Womens Fashion During the Civil War

The fight for women'due south suffrage in the Us began with the women'due south rights movement in the mid-nineteenth century. This reform effort encompassed a broad spectrum of goals earlier its leaders decided to focus outset on securing the vote for women. Women's suffrage leaders, however, disagreed over strategy and tactics: whether to seek the vote at the federal or land level, whether to offer petitions or pursue litigation, and whether to persuade lawmakers individually or to take to the streets. Both the women'due south rights and suffrage movements provided political experience for many of the early on women pioneers in Congress, but their internal divisions foreshadowed the persistent disagreements amid women in Congress that emerged subsequently the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.

/tiles/not-drove/Eastward/Essay1_2_votes_for_women_button_2019_096_000-one.xml Collection of the U.S. Firm of Representatives
About this object Manufactured by the Whitehead & Hoag Company in Newark, New Jersey, this dime-sized push announces support for women's voting rights. The phrase "Votes for Women" was ane of the suffrage motility'southward main rallying cries.

The commencement attempt to organize a national motility for women's rights occurred in Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848. Led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a young female parent from upstate New York, and the Quaker abolitionist Lucretia Mott, almost 300 people—about of whom were women—attended the Seneca Falls Convention to outline a direction for the women's rights movement.² Stanton's call to artillery, her "Declaration of Sentiments," echoed the Annunciation of Independence: "Nosotros agree these truths to exist self-evident: that all men and women are created equal." In a list of resolutions, Stanton cataloged economic and educational inequities, restrictive laws on marriage and property rights, and social and cultural norms that prevented women from enjoying "all the rights and privileges which belong to them every bit citizens of the United states."³ Stanton too demanded for women the "sacred right to the elective franchise"—despite objections from Mott and others who considered this provision besides radical. The convention eventually approved the voting rights resolution afterward abolitionist Frederick Douglass spoke in support of information technology.⁴

Like many other women reformers of the era, Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, a Massachusetts teacher, had both been agile in the abolitionist cause to finish slavery. After kickoff meeting in 1850, Stanton and Anthony forged a lifetime brotherhood as women'due south rights activists. Post-obit the Civil War, they helped build a movement dedicated to women's suffrage and pushed lawmakers to guarantee their rights during Reconstruction.⁵

Later on the emancipation of 4 million enslaved African Americans, Radical Republicans in Congress proposed a constitutional amendment extending citizenship rights and equal protection under the police to all "persons born or naturalized in the United States." Whether those rights would include women was unclear, and debates in both houses of Congress focused on defining citizenship. Many Members praised the virtues of "manhood suffrage" and expressed concern nigh the inclusive language in early on drafts of the proposed subpoena. Ultimately, the Fourteenth Amendment went as far as to define voting rights as the sectional privilege of "male citizens"—explicitly adding gender to the Constitution for the kickoff time.⁶

During the debate over the Fourteenth Amendment, Stanton objected to the use of "that give-and-take, 'male,'" and sent to Congress the starting time of many petitions supporting women'due south suffrage.⁷ On January 23, 1866, Representative James Brooks of New York read into the official record Stanton's petition along with an accompanying letter by Anthony. Some Members, including George Washington Julian of Indiana, welcomed the opportunity to enfranchise women. In December 1868, he proposed a constitutional subpoena to guarantee citizens the right to vote "without any distinction or discrimination whatever founded on race, color, or sex." Julian's resolution never came to a vote, and even Congressmen who favored expanding the electorate were not willing to support women's suffrage.⁸

/tiles/non-drove/Due east/Essay1_3_Petition_for_Woman_Suffrage_1878_NARA-1.xml Image courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration
About this record Signed by Frederick Douglass Jr., son of the famous abolitionist, and his wife, Virginia Hewlett Douglass, this 1878 petition for woman suffrage asks the House and Senate to meliorate the Constitution and permit women to vote. The Douglasses topped the petition signed by many other African-American residents of the Uniontown neighborhood of Washington, DC, in what is today Anacostia.

In 1869 Congress ignored renewed calls to enshrine women's suffrage in the Constitution while working to pass an subpoena guaranteeing the voting rights of African-American men. The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified by the states in 1870, declared that the right to vote "shall non be denied or abridged by the United states of america or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." That year, Hiram Rhodes Revels of Mississippi was elected to the Senate and Joseph Hayne Rainey of South Carolina won election to the House. They were the offset African-American lawmakers to serve in Congress.

During the congressional battle over the Fifteenth Amendment, Stanton and Anthony had led a lobbying effort to ensure that voting rights for women were included in the legislation. With increasing frequency, Stanton denounced the extension of voting rights to African-American men while restrictions on women remained. She praised the virtues of "educated white women," and warned that new immigrants and African Americans were not prepared to exercise the rights of citizens. Stanton's rhetoric alienated African-American women involved in the fight for women'southward rights, and like ideas about race and gender persisted in the women'southward suffrage movement well into the twentieth century.⁹

In the wake of these setbacks in Congress, women'southward rights reformers responded by focusing their bulletin exclusively on the right to vote.¹⁰ Simply the women's movement fragmented over tactics and broke into two singled-out organizations in 1869: the National Woman Suffrage Clan (NWSA) and the American Adult female Suffrage Association (AWSA). Stanton and Anthony created the NWSA and directed its efforts toward changing federal law. Eventually, the NWSA began a parallel effort to secure the right to vote amongst the individual states with the promise of starting a ripple effect to win the franchise at the federal level. The NWSA, based in New York, largely relied on its own statewide network. But with Stanton and Anthony giving speeches across the country, the NWSA also drew recruits from all over. Although California Senator Aaron Sargent introduced a women'due south suffrage amendment in 1878, the NWSA campaign stalled. Meanwhile, Lucy Stone, a onetime Massachusetts antislavery advocate and a prominent lobbyist for women'due south rights, formed the AWSA.¹¹ As former abolitionists, the leaders of the AWSA had mobilized state and local efforts to flood Washington with anti-slavery petitions, and they applied that same tactic after the Civil War to advance women's rights, more often than not at the state level. During the 1880s, the AWSA was better funded and the larger of the two groups, but it had just a regional reach.

