Sisters: The Lives of America's Suffragists

Introduction

The leaders of the American suffrage movement have lost their private lives. Of course we remember their public ones, at least fleetingly in awkwardly inserted paragraphs in textbooks or as brief episodes in the reform movements of the 1840s and the 1890s. We recall as well their final success in 1920 when the Nineteenth Amendment delivering the vote to women was ratified. Certainly monographs recount the strategies of the suffrage organizations in depictions of the headquarters history of this second American revolution for freedom. There are as well impressive biographies, often by relatives, describing the individual experiences of suffrage women, though in the more benighted versions these women emerge as dehumanized saints. With such a past it is no wonder that when the suffrage leaders are remembered at all, they are homogenized into stiff icons of feminized democracy. We conflate them into one middle-class overweight white woman with a severe look, hair unflatteringly pulled behind her ears, dressed in a high-necked black dress with a lace collar and cameo pin for decoration.

There are none of the lifelike paintings by Gilbert Stuart or Rembrandt Peale that breathe patriotism into the faces of the founding brothers and that have so enhanced modern-day remembrances of Washington, Hamilton, Franklin, and Jefferson. To be sure, the founding sisters had neither the time nor the money nor the ego to sit for their portraits. Later generations of activists, more cognizant of the uses of publicity, sought to place physical remembrances of the suffragists in public places such as the U.S. Capitol so that they might become part of the nation’s historical imagination. Usually the results were unsuccessful. In 1921 when a statue of Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton was finally accepted by a bemused Congress, the women were indistinguishable. Congress promptly dubbed the statue three women in a tub and consigned it for a half century to the basement. Even the unsuccessful effort to have a suffrage sister permanently join the founders on that most popular of all material objects — the currency of the nation — foundered. Sacagawea, a Native American woman available to represent two inequalities, has now replaced Susan B. Anthony on the seldom used and manifestly clumsy gold dollar.

Heeding the call of modern feminists that the personal is the political, what follows is an attempt to retrieve the private lives of the suffrage leaders and to integrate their stories into their public work for women’s rights, and especially the vote. The five women considered in Sisters: The Lives of America’s Suffragists — Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frances Willard, and Alice Paul — did not exist in a vacuum without family, friends, lovers, and companions. They had childhoods and parents as well as tempers and illnesses. In differences that emerged from their personal circumstances, they disagreed over many issues, just as their shared convictions and the hostility to their cause nurtured a sense of sisterhood.

What they shared as sisters, besides a support of suffrage, was their leadership, optimism, stamina, and remarkable longevity. Lucy Stone died in 1893 at seventy-five years of age; Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1902 at eighty-seven; Susan B. Anthony in 1906 at eighty-six; Alice Paul in 1977 at ninety-two. Only Frances Willard died in her fifties, though a half-century’s life span for her generation was hardly an abbreviated one. During most of their lives each ran with an iron hand the organizations that she had founded. Authoritarian and opinionated, as virtual oligarchs they created and retained authority, and while they appreciated the need for a galaxy of grassroots female supporters to fight for suffrage, they also understood the necessity of an unassailable hierarchy in the early stages of the women’s movement.

There were other prominent suffrage leaders, but I have chosen these five because I believe them to be indispensable. Not only did they found and lead the national organizations that served as surrogate political parties for women before 1920, they also provided a network of leadership that shaped the goals of this first wave of American feminists. The excision of these women’s private lives has often made it seem that the politics of organized suffrage summarized the entirety of their existence. For them the political seemingly became the personal. Indeed the fact that their private lives have so thoroughly leached into the fight for suffrage represents a muted, but continuing, stereotype about political women. Baldly stated, public women must be denied private lives.

