Women and Civil Rights Flashcards
(68 cards)
What was the position like for women in 1865?
Before the American Civil War, women had become more involved in public life. The USA had become more democratic since the American Revolution in the 1770s, but political activity was confined to men in terms of voting and being elected to office. Nevertheless, women had become more active outside the home.
In which ways were women involved in public affairs before the civil war?
Growth in religious enthusiasm, women were often active in church societies. Women participated in the campaign against slavery and were often abolitionists. The former slave, Harriet Tubman, played a heroic role in rescuing slaves. Women took an active public role in the promotion of temperance in discouraging the drinking of alcohol. Parallel to these activities was the development of a movement for women’s suffrage.
How did women aim to promote change before the civil war?
There was a link between the social concerns that women took an interest in and organised themselves to promote and the wider political issue of suffrage. In order to promote change, women needed to have a political voice at national, state and local level. The sheer number of organisations for such causes shows that before the Civil War women were expanding their interests outside the home. They were involved in organisations for helping the poor, disseminating knowledge about childcare and good motherhood, Bible study and teaching, and campaigns for better working conditions and to improve property rights for women. They were also concerned with movements for moral reform and opposition to prostitution, The prevailing concept that a woman’s place in the home remained strong until into the twentieth century, and politically driven women remained in a minority.
How were women involved in political participation?
It was the anti-slavery movement that led to women organising to promote a political cause. The major turning point in the position of women was the first convention to discuss female suffrage in Seneca Falls in 1848. The first female Anti-Slavery Convention had taken place in 1847. Abolition of slavery and temperance were often concerns of white, middle class women, but there were also African American women who linked abolitionism with women’s rights. If women had the vote they would bring compassion and social concern to bear on political decisions. A notable African American campaigner was Sojourner Truth, but the main instigators of the Seneca Falls convention, which led to regular meetings, were middle-class women like Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The cause of women’s rights had able and eloquent leaders to act as role models for later campaigners.
What economic and social developments led to the interest of women in public causes?
Increasing diversification. Development of urbanisation, new technology bringing easier communication, greater literacy and better education for women before 1865. For those who prospered from the expansion of trade and industry, there was a new interest in domesticity- women not sharing with labours on the farm or in the workshop or pioneering expansion, but being responsible for the home. Women needed political representation in order to reinforce the social concerns of ‘womanly’ values of care and love to those in need.
What was the impact of the civil war?
Both sides relied on their home fronts to support the troops by running farms and plantations and working in some factories. Women raised funds, tended the wounded and suffered from economic devastation caused by the Northern invasion of the South. The war brought greater political rights for African Americans, albeit not permanently, so there was a hope that it would also bring more opportunities for women. However active abolition leaders and men who led abolitionist movements did not want to lose support by making it appear that abolitionists were also feminists. After the Civil War, the cause of African American and women’s rights became separated.
What problems did women face due to the Civil War?
When African Americans gained the vote, women were contemptuous. Men did not support a greater political role or social equality for women. As industry expanded, there was a tendency for paid work to be done outside the home, in factories and workshops. This increased the divide between the men who worked and the women who stayed at home and were concerned with purely domestic affairs. When women worked it was often in lower-paid, causal employment, domestic service or unskilled, poorly rewarded manufacturing jobs. When they worked alongside men in farms or in Southern sharecropping smallholdings, they were expected to bear the burden of domestic chores as well as helping with agricultural work. Women also suffered from limited birth control. In 1865 families remained large and there was limited use of contraception, leaving women with heavy childcare responsibilities. There were few professional opportunities available for women outside domesticity and prostitution increased which resulted in dangers and exploitation.
What was the campaign for prohibition?
The development of the temperance movement for the prohibition of alcohol was for many women the introduction to greater participation in public life. It was also a major reason for the development of a suffrage movement. The degree of organisation required to achieve a change in law and society was essentially a political act. One of the first instances of major change was the foundation of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in 1874. Prohibition activists had been keen abolitionists and also supported women’s right to vote.
What was the role of the WCTU and its impact?
By 1880, the WCTU had grown to a national organisation in 24 states with a membership of 27,000 women. By the 1880s, it had 168,000 members and membership reached 800,000 by 1920. Women organised its activities and set out their programme and strategy. This gained them valuable experience in publicity and mobilising support for a national cause. The union appealed to Protestant opinion in the Midwest, under the powerful leadership of Frances Willard and became a political force, working to ban alcoholic drinking to safeguard the family. They persuaded local legislatures to ban alcohol.
What was the link between religion and political demands, particularly in the 1950s and 60s?
