Jo Freeman's Book Review of The Women’s Suffrage Movement by Sally Roesch Wagner

The apotheosis of suffrage. Drawing by George Yost Coffin, published in the Washington Post 1896 Jan. 26

The apotheosis of suffrage. Drawing by George Yost Coffin, published in the Washington Post 1896 Jan. 26. View the original fresco on the Architect of the Capitol website; Library of Congress

By Jo Freeman

Review of

The Women’s Suffrage Movement

Edited by Sally Roesch Wagner

Foreword by Gloria Steinem

New York: Penguin Classics, 2019; 560 pages

By the time the 19th Amendment was added to the US Constitution on August 26, 1920, there were only eight states in which no woman could vote for anything. The struggle to remove "male" as a requirement to vote was long and incremental, though it is often celebrated as a single achievement.

Sally Roesch Wagner has devoted her life to understanding this "journey of courage and cowardice; of principles and capitulation; of allies and racists." In this collection of dozens of reports and statements from primary sources, she allows the participants to speak for themselves.

Her first section shows how women lost the vote before they gained it. Her documents argue that "women had full suffrage in Massachusetts from 1691 to 1780." In many places, ownership of property was a sufficient qualification to vote, regardless of sex or race. While few women or blacks owned enough property to use the franchise, some did. As colonies became states, they restricted the vote to white men. The last to do so was New Jersey, in 1807, in retaliation for women almost defeating a candidate by voting as a bloc.

The Woman Suffrage Movement is usually dated from the adoption of a Declaration of Sentiments at the 1848 Woman’s Rights Convention when suffrage was just one of many issues. The earliest document in this collection comes from 1836. It equates marriage to slavery because entering that state brought woman under the absolute control and domination of another human being — her husband. The alternative was to starve since the opportunities for a single woman to earn her own living were few and far between.

Many of these primary sources show how the Woman Movement emerged out of the Anti-Slavery Movement. Working in that movement gave women a framework of analysis which allowed them to better understand what was wrong with their own situation and experience in organizing petitions and appeals. History repeated itself in the 1960s when women’s liberation emerged out of the civil rights movement, mostly by women who were active in that movement. Then as now, race and sex intertwined.

They also conflicted. Nowhere was this more apparent than in 1869 when the Fifteenth Amendment was being debated publicly as the states decided whether or not to ratify. The Fourteenth Amendment had inserted "male" into the US Constitution for the first time by penalizing states which denied the vote to otherwise qualified male citizens. The Fifteenth Amendment split those supporting suffrage into those who believed that "this is the Negro’s hour" and those who wanted nothing less than universal suffrage. Roesch Wagner reprints a fascinating debate over the Fifteenth Amendment that took place at a convention of the American Equal Rights Association in May of 1969 in addition to other statements on both sides. We Want Our Rights poster

There are other parallels between then and now. The women’s liberation movement of the 1960s was denounced for being nothing but a bunch of lesbians in a decade when that was seen as pathological. The 19th Century movement was dismissed as being for Free Love, which was seen as immoral. In both, what was seen as deviant sexuality was equated with the demand for equal rights with men.

The voices of men are in this book, both black and white, as supporters of women’s rights. Some, like Rev. Samuel J. May, preached for woman suffrage before women were allowed to speak for themselves. Others, like Frederick Douglass, were early and strong supporters until the Fifteenth Amendment split the movement.

It took another fifty years for "the woman’s hour" to come. Realistically, it came minute by minute, through many small battles rather than one large war. These documents celebrate the victories, lament the setbacks, and illuminate the debates over race, literacy and politics which marked slow and unsteady progress. Persistence over the generations finally brought success.

If you want to know what the suffrage debate was about, and how race and sex colluded and collided in the 19th Century, you should buy this book. It’s a great read.

Note to publisher: This book would have benefitted from an index. And.... the title is ahistorical. In the 19th and early 20th Centuries, it was called the Woman Suffrage Movement, not Women’s Suffrage.

Above, Library of Congress: Magazine cover showing a Susan B. Anthony-like figure in classical dress thrusting an umbrella at a man in a toga. Another woman holds a sign reading "We want our rights"; Illus. in: Life. New York: Life magazine, inc., v. 61, no. 1582 (1913 February 20), cover

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Jo Freeman's Book Review of The Women’s Suffrage Movement by Sally Roesch Wagner

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