Women's Political Participation Later 1920: Myth and Reality

past Kristina Graves, Ph.D.

In a 1912 letter of the alphabet written to British suffragist Millicent Garrett Fawcett, President Theodore Roosevelt remarked that he was "amused" that women in suffrage states voted like to men and that their votes contributed to his defeat for a third presidential term. [i]   Though Roosevelt was an avid supporter of women'southward suffrage, he believed that women'southward involvement would have no significant interest in American politics, a conventionalities that many Progressive era Americans did not share.  Roosevelt wrote to Fawcett vi years before American women gained the right to vote under the Nineteenth Amendment, but his words contradicted what many suffragists argued: that women'southward involvement in voting and politics would create wide changes that would create a better, stronger America.

In American history, the Nineteenth Subpoena represents the finish of a long-fought eighty-year entrada for women'south voting rights.  The popular narrative of this watershed is that women were non politically active prior to 1920.  This version of history oft ignores the reality that American women have aligned and acted according to political ideology since the days of the American Revolution.  Furthermore, the assumption that all women did not take the right to vote considering in that location was no federal amendment is a faux one. [ii]   Several western states granted full voting rights to women prior to 1920, such as Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, Utah, California, Nevada, Arizona, Oregon, and Washington.  Southern states did not grant women voting rights, merely some mid-western and eastern states allowed women to vote in local or state elections. [three]   Not but did women vote in key states, they also participated in national party politics.  During the Antebellum period, women were central players in the Free-Soiler, Liberty, and Republican Parties and, during the Golden Historic period, women participated in the political "machinery" to expand their opportunities and admission to the public sphere. [4]

Historian Christine Stansell states that the Nineteenth Subpoena was the "single greatest act of mass enfranchisement" in American history.  Despite this, the 1920 watershed is a problematic 1.  1, it did not enable black women to vote in the South.  It would have several decades before blackness women specifically, and women of color by and large, would achieve full voting rights in the United States. [5]   Ii, it did not drastically increase the number of women voters in elections.  Finally, information technology did not create a "gender gap" capable of significantly influencing American elections. [6]   Prior to the passage of the Nineteenth Subpoena, suffragists argued that women'southward voting rights would do good society.  Suffragists similar Carrie Chapman Catt, President of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, suggested that women voters would clean up club on issues like temperance, ending white slavery, child labor laws, and government corruption.  Furthermore, some suffragists argued that granting white women the correct to vote would act every bit a preventative measure against groups considered inferior, such as African-Americans in the South; Native Americans, Chinese, and Mormons in the West; and Western and Eastern European immigrants in the North. [7]

In reality, the Nineteenth Amendment, and women by the same standard, had very little impact on the voting landscape of America in the years following the ratification of the federal amendment. [viii]   The generation immediately following Globe War I was so apolitical that some quondam suffragists did non even vote. [ix]   Voter aloofness amongst women was so prevalent that magazines ran articles titled "Is Woman Suffrage a Failure" and "Woman Suffrage Alleged a Failure." [10]   In a survey conducted in 1927, it was determined that merely 35 to 40 pct of eligible women voters participated in the presidential elections of 1920.  In the same survey, it was stated that women followed the political example of their husbands and fathers when deciding whether or not to vote in the ballot.  Furthermore, Illinois was the only state that recorded the presidential vote according to sexual practice. [eleven]   This makes it difficult for historians to decide exactly how many American women voted in the 1920 and 1924 presidential elections.

While it is difficult to determine specific numbers of gendered voting, historians take identified trends that influenced the starting time nationally voting generation of women. [12]   One of the main reasons for voter aloofness amidst women was that men did non easily relinquish political power to women.  A good instance of this is the southern states of Mississippi and Georgia'southward response to the Nineteenth Amendment.  The political leadership of both states defied the newly ratified subpoena in a deliberate human action of voter suppression past refusing to update the deadline for registering newly enfranchised women. [13]   Political party leadership also made information technology difficult for many women to participate in the process and only acknowledged women as a voting group when information technology was convenient or necessary for ballot success. [14]   After the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and the failure of party leadership to acknowledge women's problems equally legitimate issues, many women's organizations embraced non-partisanship every bit their official platform.  Such was the case with the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and later on the League of Women Voters (LWV) which, both nether the leadership of Carrie Chapman Catt, embraced candidates from a wide array of political parties. [15] On an individual level, women continued to vote according to partisan preferences.  Generally speaking, women in the North and West tended to vote for the Republican Political party because it was the political party with the near distinct ties to the women'due south suffrage move.  In the Due south, white women overwhelmingly favored the Democratic Party despite the fact that the leadership never supported women's voting rights. [16]   Women were non solely responsible for the successful ballot of Warren Chiliad. Harding as president in 1920, but they did contributed to an overall Republican landslide in other races at the local, land, and national levels of government.

