Suffrage

SUFFRAGE PRIOR TO 1920

The campaign for female enfranchisement, which began at the nation’s founding, was long and contentious. In 1776, Abigail Adams urged her husband John to “remember the ladies” when drafting the laws of the new United States, but the framers of the Constitution failed to endorse women’s political equality. In 1848, women reformers organized and led a meeting in Seneca Falls, New York, to demand greater rights for women, including the right to vote. Two years later, activists held the first national women’s rights convention in Worchester, Massachusetts. As the nineteenth century progressed, the national movement, as well as state and local organizations, built upon and expanded the work begun in the earlier decades. But the movement was never monolithic; differing strategic approaches and personality conflicts created splinter groups that sometimes worked at cross purposes. Post-Civil War discussions over the extension of voting rights to freedmen led to a rift in the suffrage ranks. Some women’s rights advocates opposed granting formerly enslaved men the right to vote unless women received the ballot as well, while others argued that securing the ballot for African American men was an important piece of a national suffrage and civil rights agenda. This disagreement over strategy and priorities led to the establishment of two competing national suffrage organizations, the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association. The American Association favored a state strategy for winning woman suffrage, while the National advocated a federal approach, a Constitutional amendment that would guarantee women’s political rights.

In the latter decades of the nineteenth century, constitutional conventions in numerous states and territories considered women’s enfranchisement. In each of these campaigns, suffrage activists expended significant money and energy on state-by-state lobbying efforts with little success. In 1890, the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association agreed to set aside their differences and merged to become the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). But disagreement and discord persisted. The movement remained divided along lines of race and class. White middle- and upper-class suffrage leaders actively sought to prohibit the participation of African American women and generally refused to take up working women’s economic grievances. The National Woman’s Party, formed in 1914, advocated militant tactics such as protests outside the White House and hunger strikes, strategies not endorsed by the more cautious NAWSA.

Despite the ongoing division, the movement continued to gain momentum in the early decades of the twentieth century under the leadership of a new generation of reformers, including NAWSA president Carrie Chapman Catt. Following the successful 1917 campaign for suffrage in New York, on June 4, 1919, the U.S. Senate passed the suffrage amendment, the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which was ratified on August 18, 1920, and guaranteed women the right to vote.

For information about the suffrage campaign in Iowa, see “Women’s Suffrage in Iowa: A Sneak Peek of a New Digital Collection,” Iowa Women’s Archive, University of Iowa Library.

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Iowa women could not vote in general elections before 1920, but some did hold public office prior to women’s enfranchisement. Julia C. Addington was the first woman elected to public office in Iowa and was perhaps the first woman in the United States to win election to any post. In 1869, she was elected superintendent of schools in Mitchell County. When questions arose over the legality of a woman assuming elected office, the Iowa Attorney General ruled that no law precluded Addington from holding the position of county school superintendent. This legal ruling did not silence all her critics or guarantee acceptance by her colleagues. By agreeing to run for office at a time when few women took on such public roles, Addington invited intense scrutiny and risked ridicule and scorn. Because of ill health, she retired in 1871. Other women elected to public office prior to 1920 include Edna Snell, elected superintendent of Mahaska County schools in 1871; Mary Work, elected in 1880 to the Polk County, Delaware Township, school board; and Flora Dunlap, who became the first woman elected to the Des Moines school board in 1912.

Sources and Further Reading