When neither grouping attracted wide public support, suffrage leaders recognized their division had become an impediment to progress. Historian Nancy Woloch described early suffragists' efforts as "a crusade in political instruction past women and for women, and for about of its existence, a crusade in search of a constituency."¹² The turning signal came in the late 1880s and early 1890s, when the nation experienced a surge of volunteerism amongst centre-course women—activists in progressive causes, members of women'south clubs and professional societies, temperance advocates, and participants in local borough and charity organizations. The decision of these women to expand their sphere of activities further outside the dwelling helped the suffrage movement go mainstream and provided new momentum for its supporters.

By 1890, seeking to capitalize on their newfound constituency but still without powerful allies in Congress, the two groups united to course the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Led initially by Stanton and then by Anthony, the NAWSA drew upon the support of women activists in organizations such as the Women's Trade Union League, the Woman'south Christian Temperance Union, and the National Consumers League. For the next twenty years, the NAWSA worked as a nonpartisan system focused on gaining the vote in the states as a precursor to a federal suffrage amendment.¹³

/tiles/non-collection/w/wic_cont1_6_statue_mott_anthony_stanton_aoc.xml Image courtesy of the Builder of the Capitol Carved past Adelaide Johnson and on display in the Us Capitol Rotunda, this monument was given to Congress in 1921. It commemorates three founders of America's women'southward suffrage move: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucretia Mott.

But the suffrage movement was but and so welcoming. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, civil rights and voting rights came under constant attack in large sections of the country as state policies and court decisions effectively nullified the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. As the arrangement of segregation known as Jim Crow crystallized in the South, African Americans saw protections for their ceremonious and political rights disappear, and few Members of Congress or suffrage advocates were willing to fight for whatsoever additional federal safeguards. In an 1898 address to the NAWSA, African-American activist Mary Church Terrell decried these injustices, while remaining hopeful "not merely in the prospective enfranchisement of my sex activity just in the emancipation of my race." African-American suffragists like Terrell continued to struggle to expand access to the ballot. Their voices, however, could only be heard outside of Congress. In the Firm and Senate, those voices had fallen silent: from 1901 to 1929 no African-American legislator served in Congress. The promise of the Reconstruction Era—that American republic could be more simply and more representative—was undermined by an organized political movement working to restrict voting rights and exclude millions of Americans from the political process.^xiv

West of the Mississippi River, the new activist climate and the creation of the NAWSA diameter fruit. Women had won complete voting rights in Wyoming in 1869, merely almost 25 years had elapsed without some other victory. Afterward launching the NAWSA in 1890, however, women secured the correct to vote in iii other western states—Colorado (1893), Utah (1896), and Idaho (1896).

"Why the West first?" remains an indelible puzzle. Some scholars suggest that the West proved to be more progressive in extending the vote to women, in part, in order to attract women westward and to boost the population. Others propose that women played nontraditional roles on the hardscrabble frontier and were accorded a more equal status by men. However others find that political expediency by territorial officials played a role. All hold, though, that western women organized themselves effectively to win the vote.¹⁵

Between 1910 and 1914, the NAWSA'due south intensified advancement atomic number 82 to successes at the state level in Washington, California, Arizona, Kansas, and Oregon. In Illinois, future Congresswoman Ruth Hanna McCormick assisted as a lobbyist in Springfield where the state legislature adopted women'south suffrage in 1913, the first such victory in a state e of the Mississippi. Women won the right to vote the next yr in Montana, thanks in role to the efforts of another time to come Congresswoman, Jeannette Rankin.

Despite this momentum, some reformers pushed to quicken the pace of change. In 1913 Alice Paul, a immature Quaker activist who participated in the militant British suffrage motion, formed the Congressional Union, later named the National Woman's Party (NWP), every bit a rival to the NAWSA. Paul's group adopted the British tactics of picketing, mass rallies, marches, and ceremonious defiance to raise sensation and back up. The NWP'south more than confrontational style attracted a new generation of women to the movement and kept information technology in the public eye. As part of their campaign, the NWP relentlessly attacked the Autonomous administration of President Woodrow Wilson for refusing to support a women's suffrage amendment.¹⁶

In 1915 Carrie Chapman Catt, the veteran suffragist and one-time NAWSA president, returned to pb the organization. An adept administrator and organizer, Catt authored the "Winning Programme" that chosen for disciplined and relentless efforts to achieve state referenda on women's suffrage, specially in nonwestern states.¹⁷ Key victories followed in 1917 in Arkansas and New York—the first in the Southward and East. The 1916 election of Jeannette Rankin of Montana to serve in the 65th Congress (1917–1919) crowned the "Winning Plan" campaign.

Catt's "Winning Plan" and Paul'south protest campaign coincided with the United States' entry into World War I.^xviii Catt and the NAWSA eagerly embraced the war, believing that women would quickly bear witness themselves in their support for the cause overseas and that extending the franchise at home would be an important step for national readiness and morale. Moreover, leading suffrage advocates insisted the failure to extend the vote to women might impede their participation in the war effort just when they were most needed as workers and volunteers outside the home.

Next Section

Share this post