Hope Emerges

     While the fight over the Fifteenth Amendment was being waged in the east, the western states and territories were more favorable to women’s suffrage.

     The first territorial legislature of the Wyoming Territory granted full voting rights to women in 1869. On September 6, 1870, Louisa Ann Swain of Laramie, Wyoming became the first woman to cast a vote in a general election.

Louisa Swain

In 1890, the U.S. Congress demanded Wyoming rescind the right of women to vote as a condition of statehood. The Wyoming legislature responded in a telegram: “We will remain out of the Union one hundred years rather than come in without the women.” Congress gave in. Wyoming became the 44th state and the first state in which women had full voting rights. 

     Utah had a more turbulent history in relation to women’s suffrage. The territory was home to many Mormon communities that practiced polygamy. Politicians opposed to the practice of polygamy believed if women were given the vote it would help to end the practice. On the other hand, many Mormon men supported voting rights for women to prove to the nation their wives were not oppressed by polygamy.

     In 1870, the Utah territory passed legislation that enfranchised women. This lasted until 1887, when the United States Congress passed the Edmunds-Tucker Anti-Polygamy Act. The act placed restrictions on the Mormon Church, including disincorporating it and seizing its property. It required individuals to take an anti-polygamy oath in order to vote, hold public office or serve on juries. The Edmunds-Tucker Act also disenfranchised all women in the Utah Territory. Both Mormon and non-Mormon women formed suffrage organizations.

      When Utah Territory applied for statehood in 1895, women convinced politicians to include women’s suffrage in the new state Constitution. When Utah became a state in January of 1896, women were again legally able to vote.

     Meanwhile, in the rest of the country, women continued to fight for the right to vote. In a piecemeal array of states, territories, counties and towns, they won different configurations of partial voting rights. Usually, those rights allowed women to vote only for local officials such as school board members, city officers and/or county representatives. But in most of the country, woman were still excluded from participating in elections. 

      In 1872, Susan B. Anthony, voted in the election in Rochester, New York, although the state had not granted suffrage rights to women. Her sisters and eleven other women also voted in the election. They argued that constitutional language gave them the legal right to cast ballots. They were subsequently arrested for voting. Anthony was held on $1000 bail ($21,157 in today’s dollars), the rest were held on $500 bail each. The following year, Anthony was denied a trial by jury and lost her case. She was fined $100 plus court costs.

      The U.S. Congress first introduced a suffrage amendment in 1878. Four years later, the House and Senate appointed committees on woman suffrage. Both favored votes for women. Two years after the favorable reports, the U.S. House of Representatives debated woman suffrage. In 1886, the suffrage amendment finally reached the floor of the U.S. Senate. It was defeated.

  

     As women received partial voting rights in some places, they began running for public offices. Many women won positions as school board members, county clerks, state legislators, judges, and other local officials. In 1884, Belva Lockwood, the first female to be admitted to the bar of the U.S. Supreme Court, even ran for president. Although she lost handily, women had started to gain political clout. But the fight for suffrage was far from over. 

Previous installments:

Voting in Colonial America:

 https://prairierosepublications.blogspot.com/2020/01/voting-in-colonial-america.html

NOW YOU CAN VOTE, NOW YOU CAN’T:

https://prairierosepublications.blogspot.com/2020/02/now-you-can-vote-now-you-cant.html

The Fight Begins:

https://prairierosepublications.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-fight-begins.html

A Rupture in the Cause
https://prairierosepublications.blogspot.com/2020/04/a-rupture-in-cause.html

Ann Markim

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A Rupture in The Cause

     After ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, it quickly became evident that its wording was too weak to encourage many of the states (states still controlled suffrage eligibility) to encourage black enfranchisement. Congress then designed the Fifteenth Amendment to address this issue directly. It explicitly forbade the states to deny the right to vote to anyone on the basis of ‘race, color or previous condition of servitude.’ It also gave Congress the power to pass any necessary enforcement legislation. The federal government did not specifically define who was allowed to vote, but the amendment specified who could not be prevented from voting if conditions set by the state were met. African American men were protected in this amendment. Women were not.

    Frederick Douglass and other former abolition leaders backed away from their support of woman suffrage to concentrate on fight for black male suffrage. This caused a serious rift between the two movements. It also caused a split within the women’s rights activists. Susan B. Anthony and her supporters wanted women to be included with black men. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton began publishing a women’s rights newspaper called The Revolution. Lucy Stone and her followers supported the amendment as it was, believing that women would win the vote soon.

