Women

1
Womens Movement

• Thinking Skill Explicitly assess information and
  draw conclusions
• Objective Understand the nature of early 20th
  century womens reform in the larger context of
  the Progressive Era

2
What characteristics would you want in a leader?
Bold/Daring Cautious Aggressive Courageous Decisive Stoic Authoritative Decisive Passive Timid Emotional Hesitant Self Reliant Dependent Submissive
3
Which of these columns reflects the
traditional view of men? Of women?
Bold/Daring Aggressive Courageous Decisive Stoic Self Reliant Authoritative Cautious Passive Timid Hesitant Emotional Dependent Submissive
4
Are men seen as leaders because they possess
these characteristics? OrAre these traits
ascribed to men because they have traditionally
been leaders?
5
Struggle for Suffrage

• Suffrage Movement originated in 1848 at Seneca
  Falls, NY
• Disrupted by Civil War
• Split over support of 15th Amendment

6
Early Leaders

• Susan B. Anthony-
• organized National
• American Womens
• Suffrage Association
• (NAWSA) in 1890
• President through 1900
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton-
• Prominent member
• of NAWSA
• Women deserved to vote because they were equal
  to men.

7
Womens Movement Characteristics

• Educated Middle Class Women
• Formed a Grass Roots Movement
• Sought Suffrage The right to vote
• Actions Lobbied Legislators, Held Rallies,
  Parades, and Distributed Literature
• Women first receive
• the right to vote
• in the West

8
Voting in the West

• By 1910, women had full suffrage in four western
  states
• Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and Idaho
• What might explain the success of womens
  suffrage in the West?

9
(No Transcript)
10
NAWSA in the 1900s

• Carrie Chapman Catt- focused on womens unique
  role
• Assumed Presidency after 1900
• Developed Winning Plan- push for suffrage at
  both state and federal level
• Supported by white,native-born, middle-class
  women

11
Carrie Chapman Catt
12
(No Transcript)
13
Alice Paul
14
Iron Jawed Angels background

• http//womenshistory.about.com/library/weekly/aa01
  0118a.htm
• Differences in goals between NAWSA and NWP

15
Alice Pauls Womans Party Lobbying President
Wilson at the White House
16
(No Transcript)
17
Leaflet written and distributed by Alice Paul
outside of the White House in 1917.

• President Wilson and Envoy Root are deceiving
  Russia. They say "We are a democracy. Help us to
  win the war so that democracies may survive." We
  women of America tell you that America is not a
  democracy. Twenty million women are denied the
  right to vote. President Wilson is the chief
  opponent of their national enfranchisement. Help
  us make this nation really free. Tell our
  government that it must liberate its people
  before it can claim free Russia as an ally.

18
Strong Anti-Suffrage Sentiment

• What reasons would men have to oppose womens
  suffrage? What reason would women have to oppose
  their own right to vote?

19
(No Transcript)
20
Anti-suffrage Quotes

• I am satisfied with my present position, and of
  my almost unlimited power of usefulness, that I
  have no need of a vote, and should not use it if
  I had it.
• -Edith Milner, writing in The Times, 29 October
  1906
• I regard women as superior and I dont like to
  see them trying to become mens equal.
• -Miss Violet Markham, speaking in October 1910

21
(No Transcript)
22
This cartoon (drawn by a man) stereotypes
Suffragettes as bitter old crones engaged in a
gender-war against men.

23
(No Transcript)
24
(No Transcript)
25
NAOWS

• Groups like the
• National Association Opposed to
• Woman Suffrage (NAOWS).
• Were opposed to women
• gaining the vote because
• they believed that women
• belonged in the domestic
• rather than the political sphere
• of life.

http//www.primaryresearch.org/suffrage/show.php?d
irdodgeletterfile1
26
Alleged Areas of Difference Between Men and Women
(Summary of newspaper stories and editorials from
the early 1900s).

