Votes for Women: Selections from the National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection, 1848-1921

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Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt. (In 1920, after the 36th state had ratified.)

1) Woman Suffrage In 1938, Carrie Chapman Catt, a key coordinator in the woman suffrage movement, donated her collection of woman suffrage materials to the Library of Congress. Her collection chronicles the movement to gain the vote for women. Most of the materials are from speeches and meetings of activists, both women and men, who argued for and against woman suffrage. Search on the names of well-known people who campaigned for women's right to vote including Susan B. Anthony, Henry Blackwell, Carrie Chapman Catt, Lucretia Mott and Lucy Stone. For example, search on Lucy Stone for text such as,

Gentlemen will see it is no new claim that women are making. They only ask for the practical application of admitted, self-evident truths. If "all political power is inherent in the people," why have women, who are more than half the entire population of this State, no political existence? Is it because they are not people?... Women are even held to be citizens without the full rights of citizenship, but to bear the burden of "taxation without representation," which is "tyranny."

From " Woman Suffrage in New Jersey. An address by Lucy Stone at a hearing before the New Jersey Legislature, March 6, 1867."

Occupational portrait of a woman working at a sewing machine. [c 1853] From America's First Look at the Camera: Daguerreotypes, 1842-1862.

2) Other Legal Rights It took many years of organized struggle for women to gain the right to vote. However, between the first woman suffrage convention in 1848, and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, women and others did gain voting rights in some states. During this time, women also lobbied for child labor laws, women's labor rights, and education. Search on child labor, laws, and women's trade unions. For example, in "The Trade Union Woman," [1915] Alice Henry gives an overview of the women's trade union movement. In "Persuasion or Responsibility," Florence Kelley reports on child labor and illiteracy. She says,

According to the latest report of the Department of Education, the per cent of our population enrolled in the public schools had diminished during the past five years. The cotton fields of the South call for the black children, the cotton mills, wherever found, summon the white children. In the middle states, the sweat-shops of the great cities, the glassworks, and the Pennsylvania mines absorb the boys and girls.

Schools cost money, and boards of education are composed chiefly of business men, men eager to keep down the taxes and willing to have children work. ... It may be a mere coincidence,(but an interesting one), that illiteracy looms largest where women have least power, and grows less where they vote. Of the twenty states which have fewest illiterate children, women vote in eighteen.

A. Lincoln showing Sojourner Truth the Bible presented by colored people of Baltimore, Executive Mansion, Washington, D.C., Oct. 29, 1864. From Portraits of the Presidents and First Ladies, 1789-Present.

3) Abolitionist Movement The woman suffrage movement rose in part from other reform movements, including the movement to end slavery. Documents in the collection, such as "Proceedings of the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women . . ." [1838], highlight the relationship between the rights of women and the rights of slaves and former slaves. Search on abolition and slavery for documents that emphasize connections between abolitionism and the women's rights movement. Search on Sojourner Truth for some of the speeches of this famous former slave. For example, at the American Equal Rights Association meeting in 1867, Sojourner Truth said,

The object of this Association is to "secure Equal Rights to all American citizens, especially the Right of Suffrage, irrespective of race, color or sex." American Democracy has interpreted the Declaration of Independence in the interest of slavery, restricting suffrage and citizenship to a white male minority.

The black man is still denied the crowning right of citizenship, even in the nominally free States .... Half our population are disfranchised on the ground of sex; and though compelled to obey the law and taxed to support the government, they have no voice in the legislation of the country. This Association, then, has a mission to perform, the magnitude and importance of which cannot be over-estimated.

"For some odd reason the Wholesale Liquor Dealers Association doesn't happen to like the idea of female suffrage." From, "How it feels to be the husband of a suffragette, by him. Illustrations by May Wilson Preston. [c. 1915]

4) Other Reforms: Temperance, Marriage, Religion Among the reform movements of this period, documents discussing temperance, marriage, and religion can be found in this collection. Search on religion for such documents as "Woman's Right to Preach the Gospel" [1853], which is the sermon preached at the ordination of the first American woman into the clergy. Search on temperance for such documents as "Address Before the Second Biennial Convention of the World's Christian Temperance Union" [1893], by Frances Elizabeth Willard, which relates temperance to other areas of reform. Search on husband, marriage, and wife for documents about women's rights in a marriage. "For RentóOne Pedestal," [1917], contains a lively set of letters by Marjorie Schuler narrating her account of being, at first, a reluctant activist in the suffrage movement. The humorous "How It Feels to Be the Husband of a Suffragette" includes this commentary:

Lots of good men who have no intellectual objection to women's voting nurse at heart a timidity whenever they visualize the horrible results. You can see it in many a polite, genteel citizen's eye, the moment suffrage talk starts, as if he were wondering just what his own women folks would act like around the house if they knew they were as good as he was and could prove it legally.

Of course it is a false alarm. The percentage of divorces doesn't rise in suffrage states because of suffrage; and logically there is no more reason why two domestic partners who are comrades, mutually acknowledging a pleasant equality, should separate, than there is for the separation of two people of opposite sex who, condemned to live together, are striving diligently to maintain an inequality.

From "How it Feels to be the Husband of a Suffragette, by him." [c1915]

The Western College for Women Class of 1904, Oxford, Ohio. From Touring Turn-of-the-Century America, 1880-1921.

5) Education Significant advances in education for women took place during the period covered by this collection. As with other reforms, there was a struggle to gain advances in women's educational opportunities. Search on education for documents about improving women's access to education. For example, the group of essays, "Women and the Alphabet" discusses women's education and employment opportunities. The first essay describes the differences between pay for male and female teachers:

But every female common-school teacher in the United States finds the enjoyment of her four hundred dollars a year to be secretly embittered by the knowledge that the young college stripling in the next schoolroom is paid twice that sum for work no harder or more responsible than her own, and that, too, after the whole pathway of education has been obstructed for her, and smoothed for him.