"Undoubtedly the suffragists promised - and expected- too much. When little changed in their own individual lives after they had won the vote, they were willing to "wait and see." They needed leadership, example, and the slow erosion of the older standards and ways of doing things. Europe was exhausted by tow world wars in both of which it carried the brunt of death and destruction. American women were (everyone knew it!) the best off in the world - what was there to revolt about?

      There was no real upsurge among the women in the United States until another kind of revolt had broken out - the racial upsurge of the 1950's, triggered by the Supreme Court decision against "separate but equal" educational facilities and spreading to lunch-counter sit-ins, the voter-registration drives, and then through the entire social structure.

      First in the South and eventually everywhere in this country, women were involved in these struggles. Some white women learned the degree to which black women were worse off than they were, or than black men. White and black women learned what the minority of women active in the organized labor movement had learned much earlier: that women were typically excluded form policy-making leadership roles of even the most radical movement, a lesson that would have to be relearned again and again in the political and peace campaigns of the late sixties.

      One powerful weapon in this struggle was a book, Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, Strident, repetitious, but passionate, the book's main thesis was that American mass media were programming college-educated women into the role of homemakers, concerned not with the quality of life, but with an insatiable and insensate level of consumerism. Only a meaningful career, the author argued, could offer educated women adequate alternatives to the boredom, alcoholism, meaningless hobbies, more and more "adult education" that led nowhere, or equally insignificant "do-goodism." " pages xxix-xxx

      "Recently there has been a tendency to low-rate the winning of woman suffrage as something less than the great achievement it seemed to those who carried on the struggle:" page xxxii

      "As a matter of fact, the opposition to woman suffrage itself bears witness, in a perverse kind of way, to its significance; nothing unimportant would have been so bitterly resisted." page xxxii

      "The concept of the femme covert would carry over into the nineteenth century and be a handicap to the married women who, whether from economic necessity or independence of spirit, tried to override its taboos. Married women could not sign contracts; they had no title to their own earnings, to property even when it was their own by inheritance or dower, or to their children in case of legal separation. " page 7

      "Although women would be regarded as inferior, and therefore properly subordinate human beings for hundreds of years, forces where at work undermining such attitudes from the earliest colonial days. It was not merely that Protestantism held idleness to be a sin, and therefore required of women that they weave, spin, make lace, soap, shoes, and candles, as well as care for their households and families. The economy itself demanded such a division of labor because at first there was no other source for these goods and services. Nor did all women work within the sheltering confines of the home. The toll which exploration, hunting, fishing, Indian wars, and migration to the West took of manpower left many women widowed, often with small children to provide for. Frequently they carried on a former husband's business, such as innkeeping, printing, managing a store or even a newspaper; sometimes they struck out for themselves in such endeavors; or they became seamstresses, milliners, house servants, etc. In a struggling society in which there was a continuous labor shortage, no social taboos could keep a hungry woman idle.

      Moreover, by the demands it made on human beings for survival, frontier economy established a certain rough egalitarianism which challenged other, long-established concepts of propriety. Women were just as indispensable as men, wince a household which lacked their homemaking skills, as well as nursing, sharpshooting and hunting when needed, was not to be envied. As colonial society became more complex this tradition became obscured, but its roots remained in American, life and thinking; as the frontier moved westward in a changing world, the idea that women were the equals of men traveled with it, with far-reaching results." pages 8 - 9

      "The ruthlessness of Anne Hutchinson's punishment is the measure of her stature and her threat to the Puritan way of life and faith." page 11

      Regarding Revolutionary War era women's sewing circles which supplied clothing to men in the American army: "Sporadic and incidental as these efforts were, they are the first instances we know of American women working together towards a specified end- in other words, organizing." page 13

      Noted feminist foremothers Margaret Brent of Maryland and Abigail Adams of Massachusetts, page 14

      Noted Dr. Benjamin Rush, physician, scientist, and professor of chemistry at the University of Pa. who sought to extend educational opportunities for women in the 1780s and 1790s. pages 15-16

      Rouseau on the education of women: "The whole education of women ought to be relative to men. To please them, to be useful to them, to make themselves loved and honored by them, to educate them when young, to care for them when grown, to counsel them, to console them, and to make life sweet and agreeable to them - these are the duties of women at all times, and what should be taught them from their infancy." page 22