I believe that one reason we so often overlook the suffrage crusade, beyond the general invisibility of all women’s past, is that we have no sense of its leaders’ personalities and temperaments, their love affairs and their sexuality, their homes and friendships. Americans easily recall the personalities of Washington and Jefferson, as well as their foibles even to dental problems and preferences in clothes. But they have no sense of the suffragists who suffered marital infidelities, battled to retain their femininity even as they were pelted by eggs during their speeches, worried about their children, and wondered, in the eternally unresolved battle for all working women, how to balance family responsibilities with time-consuming activism. To the extent that all history is biography, we need a collective profile of the suffrage leaders.

Certainly the cause these women served deserves more attention. The consent of the governed is the most important aspect of the history of American freedom, the latter an inheritance from England begotten in our national version during the Revolution and the subsequent writing of the American Constitution. The battle for votes for women became a struggle, albeit today largely uncelebrated, for the civil rights of half of the American population. In 1848 at Seneca Falls, New York, the first generation of suffrage sisters, amid their own fears as well as the ridicule and suspicion of their families and friends, moved from the privacy of their homes to engage in a public campaign for the vote. It was a struggle that lasted nearly three-quarters of a century — so long in fact that there is no one single suffrage generation as exists for the founding fathers. Instead historians of women’s history must refer to decadal waves of feminism.

At the time votes for women was the most radical of their demands, but it was not their only one. They targeted injustices against women that ranged from overturning the automatic, court-imposed child custody rights bestowed on fathers to establishing equal educational opportunities for girls. They fought for dress reform at a time when conventional clothes imprisoned women, and they supported women’s equal pay for equal, and even comparative, work.

Lucretia Mott, the quiet Quaker from Philadelphia, believed that the resolution at Seneca Falls in 1848 demanding the vote would make them seem foolish, although calls for controlling their wages as married women or a single sex standard evidently would not. Mott was right. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, as the historian Ellen DuBois reminds us, giving women the vote threatened men because it overturned their control not just in public arenas where exclusion from the electoral process testified to female inferiority, but in their homes where husbands and fathers continued to rule. In the nineteenth century voting enacted the process of personal sovereignty. It established virtue and linked men to the primordial national value of a government based on the consent of the governed. Today voting hardly seems a radical enterprise, but it is only in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century that women’s struggle for the essential democratic transaction can be seen as a chimera.

To make their claims for freedom in the public sphere, these women employed a language and vocabulary well known in their times — that of the American Revolution and especially of the Declaration of Independence. In the conventions that followed Seneca Falls and that for decades represented their collective voice, they resolved, in language first used by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, that in a government that denied women the vote all laws which place [woman] in a position inferior to that of man are contrary to the great precept of nature and therefore of no force or authority. This was Stanton’s addition to the convictions of the founders: liberty was a natural right for all humans, the Constitution’s first phrase, We the people, included women, suffrage was inseparable from freedom, and taxation without representation was cause for rebellion.

Stepchildren of the Enlightenment, the sisters of suffrage were also the half children (having been excluded from any participation in its councils) of organized religion. Especially Anthony and Paul drew on the imbedded sensibilities that Quakerism inspired — resistance to conformity and assertion of the power that the internal light of God’s grace provided to those who challenged custom and habit. Methodism, meanwhile, instructed Willard in the useful pursuit of conversions and the discipline of missionary work, the latter ever so slow and full of obstacles. All of these women, except Paul, were also schooled in the antislavery campaigns of the 1840s where they first discovered each other along with a compelling example of their nation’s oppressions. When as sisters in the cause, they began crusading for their own freedom, their task was nothing less than converting the entire United States to what most Americans thought a repellent, unnecessary purpose.

By the 1860s their efforts had congealed into a battle for the vote, which is not to say that they ever abandoned their crusades for other civil rights. But like all radicals, the women of suffrage and the strategies they employed were grounded in their times and their place. They suspended their suffrage work during the Civil War for patriotic reasons, and after the war, the emancipation of slaves and the efforts by Congress during Reconstruction to amend the Constitution in order to protect black males influenced their approach. In what they called a new departure, suffrage leaders claimed the ballot as an entitlement of the explicit citizenship clause granted in the Fourteenth Amendment. Accordingly they tried to vote. In fact Susan B. Anthony actually cast a ballot in the presidential election of 1872, though it led to her prosecution for a felony.

