Winning suffrage
Winning suffrage
As suffragists continued to struggle for the full parliamentary franchise in Britain and for voting rights at both state and national levels in the USA, the first significant gains in the international movement for women’s rights came in the western USA and the Antipodes. Women in Wyoming Territory gained full suffrage in 1869, and the first appeal for women’s suffrage was published in New Zealand in that year. In both of these areas, white settlers’ responses to the issue of women’s suffrage expressed their racial anxieties. Granting the franchise to women became a way to solidify the position of whites in relation to displaced indigenous populations and other non-white groups, including African Americans and Asians, whom white settlers perceived as potential challengers to their power.
Women won full national suffrage first in New Zealand and Australia. Settler anxiety about race affected both nations, but the position of the Maori in New Zealand differed from that of the Aborigines in Australia. Since the Maori had adopted Christianity and, perhaps more importantly, had the capacity to mount a military defence against settlers, the settler government in New Zealand included Maoris, first in male suffrage and then in granting women the national franchise in 1893. The status of Aborigines differed in each of the Australian colonies, and the 1901 Australian Constitution created a status for Aborigines separate from that of white women on the national level. Only white women gained full national suffrage in the Commonwealth of Australia in 1902.
The WWCTU played a significant role in these suffrage campaigns, and WWCTU missionaries’ willingness to adapt their propaganda to local racial attitudes contributed to their success. Jessie Ackerman and Mary Leavitt were particularly successful WWCTU organizers in Australia and New Zealand. Their international ties and access to Anglo- American suffrage ideas, particularly those of John Stuart Mill, lent them considerable appeal in settler societies on the periphery of the British Empire. After 1902, white Australian women followed the implications of Ackerman and Leavitt’s work, seeing themselves as missionaries of the suffrage movement. Since their own racial and gender positions were a product of racial imperialism, white Australian women identified with British and US women, and they out-spokenly sympathized with US women about the so- called negative effects of immigration.
The willingness of WWCTU activists to adapt to local political and racial contexts, white Australian women’s views of their role in an international suffrage movement, and the priority that many suffragists gave to gaining the franchise for white women over women of other races and ethnicities: all signalled the strength of such divisive factors as race, ethnicity and class as suffrage campaigns continued. In Great Britain, class-inflected arguments had characterized the thought of John Stuart Mill and Thomas Hare in the 1860s. Mill had recommended educational tests for voting and plural votes for better- educated voters, and Hare had advocated proportional representation to encourage the election of such talented men as Mill and his colleagues. In the USA, the class position of suffragists contributed to anti-immigrant feeling in the north and anti-black sentiment in south. In 1890, the same year that US suffrage groups, the NWSA and AWSA, reunited to create the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), Mississippi and other southern states began to develop legal methods to prevent black men from
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voting. Within the women’s rights movement, black women were expected to keep to the margins and avoid offending racist white suffragists.
Black women combated the increasingly racialized climate of the international movement for women’s rights and challenged white women to look past race and reform feminism as they sought liberation. Many of their arguments revolved around questions of sexuality. At the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, Fanny Barrier Williams and Anna Julia Cooper addressed the question of black women’s moral integrity. Sexual immorality, they argued, was not the fault of black women but of white men who continued to attack them. Williams asserted that the threat of sexual exploitation lay behind the decisions of many black women to leave their homes in the south and migrate to northern cities. Investigative journalist and anti-lynching activist Ida B.Wells (later Wells-Barnett) published evidence to counter claims, such as those made by WCTU leader Frances Willard, that lynching constituted white men’s retaliation for black men’s assaults on white women. Lynching more often resulted from economic competition than sexual assault, and, in fact, black women were more vulnerable to sexual exploitation at the hands of white men than the reverse. Wells confronted Willard publicly, and Willard eventually supported anti-lynching legislation. Willard, however, represented only one of the more powerful voices of reform feminism.
In fact, white feminists’ racial biases ran deep, and many subscribed to trends in racial thought that supported the notion that blacks and other non-whites were naturally inferior to whites. US journalist, fiction writer and social purity advocate Charlotte Perkins Gilman expressed the prevailing racial thought in her Women and Economics (1898). Relying heavily on Friedrich Engels’s Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884) for her notion of how the gender division of labour had developed, Gilman combined principles of socialism and Darwinism to argue that women suffered from an over-development of their sex-function. Correcting the problem would serve the interests not only of women but of the Anglo-Saxon race as well. Seeking an evolutionary answer to women’s sub-ordination, Gilman claimed that economic independence for women and professionalization of housekeeping and nurseries would have an eugenic effect. Such a conclusion necessitated ignoring the labour of women of colour, the majority of women receiving wages as domestic workers at the time. When Gilman addressed ‘the Negro problem’, she suggested that most African Americans would need to correct their ‘primitive’ characteristics through service in industrial armies; those who could prove that they were civilized could avoid such service.
As racial divisions continued, socialism and the growth of suffrage militancy strengthened the renewal of the international suffrage movement. Such well-known figures as German socialist Clara Zetkin and Russian socialist Aleksandria Kollontai tried to strike a balance between combating the sexism of socialist men and the class interests of bourgeois suffragists. A strong network of socialist women and support for women’s rights in Finland’s Social Democratic Party played a significant role in making Finland the first nation in Europe to grant the national franchise to women in 1906. In Great Britain, the activism of Lancashire textile workers in the 1890s contributed to the climate for the founding of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) by the Pankhursts. Organized in Manchester in 1903, the WSPU emphasized public agitation, working-class organization and links to the Labour Party. After moving from Manchester to London in
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1906, the WSPU concentrated on organizing mass public demonstrations. By 1911, militancy dominated the British suffrage movement.
British militancy influenced suffrage movements in both Europe and the USA. French women disavowed militancy, but an organized movement for women’s suffrage began in France by 1906. L’Union Francaise pour le Suffrage des Femmes was formed in 1909 and affiliated with the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA), which had been formed between 1899 and 1902. In the USA, British militancy had a particularly notable effect on the activism of Alice Paul, a Quaker suffragist who learned militant tactics in England and brought them back to energize the movement in the USA after 1913. Paul and her colleagues attacked the Democratic Party in the USA, urging supporters to oppose the Democrats and renewing consideration of a national suffrage amendment in Congress. Carrie Chapman Catt, leader of the NAWSA, preferred to lobby for women’s suffrage at both the state and national levels. Catt’s winning strategy finally achieved success in 1920, when the fact that women had gained the franchise in a majority of the states ensured the victory of the Nineteenth Amendment in Congress and its ratification by the states.
Western women won the franchise gradually through the first half of the twentieth century. After Finland, Norway granted women a limited franchise based on an economic qualification in 1907, and conferred full suffrage in 1913. Iceland granted suffrage to women aged 40 and over in 1915, and Denmark extended the franchise to all women in that year. In 1917, Canada granted the federal vote to white women who were in the armed forces or were close relatives of soldiers. In Great Britain, married women, women householders and women university graduates aged 30 or over gained the franchise in 1918. Irish women won full suffrage in 1922, and the UK extended full suffrage to women in 1928. French women did not receive the franchise until 1944, just one year before women in Japan and Italy. White women gained the vote in the USA in 1920, but various legal strictures in some states deprived black women of the franchise until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Racial restrictions also limited the voting rights of American Indians and Australian Aborigines until the 1960s.