      In 1818, Hannah Mather Crocker wrote Observations on the Real Rights of Women. page 23

      "In 1819, one year after Mrs. Crocker's pamphlet had appeared, Governor DeWitt Clinton of New York (of Erie Canal fame) received An Address to the Public; Particularly to the Members of the Legislature of New York, Proposing a Plan for Improving Female Education; it was the work of Emma Willard, who had been quietly carrying out some novel pedagogical ideas which were to prove a turning pint in women's education." page 24

      Under the leadership of Emma Willard, ". . . in 1821, the Troy Female Seminary, the first endowed institution for the education of girls, opened its doors." page 25

      "In 1828 -1829 women's education received a lively impetus from the teachings of Frances Wright." page 25

      "As the electorate slowly broadened state by state to include all white males over twenty-one regardless of property qualifications, the demand that education likewise be made available to all, irrespective of income levels, became one of the important issues of the Jacksonian era; every voter needed to be responsible and intelligent, and therefore had a basic right to education. Yet it took the better part of the nineteenth century to achieve a nation-wide system of free education for males, from primary school through college. In the period before the Civil War, the states were largely concerned with establishing publicly supported elementary schools. By 1860 there were still only some forty-odd high schools worthy of the name in the entire country. Many which called themselves such were in reality little better than elementary schools." pages 26 - 27

      "The subjects Mrs. Willard taught her girls might appear as higher education to contemporaries, but they could not compare with what was offered to young men at Harvard and other colleges. The first institution which offered women a curriculum even remotely comparable to that available to men on the college level was Oberlin, which began as a "seminary" and developed into a rudimentary college. As such it held a special and deserved place in the affections of the early woman's rights leaders. . ." page 28

      ". . . the single most significant step away from the concept that women needed an improved education only to carry out their housewifely duties or teaching duties better came with the founding of Mount Holyoke in 1837. Generally regarded now as the oldest woman's college in the United States, it made no such claim at the lime. It opened as a seminary, and there were other such institutions then in existence. Mount Holyoke did not achieve collegiate status until 1893, after Vassar, Wellesly, Smith, and Bryn Mawr; yet it opened the way for them all.

      Its founder, Mary Lyon, followed the path charted by Emma Willard, but went much further; in the fifteen years between the first steps toward founding her school and her premature death at fifty-two, Miss Lyon established certain fundamental principles which succeeding institutions accepted as axiomatic: the schools must have adequate financial endowment; they must try in some degree to make education available to girl of all economic groups, they must offer a curriculum more advanced than that envisage even by Mrs. Willard; and they must prepare their student for more than homemaking or teaching." page 30

      Prudence Crandall's 1833 (4 years before Mount Holyoke, 12 years after Troy Female Seminary) school for Negro girls discussed on pages 35-37

      "Thousands of men and women were drawn into the work [abolition]; among them the latter were the first conscious feminists, who would go to school in the struggle to free the slaves and, in the process, launch their own fight for equality. It was in the abolition movement that women first learned to organize, to hold public meetings, to conduct petition campaigns. As abolitionists they first won the right to speak in public, and began to evolve a philosophy of their place in society and of their basic rights. For a quarter of a century the two movements, to free the slave and liberate woman, nourished and strengthened one another.

      The earliest rudimentary women's organizations had been church sewing circles, which were started to raise money for missionary or charitable work." page 38

      From Sarah Grimke's Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women

"Adam's ready acquiescence with his wife's proposal does not savor much of that superiority in strength of mind which is arrogated by man. Even admitting that Eve was the greater sinner, it seems to me that man might be satisfied with the dominion he has claimed and exercised for nearly 6,000 years, and that more true nobility would be manifested by endeavoring to raise the fallen and invigorate the weak than by keeping woman in subjection." page 43

      "These were the achievements of the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association, which was lead from 1845 to 1846 by Sarah Bagley, the first woman trade unionist of note in this country." page 53

      "When Jane Swisshelm, one of the earliest women to publish her own newspaper, the Saturday Visiter [sic], inherited a small estate from her mother, it was in the form of a trust, a legal device developed to circumvent women's inability to hold property." page 57