In another legal case, the 1873 Supreme Court decision in Minor v. Happersett, a ruling as important to women’s rights as the Dred Scott decision was to those of blacks, voting was decoupled from citizenship. According to the Court, the Constitution did not confer suffrage on women. The United States had no voters; the right to extend or withhold the ballot rested entirely with the states. Females might be citizens of a special variety, but that did not mean they held political citizenship and could vote. For Stanton and Anthony such a ruling returned the United States to its pre-Civil War past when the states were sovereign. We really have no right as yet to call ourselves a nation, as the Supreme Court decision is in direct conflict with the idea of national unity, Stanton chided a Senate committee in 1878. Yet the implications of the ruling meant that suffragists must continue the tedious effort of securing the vote state-by-state.

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, while they never surrendered the conviction that voting was their natural right as Americans, suffrage leaders moved to another position: the vote was an instrument to change women’s lives and simultaneously to improve America. With the vote, women could end barriers at state universities; revise the marriage, child custody, and divorce laws that Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton believed enslaved them; and in the process clean up the neighborhoods and party politics of the United States. If the suffrage as a natural right argument implied women’s equality with men, the instrumentalist approach was freighted with the sensibility that women were different. This difference was usually developed in the context of women’s superior moral development. Woman, said Susan B. Anthony in 1876, needs the ballot as a protection to herself; it is a means and not an end. Until she gets it she will not be satisfied, nor will she be protected.

By the 1870s suffragists had developed two national suffrage organizations run by women — the American Woman Suffrage Association founded and led by Lucy Stone and the National Woman Suffrage Association founded and led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Two decades later these two associations merged into the National American Women Suffrage Association. But until Alice Paul’s National Woman’s Party in the twentieth century, both employed only the feeble weapons of outsiders denied the essential political tool in a democracy. Having no votes, they used their voices, pens, legs, and minds to petition, lecture, write pamphlets and articles, and increasingly lobby both state and congressional committees. They organized newspapers, most notably Stone’s Woman’s Journal, and they held the movement together through the friendships that turned them into sisters with a cause.

The suffragists fought against an opposition that at first paid them no attention. Gradually when the logic and justice of their cause moved through a previously closed door of opinion into the vestibule of acceptance, their opponents took notice and began to circumvent their efforts by legal and constitutional maneuvers. In time success led to an organized opposition of men and women, and suffrage became one of the few reforms ever rejected by some of those whose lives it would improve. To the chagrin of Stone, Stanton, Anthony, and Willard, critics made the case that women did not want the vote. Therefore, went this easy dismissal, why give it to them?

By 1900 only four states — all in the West and all accepting women’s suffrage because of special circumstances that had little to do with its justice or usefulness for women — gave women the right to vote. Another nineteen states had limited suffrage, permitting female voting only in elections for school boards and city officers. Given the attractions of this restricted ballot, it became an open question within the ranks — with Anthony always opposed — as to whether to accept the partial ballot or demand complete suffrage. No matter what the opportunity, during the nadir of the movement from 1885 to 1910, the suffragists traveled ceaselessly across the United States to increase the number of states where women could vote. Often they failed, but in the process they publicized their cause.

The federal nature of the U.S. government and the tangled jurisdictions over state and national authority complicated this endeavor. Suffragists had to engage the issue wherever it appeared — in South Dakota and Wyoming in 1890; in New York and Kansas in 1894; and back to both in the twentieth century. Ever optimistic, suffrage leaders always believed that suffrage was just over the horizon and if they lost in California as they did in a hotly contested referendum in 1896, then they would win somewhere, sometime. From 1896 to 1910 during the Progressive period when more acceptance might be assumed, they won no new suffrage states. Of six state referenda, all lost. It was indeed a time to try the patience of patriots’ souls, but the sisters reminded themselves that if suffrage did not come in their lifetime, it would come in that of their daughters and nieces.