     In February 1869, Congress passed the amendment, enfranchising black men but not women.

     At a meeting of the American Equal Rights Association in May, Stanton voiced her sense of betrayal by longstanding male abolitionist allies, and her belief that "educated" women like herself were more worthy of the vote than men who had just emerged from slavery. She and Frederik Douglass had a public argument about the relative importance of black man versus woman suffrage. Stanton, Anthony and their supporters walked out of the meeting and formed the National Woman Suffrage Association.

     That same year, Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe formed the American Woman Suffrage Association, which maintained its ties with the abolitionists and the leadership of the Republican Party. They expected to get women’s suffrage enacted soon after black male suffrage had been fully inscribed in the Constitution.

     In 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified.

     

     Afterward, the American Woman Suffrage Association focused on winning changes in state constitutions, counting on winning over a majority of male voters.

     Meanwhile, the National Woman Suffrage Association centered its efforts on the national Constitution. They doubted that an additional federal amendment would be passed but sought a way to base women’s suffrage in the Constitution’s existing provisions.

     For the next twenty years, these two competing organizations fought for influence and for woman suffrage. Neither group suspected it would be fifty years before women finally won the right to vote.

Coming next month:  Hope Emerges 

Previous installments:

Voting in Colonial America:

 https://prairierosepublications.blogspot.com/2020/01/voting-in-colonial-america.html

NOW YOU CAN VOTE, NOW YOU CAN’T:

https://prairierosepublications.blogspot.com/2020/02/now-you-can-vote-now-you-cant.html

The Fight Begins:

https://prairierosepublications.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-fight-begins.html 

Ann Markim

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The Fight Begins

After New Jersey disenfranchised women in 1807, no women in the United States had voting rights. But organized efforts to win women’s suffrage did not begin for quite some time. Long before women were fighting for the vote, they were fighting for human rights.

The fight for women’s rights has its roots in the Abolitionist Movement. In the 1830s, many women formed and joined female antislavery associations. Although Angelina and Sarah Grimke had been raised on a slave-owning plantation in South Carolina, the sisters were among the first women to speak publicly against slavery. In 1836, Angelina published a pamphlet, An Appeal to Christian Women of the South, calling on all southern women to join the effort to abolish slavery. This did not go over well, and South Carolina leaders threatened to put Angelina in prison if she returned home.    

                                                                   

The Grimke Sisters

The next year, the General Association of Congregational Ministers of Massachusetts issued a pastoral letter, primarily directed at the Grimke sisters, denouncing women preachers and reformers. This epistle prompted the Grimkes and other female activists to crusade for women’s rights in addition to abolition of slavery.

In the same year, at age 17, Susan B. Anthony collected anti-slavery petitions. She had grown up in a Quaker family that was strongly committed to social equality. Anthony became the New York state agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1856, while she was active in the women’s rights movement.

Anthony wasn’t alone in fighting for women’s rights and against slavery. In 1840, Elizabeth Cady married reformer Henry Stanton and immediately went to London to attend the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention. Upon her arrival, she was shocked to learn that women were barred from attending the assembly. She joined with Lucretia Mott and other women in objecting to their exclusion on account of their sex.

This was just the beginning for Stanton. At the first Women’s Rights convention in the United States held in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York, she proposed a long list of reforms to protect women and to give them equal rights. Among these rights, was equal suffrage, an idea so radical that it spurred heated debate. In the end, inclusion of women’s suffrage was adopted, and this convention is often seen as the birthplace of the movement for Woman Suffrage (as it was originally called). A report of this convention was published as the Declaration of Sentiments.

Although Woman Suffrage was now on the agenda, the fight for women’s rights was much broader. And, over the next two decades, the cause became inextricably linked to temperance and abolition of slavery.

In 1851, Susan B. Anthony met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and they formed a partnership for social reform that would last for the rest of their lives. The following year, they founded the New York Women's State Temperance Society after Anthony was not allowed to speak at a temperance conference because she was female. At the time, women were considered the property of their husbands. Consequently, women had no legal recourse when their husbands beat or abused them. Because such abuse commonly occurred when men were drunk, abstinence was seen as a way to curb intoxication and thus make women safer.

When the Civil War began in 1861, most women put aside women’s rights and woman suffrage activities to help the war effort. However, Anthony and Stanton continued their work for social justice. In 1863, they organized the Women’s Loyal National League to work for a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery. The league accomplished the largest petition drive in United States history up to that time, collecting nearly 400,000 signatures in support of the abolition of slavery.