      "A working woman could be compelled to hand over every penny of her wages to a drunkard husband, even if she was left with nothing for her own subsistence or the maintenance of her children, and even if the husband was known to be making no provision for them. If she sought to divorce such a husband, he might, irrespective or the kind of father he was, be legally entitled to sole guardianship of the children." page 58

      "Between 1839 and 1850 most states passed some kind of legislation recognizing the right of married women to hold property. In some cases this was due to the interest of large property-owners in protecting their bequests to female legatees; in others it was due to the efforts of liberal-minded men aided and abetted by a few energetic women.
      In 1836 the first petition for a Married Woman's Property Law in New York reached the state legislature. It carried the signatures of six women and was the work of Mrs. Ernestine Rose, who had just arrived in this country." page 60

      "Behind the slowly rising tide of legislative reform was the growth of a perceptible body of public opinion, educated by lecturers and writers of all shades of liberalism and vehemence, There were men like John Neal, the "downeast Yankee" from Portland, Maine, who began speaking on woman's rights in 1832 and kept it up for half a century. There was Judge Hurlbut of New York, who was converted to the cause by writing a paper against it, which he then found he could refute at every point; the result was a pamphlet by the eminent jurist called "Human Rights", which was widely circulated.

      An important force in educating public opinion was Mrs. Sarah Josepha Hale, the editor or Godey's Lady's Book. . . . .

      Most influential of all was Margaret Fuller, whose book Woman in the Nineteenth Century became a beacon to generations of women." page 60

      "Miss Fuller would not admit that women were adequately represented in government by men, however close their family ties, because man' view of woman was distorted by his dominant relationship with her; yet her primary concern was not political:

What Woman needs is not as a woman to act or rule, but as a nature to grow, as an intellect to discern, as a soul to live freely, and unimpeded to unfold such powers as were given her when we left our common home.
      But if you ask me, what offices they may fill, I reply - any. I do not care what case you put; let them be sea-captains, if you will.

We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. We would have every path laid open to Woman as freely as to Man. . . then and only then will mankind be ripe for this, when inward and outward freedom for Woman as much as for Man shall be acknowledged as a right, not yielded as a concession. As the friend of the Negro assumes that one man cannot by right hold another in bondage, as would the friend of Woman assume that Man cannot by right lay even well-meant restrictions on Woman." page 62

      "The signers of the call to the first national woman's right convention in 1850 included Wendell Phillips, William H. Channing, Bronson Alcott, William Lloyd Garrison, and Gerrit Smith. Speeches by Phillips, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Theodore Parker were standard woman's rights propaganda for decades." page 75

      "If Lucretia Mott typified the moral force of the movement, if Lucy Stone was its most gifted orator and Mrs. Stanton its outstanding philosopher, Susan Anthony was its incomparable organizer, who gave it force and direction for half a century." page 79

      "The first black woman to publish a newspaper [1854 Provincial Freeman, Ontario, Canada] was Mary Ann Shadd Carry, who was born a free Negro in 1833 in Wilmington, Delaware." page 91

      Other woman's rights activists: Lucy Stone, Lucretia Mott, Ernestine Rose, Abby Kelley Foster, Paulina Wright Davis, Frances Dana Gage, Clarina Howard Nichols, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Josephine S. Griffing, Amanda M. Way, Caroline Severance, Hannah Tracy Cutler, Mary Upton Ferrin, and "the Negroes" Sojourner Truth, Frances E. W. Harper, Sarah Remond (page 84) and Charlotte Forten, Anna Mae Douglass (wife of Fredrick Douglass) (page 92)

      Vassar College "was chartered by the state of New York at Poughkeepsie in the Hudson River valley in 1861. Its founder, Matthew Vassar, was a leading citizen of the town who had made his fortune as a brewer, banker, and real-estate owner." page 118

      Wellesly, founded in 1875, was the "product of the generosity and vision of one man - a wealthy Boston lawyer, Henry Fowle Durant." page 119