Carrie Catt, one of the movement’s leaders, testified to the human exertion of this solely female crusade:

To get the word male out of the Constitution [required] fifty-six campaigns of referenda … 480 campaigns to get legislatures to submit suffrage amendments to voters; forty seven campaigns to get state constitutional conventions to write woman suffrage into state constitutions, 277 campaigns to get state party conventions to include woman suffrage planks, thirty campaigns to get presidential party conventions to adopt woman suffrage planks in party platforms and 19 campaigns with 19 successive congresses.

In every case, at least until a few Western states granted women the right to vote, they necessarily appealed to an all-male electorate. And after 1883 when Frances Willard pushed the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) to support suffrage, suffragists faced the powerful liquor lobby.

The difficulty of a state-by-state strategy encouraged support of a federal amendment. Introduced in 1878 and first debated on the floor of Congress in 1887, the Susan B. Anthony Amendment gradually became their cynosure, though Lucy Stone and her daughter Alice Stone Blackwell continued to focus on states. As Anthony had written in what she hoped would become the Sixteenth Amendment, but which, there being other national priorities, became the Nineteenth Amendment, 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. A notable weakness for the success of the amendment was the fact that suffragists had no core of supporters inside the halls of government. Both propertyless males in the early decades of the nineteenth century before universal white male voting was achieved by 1824 and male slaves in the 1860s had advocates in the halls of public power who shaped the opinions of others. For years women had only themselves and a stray senator or two.

It took a new generation of suffrage sisters to complete the work of what had begun in 1848. Alice Paul, a demure Quaker who learned her militancy in England as a student, with her friend Lucy Burns formed the National Woman’s Party (NWP) in 1915. Employing an array of confrontational tactics, she embarrassed Woodrow Wilson’s government during World War I when the president, in his idealistic fashion, held the banner of democracy aloft as a rallying point for postwar European governments as well as the explanation for American involvement. But as members of the NWP pointed out, Wilson was doing nothing to promote democracy in the United States. The comparison was a compelling one. Unlike her English counterparts, Paul did not throw stones or burn golf courses. But she did picket the White House and after being arrested and force-fed, she provided the suffrage movement with a galvanizing episode of heroism. In 1919, after Wilson capitulated and gave his support to the Anthony Amendment, it passed Congress. By August 1920 it had been ratified by three-quarters of the states. Approximately twenty-six million American women were enfranchised in time for the presidential election of 1920.

What follows is the private and public story of five women — Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frances Willard, and Alice Paul. The intention is not to engage in hero worship, but rather to recover the lost lives of these sisters of suffrage and through that recovery to understand why the suffrage movement developed when and how it did. Surely if we know these women better, they will deservedly become part of the American political tradition.

1

The Martyr and the Missionary: Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell

By 1855 Lucy Stone had resisted the pleading of her suitor, Henry Blackwell, for three years. Ever since their chance meeting in Cincinnati when she had tried to cash a payment voucher from one of her lectures at his hardware store, he had pursued her — by letter, by attendance at the annual women’s conventions (where Lucy, in her lover’s eyes, always delivered the best speech), and once by arriving, unannounced, at her family’s farm in western Massachusetts, where he waited several days reading Emerson before she returned from a lecture tour. Let me be your friend and write to you occasionally, Blackwell implored, sending her long, engaging letters addressed to Miss Lucy. Love me if you can, he reiterated, adopting patient adoration as his courting strategy. You may forget me if you will. I shall not forget you.¹

By the 1850s Lucy Stone was one of the most famous women in the United States. Success as an antislavery lecturer in the late 1840s had reinforced her personal commitment to what she capitalized as The Cause. At first Lucy had meant by that the abolitionist efforts of the American Antislavery Association to create a thorough discontent among Americans about slavery and the circumstances of millions of slaves sighing for freedom. But to the chagrin of antislavery leaders like Frederick Douglass and Samuel May, Lucy increasingly inserted stories about the woman’s plight in her speeches until she was told that during her lecture tours she must stick to antislaveryism on the weekends and save women’s issues for her less well-attended lectures on weeknights. In 1854, on the front page of his newspaper, Douglass accused her of being willing to say to her antislavery principles, stand aside while I deal out truth less offensive. By no means intimidated by such censure, Lucy responded that she was a woman before she was an abolitionist.²