Anthony and Stanton’s efforts intensified after the war. In 1866, they joined with Lucy Stone and Frederick Douglass to establish the American Equal Rights Association in 1866. This group campaigned for equal rights both for women and African Americans. 

                                       

Congress introduced the Fourteenth Amendment, extending the liberties and rights granted by the Bill of Rights to former slaves. This amendment included the first use of the word male in the Constitution, defining citizens as “male.” Women’s rights activists strongly objected and petitioned Congress to change the language. Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote, “If that word ‘male’ be inserted, it will take us a century at least to get it out.”

The amendment passed Congress and was sent to the states for ratification with the qualification of ‘male’ intact. This posed a dilemma for the advocates for women’s rights. Did they support the rights of freedman citizenship at the expense of their own cause? Although they objected to the exclusion of women, they stopped short of calling for non-ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment.

 In 1868, the fourteenth amendment was ratified.

Coming next month: The women’s suffrage movement crystalizes.

Previous installments:

Voting in Colonial America:

 https://prairierosepublications.blogspot.com/2020/01/voting-in-colonial-america.html

NOW YOU CAN VOTE, NOW YOU CAN’T:

https://prairierosepublications.blogspot.com/2020/02/now-you-can-vote-now-you-cant.html

Ann Markim

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Facebook

    Buy Links:      Paperback at Amazon    Amazon Kindle

NOW YOU CAN VOTE, NOW YOU CAN’T

In researching the history of women voting in America, most references identify the beginning of the movement to fight for “woman suffrage,” as it was called by the suffragists, as the 1848 Women’s Rights convention in Seneca, New York. Consequently, I was surprised to learn that the first legally recorded woman’s vote occurred nearly twenty years before the Declaration of Independence.

So, what happened?

On October 30, 1756, Lydia Taft’s vote was recorded in the official records of the Uxbridge Town Meeting. This was an open meeting of the village of Uxbridge, Massachusetts, and the first record of an official vote by a woman in America.

While the colonies remained independent entities, each was free to handle decisions regarding enfranchisement on its own. This all changed in July, 1776, with the Declaration of Independence.

After the formal break from England, each colony wrote a new, formal constitution. Many of them attempted to reform their voting procedures, with moves to enfranchising all free, adult taxpaying males. Vermont even granted suffrage to all adult males. Some eliminated religious tests. And those who had originally given women the right to vote withdrew it one by one.

In 1777, women lost the right to vote in New York.

In 1784, women lost the right to vote in New Hampshire.

In 1787, the U.S. Constitutional Convention places voting qualifications in the hands of the states. After that, women lost the right to vote in all states except New Jersey.

New Jersey’s new 1776 state constitution granted the right to vote to "all inhabitants” of legal age (21 years) who had lived in their county for at least one year and owned at least 50 English pounds worth of property. This enfranchisement of women was apparently accidental, although the state’s constitutional convention was held in secret so no one outside the participants knew for sure. New Jersey voters (presumably only men) ratified their constitution.

It is not clear how many, if any, women voted under this constitution, but a state election law passed in 1790 referred to voters in terms of “he or she.” There was little, if any, controversy over ‘woman suffrage’ in New Jersey until 1797. Then a political contest intervened and for the first time in the United States, a large number of women voted in an election.

In a bitter battle over a seat in the state legislature, William Crane from Elizabeth, New Jersey, ran against John Condict from Newark. Condict was a Jeffersonian Republican. Crane was a Federalist. Even though the Federalists turned out a large number of women to vote for Crane, Condict won by a narrow margin.

This ignited a fiery controversy over women’s suffrage and whether or not the New Jersey Constitution really intended for women to vote. One newspaper sarcastically referred to “government in petticoats.” Some contended that slaves, children and foreigners weren’t included, so women shouldn’t be either. Others argued that single women and widows who owned the required amount of property should be enfranchised. Since all property in a marriage was considered to be owned by the husband, married women were automatically excluded.

According to the Constitutional Rights Foundation:

In 1806, Newark and Elizabeth again faced off at the polls, this time over the site of a new county courthouse. During three days of voting, partisans from both towns used every legal and illegal device to gather the most votes. Men and boys, white and black, citizens and aliens, residents and non-residents, voted (often many times). Women and girls, married and single, with and without property, joined the election frenzy. Finally, males dressed up as females and voted one more time.

Newark, with 1,600 qualified voters, counted over 5,000 votes; Elizabeth, with 1,000 legal voters, counted more than 2,200 votes. Although Newark claimed victory, the voting was so blatantly fraudulent that the state legislature canceled the election.