Discouragement of women's interest was not limited to voting, but also running for political office.  1 of the chief promises that suffragists made was that women would become more than involved in the political machinery and help to make clean out corruption.  In reality, women were seldom elected to positions of political power.  Often, this was considering women tended to encompass concepts of pacifism, feminism, and gender equality which made them controversial candidates. [17]   Political party leadership simply supported women candidates when it benefitted the party equally a whole and actively discouraged women from running for political office.  These tactics were effective and long-lasting.  In 1925, out of 7500 state legislature seats, women only held 150 of the seats.  Past 1930, there were only xiii women elected to Congress, but one-half of them were temporarily filling it for vacant seats. Women did not begin voting in record numbers and grade an increasingly Democratic voting bloc until the 1980s.  This was in response to the women'south liberation movement far more the suffrage move. [18]   Information technology would not be until 1992 that women gained a significant number of seats in Congress.  With each subsequent election, more and more female candidates are elected to serve at the local, land, and national levels of government. [19]

The gender gap that was predicted past suffragists never happened.  Women proved to be more divided on bug than previously anticipated, particularly on matters of protective legislation and racial issues.  A good example of this is the debate over the ERA during the 1920s because women were divided on the language of the proposed amendment.  Militant suffragists like Alice Paul, who authored the subpoena, and the National Adult female's Political party supported gender equality, while more bourgeois women similar Carrie Chapman Catt and the League of Women Voters, established from the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1919, supported the protective labor laws for women and were fearful that the ERA would erode this legislation. [twenty]   Similarly, racial problems split the women's vote forth colour lines, particularly in the American Southward.  Issues of white womanhood, religious fundamentalism, and fears of miscegenation complicated the outcome of the vote for white women.  The 1920s witnessed the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan and white women comprised four 1000000 members in the arrangement, furthering the grouping'southward commitment to racial purity and radical conservatism with efforts designed to mass disenfranchise the Due south's blackness population. [21]

And then, every bit is the instance now, women did not vote for candidates only because of their gender and some refused to vote for another woman out of personal disagreements with the private. [22] Furthermore, just as women had been some of the more than vocal opponents to women'southward voting rights, women voters did not always vote in line with the feminist platform.  Women disagreed on problems of birth command, pre-marital sex, and manner and those differences translated into differences in the voting booth.  The "New Adult female" of the Progressive era and the younger "flapper" generation were stark contrasts in American womanhood.  The shift in values from citizen equally voter to citizen as consumer had a major touch on on women after World War I and contributed profoundly to women's apparent apathy towards the vote. [23]   In contrast to what suffragists argued, women were not more inclined to participate in political discourse now that it was legal for them to do so.

The Nineteenth Subpoena equally a watershed moment in American women's history was a success because information technology was the largest example of enfranchisement in the nation'southward history. [24]   Nevertheless, the Nineteenth Amendment did not get the broad stroke of equality for which suffragists advocated.  For black women in the South, gerrymandering and Jim Crow would prevent access to the vote for some other forty-five years before African-Americans would be able to make utilize of their legal voting rights.  This was also true of other women of color: Latinas, Asian-Americans, and Native-Americans in the west faced bigotry in voting laws similar to African-Americans in the Southward.  The groups that would have benefitted the most from enfranchisement under the Nineteenth Amendment were the least able to admission their rights legally for a significant portion of the twenty-century.

Information technology is for this reason that the Nineteenth Amendment has a mixed legacy.  For one, it enfranchised, legally, a large percent of American women.  In reality, many women were still unable, or unwilling, to vote.  In the 1927 research written report examining women's voting patterns, the League of Women Voters responded to the data by challenge that "women are the worst offenders" when it came to non-voting. [25]   According to the Pew Research Eye, the gender gap promised by suffragists began to rising in the late twentieth century with the women's liberation motility.  However, equally recent every bit the 2016 presidential ballot, the data too shows that white women and black women go along to be divided in their votes.  By a large margin, white women voted for President Trump, while black women were solidly voting for Hillary Clinton. [26]

While the Nineteenth Amendment will keep to be an of import event studied in history classes at the secondary and collegiate level, it is critical that we examine the subpoena for what it really did versus what suffragists argued it would accomplish.  Women continued to exist partisan and apolitical, just as before the passage of the amendment.  Issues of race, morality, and religion influenced women's voting behaviors.  Despite the amendment and promises of a female person-centered future, men overwhelmingly continued to hold a tight grip on the American political arrangement in the years to come.  The women'southward liberation motility of the 1970s and 1980s would be the generation to attempt increasing women's political presence.  Even so, women in America continue to this twenty-four hours to be split betwixt black and white, liberal and conservative, young and sometime.  The reality of the Nineteenth Subpoena is that the law demonstrates the complicated political history of American women, ane that is securely divided and still growing.