My life, she informed Henry Blackwell in a letter that might have chilled a less ardent suitor’s passion, will be an associative life … For myself I see no choice but constant conflict … made necessary by the horrid wrongs of society, by circumstances which it will be impossible to change until long after the grave has laid its cold colors over those who now live. It was the martyr’s stance — her own suffering increased her identification with those whom she would free — and it became Lucy’s lifelong reform habit. The objects I seek to attain will not be attained until long after my body has gone to ashes. And like all martyrs, Lucy Stone’s ideals were imbedded in personal history.³

Born in 1818, on her father’s farm in the Massachusetts Berkshires — the eighth of nine children — she had nowhere observed the pleasant intimacies of a loving marriage, or the joys of parents in shaping their children’s futures, or even the domestic security of the middle-class home that, romanticized as the female’s separate sphere, served as the essential enterprise for American women. Instead this third daughter remembered her mother’s plaintive and oft-repeated wish that Lucy and her younger sister, Sarah, had been boys. A woman’s lot is so hard, repeated Hannah Stone. Lucy had come to agree, as she watched her mother suffer from a drunken husband’s abuse, the birth of nine children followed by the death of four, and the incessant domestic drudgery of women’s work on an isolated farm. She had seen her mother beg for pin money, not for herself, but rather to buy a ribbon for Lucy or material for her older sister Rhoda’s school dress. I wish your life could have been happier, Lucy once wrote her mother, as she remembered how ugly her father had been about giving money to the women of the household.⁴

By the age of twelve, Lucy had absorbed a sense of duty that obliged her to run the Stone household when her mother’s health failed — to milk the eight cows that were her mother’s responsibility, to do Monday’s washing, Tuesday’s ironing, Wednesday’s butter making, Thursday’s cleaning, Friday’s weaving, and Saturday’s baking in the routinized cycle that ended only in Sunday’s brief respite. It was, as she later acknowledged, a perverse childhood.

Lucy’s father, Francis Stone, was a hard man — as durable (he outlived his wife by four years) and impenetrable as his last name. On the nights when he and his friends drank rum and hard cider in the family parlor, Lucy and her sisters learned to avoid his laying on the slaps, especially when he ordered them down to the cellar to bring up yet another bottle of liquor.⁵ And later when Stone turned to the church to stop his drinking, he refused to pray with Lucy. In this family there would be no joyful conversion of the kind popularized across the United States during the religious revivals of the Great Awakening. He told me he would not pray, that he felt like the lions when Daniel was in the den, his mouth was shut … and when I asked him if he thought it was the angel of the Lord that shut his mouth, he did not know what it was. Never would the proud Francis Stone bare his soul to the daughter who challenged his beliefs on the position of women.⁶

While Hannah Stone and her daughters had no context for any improvement in their circumstances, Francis Stone did, in the way of fathers whose ancestors had fought in the French and Indian Wars, the American Revolution, and in Stone’s case, Shays’ Rebellion. He was ambitious for his sons and sought for them something beyond his own life of relentless toil, first in a tannery and later on the farm outside of West Brookfield where he kept chickens, cows, and pigs and raised alfalfa and oats. Although he had little formal schooling himself, he paid for his sons’ education in Maine and later their college tuitions at Amherst; he subscribed to the Massachusetts Spy and the Antislavery Standard so that they might envision the world beyond the rocky promontory of Coy’s Hill. There his 145-acre property ended, though neither the view nor his expectations for his sons did. In his will he left his land and money disproportionately to his sons, for he expected his daughters to be supported by their husbands. Sarah, his youngest daughter, was outraged by this favoritism, but by 1864, when her father died, Lucy did not expect otherwise.⁷

