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The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote
Elaine Weiss
By
Published: May 28, 2019
Category:
History
GUEST BUTLER JILL SWITZER last reviewed a biography of Sandra Day O’Connor/. She has been a member of the State Bar of California for 40 years and now is a full-time mediator. She writes a weekly column for Above the Law, where she rants without interruption. She also contributes to Legal Ink and other legal publications.
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In 1919, by the slimmest of margins — one vote — the Susan B. Anthony Amendment was approved by Congress. Now 36 states needed to approve the amendment so it could become law. 35 voted aye, 9 rejected it, 3 refused even to consider it. “If the Tennessee legislature ratified the Nineteenth Amendment,” Elaine Weiss writes, “woman suffrage would become the law of the land and twenty-seven million women would be able to vote, just in time for the fall presidential elections; if the legislature rejected it, the amendment might never be enacted. It all came down to Tennessee.”
In the steamy Nashville summer of 1920, both the “Suffs” and the “Antis” descended on the Tennessee capital en masse to twist arms, lobby legislators — all men, of course — and sway them to their respective positions. “The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote” is a fascinating, detailed account of exactly that: the story of the women who supported and those who opposed the right of women to vote. It was the Tennessee variation of the War of the Roses; the Suffs wore yellow roses, the Antis red.
The women and men who opposed suffrage were just as forceful in their opposition as those who supported it. The Antis feared destruction of the moral order if women could vote. Ratification was a battle of home and hearth versus women who had doggedly fought for decades for a right they thought they should have had at the nation’s founding, but still didn’t. There were many tensions at play: Tennessee was a Southern state that had fought for the South not all that long ago, a state angry at Reconstruction, a state that didn’t like outsiders telling it what to do, a state angry at President Woodrow Wilson for dragging its men into war overseas.
Passions ran high. The whole world was watching. Many European countries already had women’s suffrage. Why not the United States? [To read an excerpt, click here. To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here. For the audio book, click here.]
Among the leading players: Carrie Chapman Catt, a Northerner who had led the Suffragist movement, and Josephine Pearson, a Tennessee native and leader of the Antis. Catt, an Iowa farm girl, wondered at an early age why her mother could not vote in the 1872 presidential election, leading to her lifetime as a suffragist. Pearson was 52 years old, with both college and graduate degrees and a career as an educator. But did she ever have missionary zeal:
Barely a week before Mother had died in the summer of 1915, in the library of their house on the Methodist Assembly grounds in Monteagle (Father was a retired Methodist minister), Amanda Pearson had grasped Josephine’s hand and implored: “Daughter, when I’m gone-if the Susan B. Anthony Amendment issue reaches Tennessee-promise me, you will take up the opposition, in My Memory!” Josephine bent to kiss her mother’s brow, to impress the vow upon her forehead, and answered: “Yes, God helping, I’ll keep the faith, Mother!” So when the telegram arrived late Saturday afternoon, it was with a sense of holy purpose that Josephine Pearson quickly packed her travel case, walked from her house to the depot, and bought a one-way ticket for the late train to Nashville.
Issues abounded. One was whether the Legislature could vote on the proposed Amendment in a special session without running afoul of the state’s constitution. Another concern: would it complicate the Democratic Governor’s re-election campaign? A conundrum for the Suffs was the racial issue. Black women had the right in Tennessee to vote in municipal elections, but that was far as it went. The proposed Amendment said that no one shall be denied the right to vote “on the basis of sex,” but did that include black women? It was assumed that black men had previously been granted the right to vote based on the 14th Amendment. The Suffs evaded that issue in their push to have Tennessee ratify the Amendment, concerned that if race became an issue or the issue, the chances for ratification would diminish, given Tennessee’s history. Their zeal did not make the Suffs inclusive; their goal was ratification and if sacrifices had to be made, so be it.
Dirty pool is nothing new in retail politics, and that’s what was played back in 1920, long before radio, television, billboards and the ubiquitous social media. The ratification fight was nasty and physical. It may be been dubbed “petticoat politics,” but it was anything but demure. Still yet another issue was head counting. Both the Suffs and the Antis travelled all over the state to count noses for votes. No vote was secure; the pressure put upon the men by both factions was relentless. Both the Suffs and the Antis travelled all over the state to count noses for votes. No vote was secure; the pressure put upon the men by both factions was relentless.
Weiss keeps the tension mounting while the jockeying goes back and forth in the Tennessee House. The Tennessee Senate voted for ratification after the usual amount of arm-twisting and delays; the Tennessee House was uncertain until literally the final moment. The suspense as to the eventual outcome is finely crafted, and even though we know what happened, knowing the outcome doesn’t make the story of ratification any less suspenseful:
“Housewives left the breakfast dishes in the sink. Clerks took the morning off, and shop attendants might have even called in sick. Farm wives gave the cows an early milking and hopped into the truck for the bumpy ride into the city. Whole families arrived on the streetcars, carrying picnic baskets.”
The vote in the House went back and forth several times. Seth Walker, Speaker of the House, who the Suffs thought was in favor of ratification, switched sides and became the Antis advocate. Now it was unclear whether the Amendment would pass. Two more votes were needed for ratification. One vote came via a letter from a legislator’s mother who prompted her son to vote for ratification: “Hurrah and vote for suffrage and don’t keep them in doubt … Don’t forget to be a good boy and help Mrs. Catt … With lots of love, Mama.” That tied the vote. Then it happened: one final “aye.” Silence gave way to shock to an eruption of hollering, whooping, screams and cries. The Suffs had their ratification. And on November 2, 1920, ten million women voted for the first time.
Despite its title, “The Woman’s Hour” is not a “woman’s book.” It’s a reminder that success should not be taken for granted. “Everything the Cause had accomplished — every state won, every piece of legislation, every change of heart and shift in policy — was once considered utterly impossible,” Weiss writes. “Until it wasn’t.” A hundred years later, as Weiss points out, we have seen that winning the women’s right to vote did not lead to a woman president in the 2016 election, nor has it led to women voting in a bloc, nor have women reformed politics in meaningful ways. Alice Paul, another one of the Suffs leaders, said afterward that getting the vote was only the beginning of the fight for women’s equality. She was spot on.