In the North, many members had supported abolitionism and women’s suffrage. In the South, much of its appeal was due to a desire to restrict the sale of liquor to African Americans as it was believed their drunkenness would make them uncontrollable and violent. However, African American women were also enthusiastic because of the moral aspect, their strong religious beliefs and membership of Baptist churches.
What was the rural political involvement?
The greater food production of the 1870s meant falling prices and pressure on many farms in rural America. Small and medium sized farms came under competition and needed a political voice to represent their interests. Farmers were particularly concerned about the high cost and influence of the railway companies, and so they supported the Populist Party. Women were active in rural protests, especially in the Grange movement and Farmers’ Alliance. Women spoke at public meetings against the influence and spread of railways and for the need to protect farmers’ income. Elizabeth Lease was a well known orator for the Populist Party, and she and female activists led protests despite bitter hostility from business interests. The reforming impulse which swept through rural America in the Gilded Age also included Native American women, who in 1883, formed the Women’s National Indian Association for Native American Rights.
What was urban political involvment?
In the cities, female public activity often centred around charities, continuing their work done during the Civil War to help the poor. The Charity Organisation Society became a major outlet for many urban women’s energies. The experience of charity work led to many cities and states to appoint women to administer public charities, giving them experience of influencing local government. Women were effective in persuading many states to pass pension legislation in the 1900s, giving assistance to mothers, widows and wives whose husbands were unable to work through disability. Female graduates pioneered the settlement house movement of the late 1880s, establishing some 400 settlement houses in cities. These were where poorer people could find educational, recreational and cultural activities to relieve what were often bleak urban districts. In some areas, these took on a political aspect, providing a meeting place for social reformers and offering rooms for trade union meetings.
What led to the break with abolitionism?
Initially, a strong impetus came from abolitionism with the founding of the American Equal Rights Association in 1866 to remove restrictions on rights on both racial and gender grounds. In the post-war period, the Republicans were able to secure rights for African Americans in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments but there were unintended consequences for women:
- The Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed equal rights but penalised states which denied rights to ‘any of the male inhabitants of such state’
- The Fifteenth Amendment specifically stated that voting rights could not be denied ‘on account of race, colour, or previous condition of slavery’ but did not mention sex
Abolitionists felt that it was African Americans who commanded their first responsibility, not women. There was little support for the women’s suffrage groups which continued to campaign, and the fact that abolitionism had distanced itself from women’s rights to make sure that African Americans were prioritised weakened the cause of female suffrage.
What were the suffrage organisations?
Disappointment that the right to vote had been given to African Americans but not to women led Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to form the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869. This organisation was without the former alliance with the abolitionists and its membership was restricted to women. Protest about women’s suffrage was weakened by the creation of a rival organisation, the American Women Suffrage Association, which admitted men and focused more on getting women to vote in state legislatures. The cause was weakened by the divide between them, as their strategies were different. The NWSA campaigned for national change, but the AWSA aimed to get women voting in individual states for the state legislatures. In addition, they were a one-issue organisation whereas the national organisation took a broader view and adopted a feminist line, opposing male domination in a number of spheres. Although the two organisations merged in 1890 to become the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), the splits weakened the cause and many women put energies into temperance and social reform as an alternative.
What progress was there in some states?
The federal political structure gave women more opportunities to make progress. Individual states granted the right to vote to some women, for example, Wyoming in 1869 and Utah in 1870. In Utah, the Mormons wished to show that polygamy did not mean that women were exploited or had no rights, and some Mormon women were enthusiastic workers for the right to vote.
What was the issue regarding voting?
Susan B. Anthony and some 150 other women tried to vote in 1871 and 1872 ignoring the ruling by polling officials and were arrested and tried for electoral malpracitce. The judge told the jury to find them guilty for violating voting rules and they were fined. In 1875, when Virigina Minor sued the state of Missouri for preventing her from voting, the Supreme Court ruled that women were not allowed national voting rights, but states could give women the right to vote. By 1890, the suffrage campaigners had managed to get eight states to hold a vote on the issue, but in all of these the reformers were defeated. In all, there were campaigns in 33 states to get votes on the issue, but only Colorado and Idaho voted in favour before 1912. Twenty states permitted only widows with school-age children to vote, and, even then, hostile crowds often prevented women from casting their votes. Many men saw women voting as unnatural and a distraction from their domestic duties. Women needed to gain the vote in order to influence laws to help them with working conditions, to ban alcohol, to help with social reforms, or be involved with matters to do with raising children.
What was the opposition?