For years the rebellious Lucy clashed with her father, even as she tried to gain his attention by good works, serving as a surrogate housekeeper, doing well in school, and even helping to repair his homemade shoes. There was only one will in my family and it was my father’s, Lucy Stone remembered, and it was a will enforced by insults and physical force. For a lifetime she blushed at the memory of his cruel comparison of her round face in its heaviness, rough texture, and shape to a blacksmith’s apron. It would light no sparks, he said, wondering aloud whether his daughter with the large mole above her upper lip, unlike her pretty sister Sarah, would ever find a husband among the local boys who were the only ones she knew.⁸

Lucy retaliated. When the congregation of the West Brookfield Congregational Church debated the issue of whether women should speak in public as the South Carolina-born abolitionists Angelina and Sarah Grimké were doing in their lecture tours, Lucy embarrassed her father by insisting on voting, as no other woman did. Again and again she raised her hand for the affirmative, until the pastor finally rebuked her. Women might be church members, Deacon Henshaw instructed, but they were not voting members. In the end the congregation voted to accept the pastoral letter written by the leaders of the Congregational Church that condemned Angelina Grimké’s lecturing. Women violated biblical edict if they spoke in public. The reason given was that the character of any woman who spoke in public became unnatural — too independent and overshadowing of the elm. Later when Lucy lectured in the West Brookfield meeting hall, her father, humiliated that any daughter of his would speak in public and even more heretically on the rights of women, buried his face in his hands. Still it pleased Lucy that a father who once called her a slut had come at all.⁹

When Lucy proposed to her parents that she attend Oberlin College in faraway Ohio, Francis Stone refused to help. So she began a campaign to pay her own way, teaching in the district school for sixteen dollars a month, selling chestnuts and berries, and sewing shoes in the piecework household economy that still prevailed in western Massachusetts. Sometimes she took one of her mother’s homemade cheeses to market and bargained for the highest price. It took nine years to save the necessary seventy dollars for the first year’s room and tuition at Oberlin, but the process educated Lucy Stone in the uses of patience and determination. Having arrived at college in the summer of 1843 after a lonely five-hundred-mile journey by railroad to Buffalo, and then by steamer across Lake Erie to Cleveland (where she slept on deck), and finally by coach to the small town of Oberlin, Ohio, twenty-five-year-old Lucy proudly reported that, in the words of Father I passed muster.¹⁰

But the battle was not over; indeed, for Lucy Stone, the struggle never ended. Now she must find the means to pay her tuition and board for her remaining years at Oberlin, though her crowded daily schedule required that she rise at four in the morning, attend recitations of Latin, Greek, and algebra after breakfast, write compositions in the afternoon, and study in the evening. Her father was so impressed with her hard work that he agreed to a fifteen-dollar loan the next year, with the stipulation that it must be promptly repaid after Lucy graduated. With this in mind, on Saturdays Lucy cleaned homes for three cents an hour and taught reading and writing to a class of African American men, some former slaves, for twelve and a half cents an hour. Her students, at first, were outraged that their teacher was a woman.¹¹

Since its founding in 1833 Oberlin College had pioneered interracial coeducation, awarding degrees to both white women (three had graduated before Lucy’s arrival) and African American men. The arrival in 1835 of a group of refugee students and faculty protesting the stifling of antislavery views at the Lane Seminary in Cincinnati reinforced the institution’s commitment to abolitionism. Its faculty promoted the views of perfectionists who believed that man’s sins could be atoned for by conversion experiences inspired by Christ’s death on the cross. They also promoted the view that Oberlin students must dedicate themselves to the hard duty of improving self and society.¹² As Lucy wrote her sister, you never heard such scorching, plain, personal, political preaching as we get there. Individuals are called out by name. The effect was to inculcate an approach to reform based on changing the minds of individuals who would be converted in public meetings by listening to inspired orators and prophets foretelling a better world. Thereafter the wayward would read propaganda and follow the example of ministers and reformers. Such were the means Lucy used