In 1807, women lost the right to vote in New Jersey. At that point in history, women could no longer vote in any of the United States.

This series will be continued in my March blog.

If you missed the first blog of this series, find it here:

Voting in Colonial America:

 https://prairierosepublications.blogspot.com/2020/01/voting-in-colonial-america.html

Ann Markim

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SERIES OF SMALL THINGS

Post by Doris McCraw
writing as Angela Raines

I came across a quote by Vincent Van Gogh that gave me a lot to think about. "Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together."

This year 2020 is the anniversary of the 19th amendment that guaranteed women the constitutional right to vote. The passage of the amendment was a series of events over a number of years by women and men. In Colorado, in 1893 women were given the same right via a referendum to the state constitution, the first state to do so.

As we traverse this year, there are probably so many things we want to do. Of course, writing the 'great novel' is a wonderful idea, but it doesn't just fly from our mind to the page. It takes small bits that add up to the whole.

Before I had my first story published, other than a suspense short in a regional magazine, I had a daily practice of writing seventeen syllables daily, that went to five days a week. This led to over one thousand haiku that were posted along with a photo I took. 

Rosita Colorado in Custer County (setting for the upcoming novel)

I am now working on a novel, and at least six days a week I work on it. Sometimes I'll add a thousand words, sometimes fifty. Each word leads me to the goal of finishing the story.

The point is, to get to where we wish to go requires we start the journey and add that 'series of small things' to reach our destination. Remember all the small steps that led to the beginning of the suffrage movement. Each of those steps led to the next and next. Colorado not only had women doctors who came to set up a practice here due to the healthy climate but for many, it was to help women win the right to vote.

Take your great ideas and build them step by step. Write those stories and follow those dreams. The year is just starting and who knows where your steps will lead.

I recently updated my Amazon author page biography on both the US and UK sites. A small step, but they do add up. updated biography

Doris Gardner-McCraw -

Author, Speaker, Historian-specializing in
Colorado and Women's History

Angela Raines - author: Where Love & History Meet

Books: Angela Raines Books

Voting in Colonial America

Not only is 2020 an election year, it is also the 100^th anniversary U.S. women winning the right to vote. In recognition of this milestone, I will be writing a series of blogs on the history of the vote. This is the first one.

In 1607, the first permanent English colony in North America was founded at Jamestown, Virginia. From that time on, voting rights have been all over the map – literally.

As the colonies were established, common English beliefs about race, gender, judgement, wealth, religion, and property ownership influenced who was considered eligible to vote. There was much variability across time and place. These beliefs did not manifest as universal suffrage in any of the colonies. In some places, free blacks, Native Americans and/or women who owned property could vote, but these were the exceptions.

“Bacon’s Rebellion” resulted in far-reaching and long-lasting changes in the social order and enfranchisement. In 1676, Nathaniel Bacon led a group of disgruntled frontiersmen, indentured servants, free blacks and enslaved people in a revolt against the colonial governor, Sir William Berkeley. Bacon alleged that the governor was corrupt and protected the Indians for his own benefit 

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NPS image

After chasing Berkley from Jamestown, and eventually burning the Virginia colonial capitol, forces sent from England ultimately suppressed the rebellion.

The government was put under stronger royal control. Property requirements for voting were restored. Indentured servitude was eliminated, while hardening the codes for African slavery and restricting the rights of free blacks. This was done in an effort to divide the races and prevent coalitions that could lead to future uprisings. Within a few decades, all colonies had enacted similar laws preventing enslaved persons and free blacks from voting.  

 Colonies with large Protestant majorities often denied the vote to Catholics and Jews. After 70 years of the Maryland Toleration Act requiring religious tolerance, Maryland barred Catholics from voting in 1718. Nearly three decades later, in 1737, the New York General Assembly disenfranchised Jews. At that time, four colonies prevented Jews and five prevented Catholics from voting.  

By 1732, each of the 13 colonies had imposed some type of restrictions requiring voters to be landowners, taxpayers, and/or men who owned a substantial amount of personal property.

Voters in colonial times often had to travel long distances to a courthouse or other polling place, which meant incurring expenses for food and lodging while losing time from earning their livings. Presumably, this discouraged turnout, especially of rural voters. However, election days became social occasions in many places. Amidst much eating and drinking, the qualified voters would gather and designate their preferences by standing or voice votes, making each person’s choices public. Some colonies published lists showing how each person had voted.