      "Smith was the first college for women to be endowed by a woman. No greater contrast could be imagined than that between Mary Lyon's single-minded, life-long intensity of purpose, and the shy, deaf, doubt-ridden Sophia Smith of Hatfield, Massachusetts, who at sixty-eight inherited a fortune in whose accumulation she had played no part, and who sought long and anxiously for guidance as to its disposition. Both women shared a deep religious feeling, but what was the bread and breath of life to Miss Lyon - "concern for the adult female youth in the common walks of life" - had to be nurtured in Miss Smith over long years by her friend and pastor, John M,. Greene." page 120

      "Mrs. Anna J. Cooper, who taught Latin in the colored schools of the District of Columbia, looking for reasons why only thirty Negro women had received college degrees by 1890, laid the blame principally on the men of her race:

While our men seem thoroughly abreast of the times on every other subject, when they strike the woman question they drop back into 16th century logic. . . . I fear the majority of colored men do not yet think it worthwhile that women aspire to higher education. . . . A self-supporting young girl has to struggle on by teaching in the summer and working after school hours to keep up with her board bill, and actually to fight her way against positive discouragement to higher education. . . Let money be raised and scholarships be founded in our colleges and universities for self- supporting, worthy young women."       page 123

      Abigail Scott Duniway was the leader of the woman's suffrage movement in Oregon and the northwest. page 151

      Emily Pitts Stevens, published The Pioneer in San Francisco and Duniway launched her own paper, The New Northwest in 1871. page 152

      Wyoming territory was the first to grant woman suffrage - by a vote of six to two with one abstention in the Senate, and six to four with one abstention in the lower house. Crucial supporters were Edward M. Lee and William H. Bright (Senate). After four days of indecision, the bill was signed by Governor John A. Campbell. page 153

      "The absence of any furor over the Woman's Declaration of 1876, comparable with that aroused by the Seneca Falls Declaration, was indicative of the progress that had taken place. There was more evidence to the same effect in the document itself. Not only were some of the earlier demands notably absent, such as those for equal education, public speech, the right to preach, tech, write, and earn a livelihood, but the strident note of complaint against man, all men - had given way to charges leveled against the state - an all-male government." page 164

      According to Carrie Chapman Catt,

"To get the word "male" out of the Constitution cost the women of the country fifty-two years of pauseless campaign . . . . During that time they were forced to conduct fifty-six campaigns of referenda to male voters; 480 campaigns to get Legislatures to submit suffrage amendments to voters; 47 campaigns to get State constitutional conventions to write woman suffrage into state constitutions; 277 campaigns to get State party conventions to adopt woman suffrage planks in party platforms; and 19 campaigns with 19 successive Congresses."       page 165

      "Women reformers had been concerned with the temperance question since the 1840's, not merely out of sympathy with an abstract ideal, but because the law placed married women so much at the mercy of their husbands. What might be moral injustice if the latter was a sober citizen became sheer tragedy if he were a heavy drinker who consumed not only his own earnings but his wife's, and reduced her and her children to destitution. Alcoholism was wide-spread in a society lacking social hygiene, medical therapy, and any kind of welfare work, and whose recreational facilities were non-existent except for the well-t--do. A combination of idleness, boredom, and misfortune could make a man the bane instead of the mainstay of his family, while his wife would have no legal redress.

      Small wonder that Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone, and the rest were temperance crusaders almost as soon as they became abolitionists, and before they espoused the cause of woman's rights as such." page 174

      lots on Ida B. Wells-Barnett around page 180

      Fannie Barrier Williams founded of the first training school for Negro nurses. page 179

      Mary Church Terrell was first president of the National Association of Colored Women page 183

      "The report [a nineteen-volume report on the condition of women and child wage earners released in 1911], a landmark when it was issued, is still required material for the student today.

