Votes for Women

VOTES FOR WOMEN

Middle-Class Movement

In 1910 the decades-old fight for women's suffrage was led by middle-class women who subscribed to the progressive agenda for social reform. The movement benefited from progressive organizing and the popularity of the progressive movement in the 1900s. The most prominent national organization, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), grew from seventeen thousand members in 1905 to seventy-five thousand members in 1910. Despite resistance to suffrage in eastern states—where it was linked to the Prohibition movement—many western states passed forms of suffrage legislation between 1910 and 1915. In 1912 the Progressive Party, led by Theodore Roosevelt—who had long vehemently opposed women's suffrage—endorsed the suffragist position; when that party dissolved, Republicans and Democrats began to support voting rights for women in order to woo former Progressive Party members. Even proponents of women's right to vote feared the consequences of extending the franchise to blacks, immigrants, or the less educated. Many women favored a literacy test for voting rights. The crusade for women's suffrage was sustained in part by racism and nativism.

Catt Takes Over NAWSA

An excellent organizer, Carrie Chapman Catt became the leader of NAWSA in 1915. Before America's entry into World War I, most feminist leaders, including Catt and settlement-house activist Jane Addams, strongly opposed the war; but in 1917 Catt made a strategic decision to reverse herself and support American involvement. Stressing women's contributions to the war through selling war bonds, working in factories, and volunteering for the Red Cross, Catt continued to lobby Congress for a constitutional amendment to allow women to vote. But her support of the war split the women's movement into two camps, between moderate NAWSA supporters and more-militant pacifists; nevertheless, the tactic allowed President Wilson to favor the moderates' position, and after long hesitation, in 1917 he threw his support behind the amendment as "vital in winning the war.

National Woman's Party

Alice Paul, a Quaker who categorically opposed war of any kind, brought radical new tactics to women's fight for the vote. Having spent several years learning from the suffrage movement in England, she returned to the United States in 1913 and formed a Congressional Union within NAWSA. Soon, however, she tired of the large organization's moderation and orderliness. In 1916, together with western women voters, she formed the National Woman's Party (NWP). Copying methods of British suffragists, the NWP staged dramatic demonstrations, picketing the White House and burning President Wilson's speeches. Its members chained themselves to the White House fence, and when jailed began a hunger strike. Their militancy alienated legislators, but forced the government to act.

The Nineteenth Amendment

The U.S. House of Representatives finally passed a women's suffrage amendment in January 1918, and the more conservative Senate followed suit in 1919. Another year of political organizing was needed to move the measure through the requisite three-quarters of state legislatures, but in August 1920 the state of Tennessee gave the final vote necessary for ratification, The war, Carrie Chapman Catt wrote, had "a tremendous effect on woman suffrage by revolutionizing the whole sphere of women."

TAXI DANCING

Taxi dancing was a practice that began in San Francisco during World War I. Just as a passenger could hire the services of a taxicab, dance patrons could hire a dance partner. Antivice reformers had closed many saloons and dance halls where many dance partners had previously met in a less artificial setting. Police monitored the dancers, and prominent signs warned, "No Improper Dancing Permitted." Still, patrons of taxi dancing invariably clung too tightly to the dancer they had hired or fought over favorite partners. A ten-cent ticket bought ninety seconds of dancing, and the dancers kept half their nightly earnings. To attract business, they dressed to the nines in fur coats, silk dresses, and thick makeup, and tapped their toes and cracked their bubblegum to songs such as "Baby Face" or "I Like Your Size, I Like Your Face, Who Wouldn t?"

Source:

Frank W. Hoffman and William G. Bailey, Arts and Entertainment Fads (New York: Haworth Press, 1990).

Sources:

Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of American Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987);

Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Women's Rights Movement in the United States, revised edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975).