• 1. The frailty of women make them unsuited
  for the vote. Once a woman arrived at the
  polling place she would have to mingle among the
  crowds of men who gather around the pollsand to
  press her way through them to the ballot box.
  Assuming she reached the polling place, she might
  get caught in a brawl and given womens natural
  fragility, she would be the one to get hurt.
  (Mayor, 64)
• 2. Allowing women to vote would lead to foreign
  aggression and war. (Mayor, 65)
• 3. If women got the vote they would be placed in
  situations where their vulnerability, based on
  ignorance and frailty, would be exploited.
• 4. If women got the vote, they could hide extra
  ballots in their dress and slip them into the
  ballot box unnoticed.
• 5. If women got the vote, they would have to
  mingle in the dirty world of politics and would
  tarnish their naturally high morals.

27

• Note - Some arguments against suffrage, from both
  men and women alike, attempted to justify their
  position on the grounds that women were superior,
  not inferior, to men.

28
Anti-suffrage 1913 article

• http//www.primaryresearch.org/suffrage/show.php?d
  irbeverlybeaconfile12

29
Anti-Suffrage Analysis

• The suffrage movement in the UK also met with
  opposition
• The Anti-Womens Suffrage League (London, 1908)
• Serious concern about the impact of women
  getting the vote was quite widespread throughout
  the duration of the campaign. This concern had
  complex roots bound up with Victorian views about
  womens position in society. On the one hand
  women were considered too precious and innocent
  to become embroiled in public life, on the other
  they were thought too irrational and emotional to
  make an intelligent contribution. Whatever their
  abilities, their place was thought to be in the
  home.

30
More common arguments against suffrage

• - Women and men have separate spheres.
• - Most women do not want the vote.
• - Womens role is in local affairs.
• - Women are already represented by their
  husbands.
• - It is dangerous to change a system that
  works.
• - Women do not fight to defend their country
•  - Women would be corrupted by politics and
  chivalry would die out
• - If women became involved in politics, they
  would stop marrying, having children, and the
  human race would die out
•  - Women are emotional creatures, and incapable
  of making a sound political decision.

31
Even when the position appeared to have be in
favor of womens voting rights, the argument used
was often based on prevailing stereotypes that
were grounded in false assumptions about gender
roles

• Words on the cartoon "Woman Devotes Her Time to
  Gossip and Clothes Because She Has Nothing Else
  to Talk About. Give Her Broader Interests and She
  Will Cease to Be Vain and Frivolous

32
Who is she appealing to here?

• Jane Addams Why Women Should Vote (1915)
• If woman would fulfill her traditional
  responsibility to her own children if she would
  educate and protect from danger factory children
  who must find their recreation on the street
  then she must bring herself to use the ballot.

33
Steps toward the 19th amendment

• Between 1878, when the amendment was first
  introduced in Congress, and August 18, 1920, when
  it was ratified, champions of voting rights for
  women worked tirelessly, but strategies for
  achieving their goal varied. Some pursued a
  strategy of passing suffrage acts in each
  state--nine western states adopted woman suffrage
  legislation by 1912. Others challenged male-only
  voting laws in the courts. Militant suffragists
  used tactics such as parades, silent vigils, and
  hunger strikes. Often supporters met fierce
  resistance. Opponents heckled, jailed, and
  sometimes physically abused them.

34
(No Transcript)
35

• The thirty-three women arrested that day were
  taken to the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia. As
  protestors returning to the line after a series
  of unjust arrests and subsequent trips to
  Occoquan, they were no strangers to the violent
  and abusive behavior they faced. Many had already
  been beaten, violently force fed rotten and
  maggot infested food, denied medical attention
  and forced to live in unsanitary conditions.
  Still, little could have prepared them for what
  has become known as the Night of Terror for the
  appalling treatment it brought them.  By order of
  Occoquans superintendent, as many as forty
  guards armed with clubs went on a rampage,
  attacking the jailed and defenseless women. They
  were dragged, beaten and choked, slammed into the
  hard iron furnishings of the cells, and chained
  up injured and bleeding. One woman suffered a
  heart attack which was ignored while she saw her
  compatriot lying unconscious and presumed dead on
  the floor. Shamefully, it took a night of terror
  to affect change. When news got out about the
  nightmare endured at Occoquan, public outrage
  rose to the point that even President Woodrow
  Wilson, staunchly opposed to womens suffrage,
  started to reverse his position. While he may not
  have cared about the plight of the women, he was
  shocked at the events of that night and he was
  not blind to the outrage of his public. The
  wheels of our government are slow to move and it
  took three more years for women to get the vote
  they never shouldve been made to fight for but
  it was a turning point and tales of that night
  are often used to urge women to exercise their
  right vote.
• http//spitbristleandfury.wordpress.com/tag/protes
  t/