More formal voting procedures were enacted in some colonies. Charles S. Sydnor described Virginia’s practices in his book, Gentlemen Freeholders: Political Practices in Washington's Virginia, this way:

 As each freeholder came before the sheriff, his name was called out in a loud voice, and the sheriff inquired how he would vote. The freeholder replied by giving the name of his preference. The appropriate clerk then wrote down the voter's name, the sheriff announced it as enrolled, and often the candidate for whom he had voted arose, bowed, and publicly thanked him.

Initially only a few colonies used some form of ballot, but over time, secret paper ballots replaced public voting.

To be continued in my February blog.

Ann Markim

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The Liberty Bell and the Justice Bell

     “ … With liberty and justice for all.”

If you are a citizen of the United States or attended American public schools, you’ve probably repeated these words hundreds of times when saying the Pledge of Allegiance.

 

Nearly every American, and many people around the world are familiar with the Liberty Bell, but how many know about the Justice Bell?

Here is a brief story about the bells that symbolize two of our pillars of freedom – Liberty and Justice.

The Liberty Bell

In 1752, the Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly commissioned a tower bell to hang in the new State House in Philadelphia. The firm of Lester and Pack in London cast the bell with the requested lettering:

Proclaim LIBERTY throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants thereof Lev. XXV X
By Order of the ASSEMBLY of the Province of PENSYLVANIA [sic] for the State House in Philada

In those days, the spelling on Pennsylvania with one ‘n’ was widely accepted. ‘Philada’ was short for Philadelphia.

The Assembly was not pleased with the quality of the bell as it arrived from England because it cracked the first time it was rung. They had it recast twice by John Pass and John Stow of Philadelphia before its sound was deemed satisfactory. Their last names appear on the bell.

The bell was initially used to call lawmakers to legislative sessions and to alert citizens about public meetings and proclamations. Weeks before the British occupied Philadelphia in October 1777, the Liberty Bell and the city’s other bells were removed from the city and hidden. This was done prevent them from being melted down and used for cannon.

Philadelphia served as the nation's capital from 1790 to 1800. During that time, the bell called the state legislature into session and notified voters to turn in their ballots. It was also rung to commemorate Washington's birthday and celebrate the Fourth of July among other commemorations until the crack silenced it in the early 1840s.

In the early nineteenth century, the bell became the symbol for abolitionists. It was first called "the Liberty Bell" in an 1835 article that appeared in the New York Anti-Slavery Society's journal, Anti-Slavery Record. It has been know as the Liberty Bell ever since.

The Liberty Bell is now housed in Philadelphia at the Liberty Bell Center in the Independence National Historical Park.

The Justice Bell 

In 1915, a prominent member of the Pennsylvania Women’s Suffrage Association, Katherine Wentworth Ruschenberger, commissioned a company in Troy, New York to cast of a near replica of the Liberty Bell for promoting the cause of women’s suffrage. This replica became know primarily as the ‘Justice Bell,’ but it is also known as the ‘Suffrage Bell’ and the 'Women’s Liberty Bell.’

The Justice Bell doesn’t have a crack and its inscription is slightly different:

Establish JUSTICE
Proclaim LIBERTY Throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants Thereof

To symbolize how women were being silenced by being unable to vote, the bell's clapper was chained to its side so it couldn’t ring.

The Justice Bell was loaded onto the back of a modified pickup truck and taken on a tour of all counties in Pennsylvania (67). The truck also carried a sign proclaiming “Votes for Women.” It also appeared in other states in support of the cause.

Wherever it went, the Justice Bell was greeted with dignitaries, parades and marching bands. Huge crowds gathered to see it, especially in large cities. On October 22, 1915, just days before Pennsylvania’s November referendum on women’s suffrage, the bell appeared a parade of approximately 8000 people in support of votes for women. Despite this show of support, the referendum was defeated.

After Congress passed the 19^th Amendment, the Justice Bell toured other states to make people aware of the amendment which, if ratified. would give women throughout the United States the right to vote.

Thirty-six states needed to approve the amendment for it to become law. On August 18, 1920, the Tennessee General Assembly voted on adding the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. By one vote, Tennessee became the thirty-sixth state to ratify the Amendment and it became law.

The Justice Bell finally rang for the first time on September 25, 1920 at a ceremony held on Independence Square in Philadelphia. Katherine Wentworth Ruschenberger led the celebration attended by a large crowd. The bell rang 48 times, once for every state in the union in 1920, symbolizing that women throughout the country had finally won the right to vote – 72 years after the suffrage movement began.

The Justice Bell is on permanent display at the Valley Forge National Park in the Washington Memorial Chapel.

Ann Markim

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