtless reflected
public opinion when he called her a “hyena in petticoats.”
In the Western World there were more robust signs of coming change. Mistress Brent,
a relative of Lord Baltimore and the owner of a vast estate in Maryland, not only
demanded a voice in the State Assembly, composed of land holders, but defended her
contention with so much spirit and logic as to create a lively if unsuccessful debate in
that body and all of its constituencies. In March, 1776, Abigail Adams wrote her
husband, when he was sitting with the Continental Congress, “I long to hear you have
declared an independency, 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
favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands
of husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and
attention are not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion and will not
hold ourselves bound to obey any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”
In New Jersey, tax-paying women were granted the vote by the constitution of July 2,
1776, two days before the Declaration of Independence was declared. In 1790 and 1797
legislative enactments confirmed them in the right. The vote was taken from them by the
Legislature in 1807, and the explanation was that although qualified women had used
the vote quite generally, they had not supported the right candidates in the election. The
legislators therefore sought and won a party advantage by the disfranchisement of
electors who had voted against them!
It was upon such signs and portents that the curtain of the nineteenth century rose;
the century which the prophetic voice of Victor Hugo proclaimed the “Century of
Women.”
Of special significance were the indications of a definite movement in the United
States for education for girls. School Districts taxed their own residents for the
maintenance of schools. As it cost more to build school-houses large enough for both
boys and girls than for boys alone, the discussion was at once precipitated as to whether
“schools for shes” should be maintained, the liberal-minded contending for them and the
conservative and ungenerous against them.
Many districts compromised by permitting girls to attend school in summer months
when boys vacated seats to work on the farms. In Boston, from 1789 to 1822, girls were
allowed to attend the public schools under this rule, although for a portion of the time an
exception was made and they were admitted for two hours in the afternoon after the
boys had gone home. In 1826, Boston, amid a storm of opposition, opened a high school
for girls, but yielded to hostile clamor and closed it in 1828. It had been an “alarming
success”; the school had been full and not a girl had quitted it in the eighteen months of
its existence, in spite of the persecution of doubters.
The discussion of educational opportunity for women received a fresh impulse when it
was proposed to include geography in the instruction of girls. The proper schedule for
girls was held to be confined to the three R’s, “Readin’, ’Ritin’ and ’Rithmetic,” with
some knowledge of a fourth R, Religion; so a battle royal was fought around geography.
Girls whose parents approved the innovation were chased from the schoolhouse to their
homes by bands of rollicking boys, throwing dirt, stones or snow balls, and shouting in
tones of derision—“Geography girl, Geography girl! There goes a Geography girl.”
It was not uncommon for a teacher to give private instruction to girls after school
hours, and consequent “Dame Schools” for girls, that is, teaching by women in their own
homes, sprang up in all parts of the country in response to the demand. In time women
began teaching in country districts during summer months when schools were small, one
dollar a week and “boarding round” being considered good terms for such teachers. In
1821 the Troy Female Seminary was opened by Mrs. Emma Willard, the first institution
in the United States offering “higher education” to women. It became an immediate