      With the publication of the report and the pioneering work being done during the same period by such investigators as Edith Abbott, Mary Van Kleeck, Josephine Goldmark, and others, the basis was being laid for legislation to protect women and child workers for decades to come." page 205

      "Today the role which so-called "protective legislation" for women workers played in extending the state's responsibilities for all wage earners is lost sight of; such restrictions are rather seen as limits on woman's freedom to work at any job or hour of her choice." page 206

      ". . . .Carrie Chapman Catt put Charlotte Gilman at the head of a list of the twelve greatest American women, and none of her contemporaries who labored for woman's rights was untouched by her thinking." page 225

      "The Women's Trade Union League made its greatest contribution in taking the striker's case to the public and in enlisting the aid of women who could provide bail for hundreds of arrested pickets." page 235

      The partners who were responsible for the Triangle Shirt Waist factory when it burned to the ground were fined for their actions - $20. One-hundred and forty-six workers, mostly women and (girl) children died in the blaze. page 236

      Female labor leaders [from the Women's Trade Union League organized in 1903]: Mary Anderson and Emma Steghagen of the shoe workers, Rose Schneiderman of the cap makers, Agnes Nestor and Elisabeth Christman of the glove workers, Melinda Schott of the hat trimmers, Josephine Casey of the railway ticket takers, Stella Franklin of the department store clerks, Elizabeth Maloney of the waitresses, Maud Swartz of the typographers. The league was founded under the leadership of wealthy women and gradually (over a 4-5 year period) working women took over operating control as they gained experience in running an organization. page 237

      Equality League of Self-Supporting Women founded by Harriot Stanton Blatch in 1907 membership included Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Florence Kelley, Leonora O'Reilley, Lavinia Dock from the Henry Street Settlement, Gertrude Barnum from the Women's' Trade Union League, Jessie Ashley, Helen Hoy Greeley, Inez Milholland, and Rose Schneiderman. Blatch had abandoned any hope of working through established suffrage organizations which had become moribund. pages 244 - 245

      Alice Paul and Lucy Burns gathered a group of suffragists around them in Jan 1913 including Mrs. Lawrence Lewis, Crystal Eastman, and Mary Beard. page 256

      "The woman suffrage bill first became a live issue in Congress because of the activity of the [Alice Paul's] Congressional Union; of this there can be no doubt." page 262

      In 1914, Mrs. Frank Leslie, wealthy publisher of Leslie's Weekly, bequeathed Carrie Chapman Catt a personal legacy of $2,000,000 "to the furtherance of the cause of woman suffrage." page 265

      Regarding the House vote on the Anthony Amendment on January 10, 1918:
      "The vote in the House proved, if proof were needed, that not all the heroes in the long struggle were women. Endless lobbying and tallying by both suffrage groups had shown that the vote would be painfully close and that no one could foretell the outcome. It was with real anguish that the women keeping their tallies up in the galleries saw the hair-line finish shaping up, and their supporters rounding up every possible vote. Four of them - determining votes - came from sick-beds: Sims of Tennessee, with a broken arm and shoulder, which he refused to have set for fear he would be incapacitated from attending, and who, despite excruciating pain, stayed till the end trying to influence uncertain colleagues; Republican House minority leader Mann of Illinois, who had been in a Baltimore hospital for six months and who appeared, pale as a ghost and hardly able to stand upright; Crosser of Ohio; and Barnhart of Indiana, the latter carried in on a stretcher on the very last roll call. Representative Hicks of new York kept faith with his wife, an ardent suffragist, who had just passed away; he left her death-bed to come to Washington for the roll call, and then went home to her funeral.

      Thanks to such devotion, the amendment passed, 274 to 136, exactly the two-thirds majority required to pass a constitutional amendment, with Speaker Champ Clark's favorable vote in reserve in case of a deadlock. Such bedlam reigned around the clerk's desk on the floor that three rollcalls and a recapitulation were needed before the outcome was certain. The women in the galleries were finally reassured by the cheering and waving of their supporters below." page 283 - It was defeated in the Senate 62 to 34 (page 304)

      Who Opposed Woman Suffrage?: But the more closely one looks, the clearer it becomes that suffragists faced far more than mere conservative opinion; no distaste for women in new social roles, no feeling about the sanctity of motherhood or the sacredness of the home could amount for the animus that expressed itself in highly organized and articulate form against women as voters, becoming increasingly intemperate as woman suffrage spread slowly from one state to another." page 287

      "Inevitably the main source of opposition varied from one part of the country to another. In the South the source of the sentiment lay in fear of the Negro vote - in fear of strengthening any attempts to overthrow the system of Jim Crow restrictions (including the poll tax) which, in defiance of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments, disfranchised the colored population. In the Middle West much of the opposition stemmed from the brewing interests: in the East from industrial and business sources." page 287