36
Steps toward the 19th amendment

• August 2020 will mark the 100th anniversary of
  the ratification of the 19th amendment to the
  Constitution. The amendment guarantees all
  American women the right to vote. Achieving this
  milestone required a lengthy and difficult
  struggle victory took decades of agitation and
  protest. Beginning in the mid-19th century,
  several generations of woman suffrage supporters
  lectured, wrote, marched, lobbied, and practiced
  civil disobedience to achieve what many Americans
  considered a radical change of the Constitution.
  Few early supporters lived to see final victory
  in 1920

37
19th Amendment (1920) Right to vote shall not be
denied or abridged on account of sex In part due
to timing (WWI)
38
(No Transcript)
39
(No Transcript)
40
What is the central message of this cartoon?
41
(No Transcript)
42
Reform Campaigns

• Besides Suffrage
• many women joined
• the progressives
• Child Labor Laws
• Abortion/ Birth Control
• Prohibition
• Poverty
• Labor Conditions
• (Women and Children)
• Foods and Health

43
Other early 20th Century Womens Efforts

• Margaret Sanger- crusade for birth control
• Florence Kelly- child labor protection, National
  Consumers League
• Equality in the workplace
• Carrie Nation- Temperance movement to ban
  alcohol- Womens Christian Temperance Union
  (WCTU) organized in 1874
• Jane Addams Settlement House
• Ida B. Wells

44

• How does Sanger use her practical experience as
• a nurse to make her case?
• 2. To what extent does she make a feminist
  argument? To what extent does she make an
  argument based on class and economic issues?
• 3. How does she criticize the role of the state
  in dealing with birth control? Does she envision
  a more positive, active role for government?

45
Margaret Sanger

• The Case for Birth Control
• Prevent women in the slums from having unwanted
  pregnancies
• First birth control clinic in the US
• Questions for Discussion
• Was birth control more important than the right
  to vote, or equality in the workplace?
• Is birth control the solution to preventing the
  death of children in poverty?
• Which is more moral, to prevent excessive
  births or to protect life?
• Are free clinics the solution? Is more
  information the solution?

46
Early Feminists Oppose Abortion

• Majority of early progressive women were opposed
  to abortion (even radicals like Alice Paul)
• Discussion
• Why did most early feminists oppose abortion?
• How do modern feminists feel?
• Is abortion a cry of despair, proof of womens
  powerlessness and inequality?
• Will creating better conditions for women lead to
  a decrease in abortions?
• Does the right to an abortion empower women?

47
Charlotte Perkins Gillman

• Wrote Women and Economics
• History of sexual discrimination
• Thesis Subordination of women is result of their
  economic dependence on men. Women should seek
  equality in the workplace, no longer focus on
  domestic sphere.
• Discussion Do you agree or disagree with
  Gillmans argument?
• How equal is the workplace today?
• What are some solutions to help women in the
  workplace?
• Should women be allowed to participate in all
  jobs that men participate?
• Are men or women better at certain domestic
  tasks?

48
Continuing stereotypes..

• When my predecessors at TIME reviewed ecologist
  Rachel Carsons book Silent Spring 50 years ago
  this month, they were less than impressed. While
  the piece praised her graceful writing style, it
  argued that Carsons emotional and inaccurate
  outburst was hysterically overemphatic, which
  I believe is a fancy way of saying that the lady
  writer let her feelings get the best of her
• Time 2012