For a country that prides itself on its democracy, the United States has forced a lot of its citizens to fight for the privilege of voting. August 18th marks the centenary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which declares that the right to vote “shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” That milestone is sometimes described as having “given” women the right to vote. It wasn’t a gift; it was a hard-won victory on the part of suffragists who’d been agitating for it for more than seventy years, on the basis of their common humanity with men.
Even in the decade before the amendment was passed, its ratification was by no means a certainty. Though women had the vote in a handful of Western states, elsewhere in the country state after state turned down women’s suffrage. The antis, who fretted that women would be irredeemably sullied by the rough-and-tumble of politics (and would push issues such as temperance and wage equality), included women as well as men.
It took a surge of inventive, audacious, confrontational protests, inspired in part by militant British suffragists, to reënergize the movement. In January, 1917, the National Woman’s Party, led by the single-minded young suffragist Alice Paul, began a campaign of civil disobedience. For the first time, protesters picketed the White House. Woodrow Wilson, a Southern Democrat and patrician racist who had been reëlected President the previous year, had no interest in supporting a federal amendment granting women the vote, but tolerated the provocation for a while. After the United States entered the First World War, though, the suffragists started carrying signs comparing Wilson to the Kaiser, and his patience ran out. In June, the police began arresting the protesters en masse. Convicted of offenses such as “disorderly conduct” and “obstructing sidewalk traffic,” they were imprisoned, in harsh and filthy conditions, at the Occoquan Workhouse, in Lorton, Virginia.
When the women were denied recognition as political prisoners, they went on hunger strike, and guards subjected them to horrific force-feedings. The more moderate suffragists continued to lobby male politicians, for the most part politely and effectively. But when Congress finally passed the Nineteenth Amendment, and the states ratified it, that victory was largely due to the new breed of suffragist who simply would not stand down. “People who had never before thought of suffrage for women had to think about it,” a jailed picketer recalled, “if only to the extent of objecting to the way in which we asked for it.”
In the Presidential election of 1920, and for some years after, women did not vote in the expected large numbers. It was easy to blame them for a deficiency of civic spirit, and plenty of people did, including former suffragists. But there were structural forces at work. Local election officials often regarded the influx of new voters as a burden, and imposed poll taxes and literacy tests. Black women, in particular, faced obstacles that made voting risky and difficult, if not impossible.
The disenfranchisement of Black women was a cause that Alice Paul and the newly formed League of Women Voters should have taken up—not least because African-Americans had been key figures in the drive for female suffrage, dating back to Frederick Douglass’s enthusiastic participation in the Seneca Falls Convention, in 1848, and Sojourner Truth’s “Ar’n’t I a Woman?” speech, three years later, up through the N.A.A.C.P.’s advocacy for the cause, starting in the nineteen-tens. Yet when Black women’s groups appealed to Paul for help, in 1921, she refused them, saying that the problem was a “race issue,” not a “women’s issue.”
Some suffragists had hoped that women would consolidate into a coherent voting bloc, but this never happened. Women had their own crosscutting interests of class, race, and political and religious beliefs. They disagreed even on so-called women’s issues, such as abortion. But the past four years have been remarkably effective at turning women into a more united force. The historian Lara Putnam and the sociologist Theda Skocpol, who have studied the unprecedented mobilization of suburban college-educated women, most of them Democrats, since the Women’s March in 2017, call it a “national pattern of mutually energizing local engagement” that is shifting the political landscape.
The gender gap that first appeared during Ronald Reagan’s Presidency has widened into a chasm since the election of Donald Trump: according to the Pew Research Center, fifty-six per cent of women now say that they are Democrats or lean that way, versus thirty-eight per cent who identify as or lean Republican. Black women, who tend to vote more reliably than other groups and who cast their ballots overwhelmingly for Democrats, played a crucial role in the 2018 midterms and in the 2020 Presidential primaries, especially in the South.
Even among the white working-class voters who anchor Trump’s base, support for the President has fallen among women—from sixty-one per cent to fifty per cent, according to a new ABC News/Washington Post poll. (His support among white men is as high as it was in 2016.) A year ago, the Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg conducted focus groups of working-class voters in Maine and Wisconsin. According to the Los Angeles Times, the resulting report concluded that women who had pulled away from Trump did so because“his ego makes him impulsive and a bully, healthcare remains unaffordable, he’s dividing the country, he doesn’t care about the working class, only the 1 percent, he’s corrupt and out for himself and he doesn’t respect women.” (And that was before his mishandling of the pandemic.) Voting out of office a President whom even former supporters describe that way—and who seeks to discourage voter turnout and crush protests aimed at advancing human rights—would be a better way to mark the struggle that women endured to win the franchise than any reverent commemoration.
In a powerful speech on the House floor last week, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez denounced the language that she had been subjected to by a Republican colleague, Ted Yoho. He had called her, among other things, “disgusting” and “out of your freaking mind.” In some ways, the kind of verbal abuse she cited isn’t so different from the denigration heaped on women who protested for the vote. In 1918, the Times editorialized that women being jailed for “suffrage obsession” ought more properly to be put in the hands of psychiatrists. How grateful we are to those women and their obsession now. ♦
A previous version of this article misspelled the National Woman’s Party.