      Regarding anti-suffrage organizations: "Almost without exception the women in these organizations were ladies of means and social position. The main burden of their argument was that woman suffrage placed an additional and unbearable burden on women, whose place was in the home; the fact that this argument came largely from women whose housework was done by an adequate force of servants and that they presumed to speak for women less fortunately placed, never seemed to disturb the "antis," who also argued that they did not need political suffrage since their menfolk represented them and cared for them." page 288

      "Mrs. Catt declared categorically that "a trail led from the women's organizations into the liquor camp and it was traveled by the men the women antis employed. . . " page 289

      It is more difficult to pinpoint some of the other elements in the opposition to woman suffrage. Easiest to identify, after the liquor groups, were the political machines, whose weight was invariably thrown against votes for women until Tammany Hall gave up in 1917. Machine men were plainly uncertain of their ability to control an addition to the electorate which seemed to them relatively unsusceptible to bribery, more militant, and bent on child labor and, worst of all, "cleaning up" politics. The arguments many suffragists used in their own behalf, such as the inherent interest of women in such improvements as better schools or protective legislation for women workers, sounded in the ears of the machine bosses like the trumpet of doom.

      While both sides enlisted the support of clergymen of all faiths, the anti-suffrage forces made marked use of Catholic opponents. Although the Papacy was reticent in committing itself explicitly on the issue of women and the vote, Cardinal Gibbons sent an address to the National Anti-Suffrage Convention held in Washington in 1916; reference has already been made to leaflets aimed directly at Catholic voters in Massachusetts, and the same tactic cropped up elsewhere." page 290

      Other opponents: railroad, steel, various manufacturing lobbies page 293

      "Most white suffragists shared the not only predominant, but rarely challenged, racist views common to American society in the first half of the twentieth century. A few far-seeing blacks - Dr. DuBois, Mrs. Terrell, Mrs. Barnett - supported woman suffrage, because they understood that, sooner or later, American Negroes would benefit from the fact that black as well as white women would be entitled to vote, But it took even longer than the most sanguine of them might have foreseen." page 299

      On May 20, 1919, the House in the 66th Congress passed the Anthony Amendment by 304 to 89, a margin of 42 votes. After 2 days of debate, the measure passed the Senate by 66 votes, exactly the number needed to begin the measure on the process of ratification. pages 307 - 308

      Tennessee was the last of the thirty-six states required to ratify the amendment. Belatedly, Connecticut and Vermont also ratified the amendment. But ten states denied their women even a belated honor: Delaware (only state north of the Mason-Dixon Line), Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida. page 317

      From Flexner's Conclusions which was written in the mid-1970's: "Alice Robertson of Oklahoma was the second woman to be elected to the House, following on the heels of the path-breaker Jeannette Rankin of Montana." page 318

      "Only three women have so far been elected to the United States Senate: Hattie Caraway of Arkansas, Maurine Neuberger of Oregon, and, most outstanding because she served five terms before she was defeated in 1972, Margaret Chase Smith of Maine. The so-called "widow's route" had been the means by which most women have entered Congress or state governorships. The first of the latter was Nellie Tayloe Ross, of Wyoming, who succeeded to her deceased husband's unexpired term as governor of Wyoming in 1924. The first woman to be elected governor of her state on her own merits alone was Ella T. Grasso of Connecticut, in 1974. The largest number of women elected to the House of Representatives up to now was only 20 (out of 435). in 1962; the Ninety-Fourth Congress, elected in 1974, will have 18. Additional "firsts" scored in this election were two women chosen state lieutenant governors, the Chief Justice of a state supreme court (Susie Sharp of North Carolina), and the mayor of a city larger than half a million inhabitants (Jane Hayes of San Diego.)" page 319

      From Fitzpatrick's Afterword written in 1996: "In fact, out-of-wedlock births rose some 54 percent between 980 and 1992, but the rate of illegitimacy was highest for women over twenty years of age. Unwed mothers continue to be overwhelmingly poor and deprived of skills and education, yet national debate still focuses on the moral and economic "crisis" of teenage pregnancy." page 333

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