There were also groups of women opposed to suffrage. The National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, established in 1911 was one of the largest. The groups saw women’s rights as eroding the special place and respect for women in their work in the home, raising children and working for good causes. They feared that political equality would work against their interests of women who were happy with their existing status and cherished by their menfolk. These ideas had a long life and surfaced again in the opposition to equality in the 1960s. Opposition built up among some immigrants, Catholics, who saw suffrage reform as weakening the family and Southern Democrats disliked female suffrage, fearing women in politics would introduce labour laws which might hurt the South or work against the restrictions it had imposed on African Americans.
How much progress had been made by 1900?
By 1900, the suffragists had made little impact:
- Old splits in the organisations for greater rights for women remained
- Southern organisations were unwilling to give African American women the vote
- Not complete agreement about whcih types of women should be eligible to vote
- Opposition had been built up despite the progress that had been made
- Movement was distracted by other causes, like temperance
- Links with temperance seen as ‘too protestant’
In the 1900s, the US movement was influenced by the British suffragetes. The National Women’s Party was formed in 1916.
What was the impact of the First World War?
The First World War offered opportunities for women to gain rights. The leader of the NAWSA (Carrie Chapman Catt) insisted that the promise of suffrage would induce women to support the war effort wholeheartedly, and President Wilson agreed.
Why was the First World War more important in the development of women’s rights than the Civil War?
In both wars the cooperation and emotional commitment of women was needed. There was a protracted picketing of the White House by women demanding the vote. The Civil War was more protracted and for many in the South became a total war. The First World War did not involve women in a life or death struggle but it did increase economic activity and mean that women’s contribution to the workforce was important. Alice Paul and Lucy Stone founded the Congressional Union and the USA entering the war in 1917 was a major turning point. Also the allied propaganda of a liberal alliance with progressive Britain and France, against an autocratic and militarist Germany, shifted opinion. How could one fight for democracy and then keep women disenfranchised? The support given by some women to a Women’s Peace Party, which called for an end to war, shows the need to maintain support for the war. States were more receptive to NAWSA arguments. New York and Illinois enfranchised women in 1917, South Dakota, Michigan and Omaha in 1918. There had already been states which had enfranchised women before 1920. The NAWSA targeted anti-suffrage senators and some were defeated. By 1919, Congress was willing to pass the Nineteenth Amendment giving all American women the right to vote. This was effective in 1920.
Was the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 a major turning point?
Women gaining the vote in 1920 can be seen as a reward for war work, a symbolic extension of US democracy, an extension of the movement towards giving women political rights and a major move towards using women’s particular interests and abilities on a national scale. The amendment emerged as an expression of gratitude for women’s war work and as a result of effective campaigning by the NAWSA, but probably not because of any massive change of mind or heart by American men that women deserved the vote as a matter of natural justice and inherent democratic right. The reform did not mean women could gain everything they wanted. Once women were in Congress, they had to conform to the male dominated society, voting in the way their husbands favoured. Much economic and social change during the war proved to be short lived. African American women in the North fared better than African American women in the South. The Nineteenth Amendment seemed to some leaders like confirmation that women were free and equal citizens. Yet they still faced discrimination in terms of wages, social attitudes and the ability to exercise their rights.
How far did the extension of the franchise with the Nineteenth Amendment lead to to other changes?
Splits within women’s organisations impeded progress. Some thought that women should work within the existing two-party system, others believed either party would not choose substantial numbers of women as candidates to women would not be as active or on an equal level to men. They thought women should form a separate party. Without the central unifying cause of actually gaining the right to vote, there were divisions and a loss of impetus as different causes took the energies of women devoted to contributing to public life.
What types of women suffrage organisations were there after the Nineteenth Amendment?
The NAWSA changed into the League of Women Voters. The direction of this movement became divided between campaigners like Jane Addams, who wanted to campaign on women’s issues, and Carrie Champman Catt, who wanted women to integrate into national political life and develop into equal citizens and participants. Turnout in the elections of 1920 was low. The League of Women spent a lot of time and energy persuading women to vote and did not see many former suffragists join, only 5%-10% of members of the NAWSA joined the new organisation. There was more continuity with the general tendency of the pre-war period for women to campaign for specific social and civic issues. There were many professional and business organisations, women were active in church organisations, in groups promoting educational improvement and better working conditions and also in the continuing campaigns for temperance and moral uplift. There was interest in non-party political issues like the Women’s International League for Peace. The Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching urged federal action against increasing violence in the South against African Americans. Not all female political activity was radical, and conservative associations were also popular, most famously the Daughters of the American Revolution.
