Happy Women’s Equality Day! On August 26, 1920, the 19th Amendment became law, and American women gained “suffrage,” which simply means they got to vote. For over 70 years, women had organized, lectured, petitioned, and marched to get that right. But there were also some little-known and often downright astonishing forces that helped to unlock access to the ballot box.
10Bigots Against Slavery
Northern abolitionists, who angrily demanded justice and equality for African Americans in the South, could be a lot less progressive when it came to the women in their own homes. There was a common belief that women were intended to be wives and mothers subservient to their husbands. So it was fine when thousands of women worked to end slavery by handing out pamphlets or signing petitions, but it was considered unacceptable when they started to lecture or tried to become leaders. Two white sisters from the South, Sarah Moore and Angelina Grimke, joined the lecture circuit to share their eyewitness accounts of the horrors of slavery. In 1836, when the sisters spoke to mixed audiences of both men and women, it was considered so unladylike that many shocked anti-slavery activists tried to silence them. Another example of gender discrimination came in 1840 at the World Anti-Slavery Conference in London. Male abolitionists seated the elected female delegates off to the side and wouldn’t let them address the male delegates. Soon, some female abolitionists decided that they couldn’t effectively help slaves gain freedom that they themselves didn’t have. In 1848, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton—two of the abolitionists who’d been sidelined at the London conference—took center stage in Seneca Falls,
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New York, where they held America’s first women’s rights convention. Stanton introduced “The Declaration of Sentiments,” a list of resolutions on women’s rights—including the resolution that women should be able to vote. Though the ideas promoted at the Seneca Falls Convention were widely laughed at, the event inspired many anti-slavery activists to also work for women’s rights. And it was the first formal shot in the battle for the vote.
9A Change of Underwear
Amelia Bloomer was an activist working for the temperance movement when she attended the Seneca Falls Convention. Inspired, she soon started the first women’s newspaper, The Lily, which became a force for women’s rights. The Lily also asserted that changing your underwear could change your life. In Amelia’s time, women wore long skirts to hide their legs and ankles. Underneath those skirts were up to 6 kilograms (14 lb) of undergarments. These could include corsets, hoop skirts, and bustles along with voluminous cotton or flannel petticoats. The feminine ideal of the day was a delicate creature who found it hard to cope without the protection of a man—and since they were already coping with corsets that made it difficult to breathe, heavy petticoats, and a skirt that could easily trip them up, women did indeed seem to be fragile and in need of male help. Amelia, along with other advocates of women’s rights, happily ditched her weighty under-duds and took to sporting Turkish harem pants worn under a knee-length dress. When Amelia wrote about her new clothes, subscriptions to her newspaper increased by the thousands. Readers
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eagerly sought information about revolutionary piece of clothing that came to be known as “bloomers.” Since bloomers included pants (which made it obvious that women had legs) they were considered shocking. Unflattering cartoons, like the one pictured above, linked the new garments to smoking and other “unwomanly” behavior. The clothing caused such a fuss that most women gave them up. But bloomers also brought The Lily into thousands of households, introducing many women to the idea that they deserved the right to vote. That idea, unlike the fashion fad, didn’t fade away.
8The Afflicted
What did people do to pass the time without TV, smartphones, video games, or Listverse? The fact that Ben Franklin collected blamed for their imprisonment. That November there was a “Night of Terror” when Sentinels held in Virginia’s Occoquan Workhouse were beaten, dragged, and choked. Meanwhile, in a jail in Washington, Alice Paul was leading a hunger strike. Though very weak, she proclaimed that she would starve to death to get liberty for women. When NWP inmates appeared in court bruised and battered, the nation was outraged, and Wilson’s advisers urged him to “do something.” Paul was usually allowed no visitors, but a Washington journalist did visit her cell and might have offered a deal from the President. Within days of his visit, all the protestors were suddenly released and there were no Silent Sentinels picketing the White House over Christmas. Early in January, Wilson threw his support behind the 19th Amendment. The bill passed the following year. Wilson claimed that his support was a reward for women’s tireless war work, but there are
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suspicions that what he really wanted was no more grief from Alice Paul.
1Heroic Politicians
“Heroic” and “politician” don’t usually go together, but some of America’s male politicians were definitely suffrage heroes. In 1878, Senator Aaron Sargent of California—a friend of Susan B. Anthony and a steadfast supporter of women’s rights—introduced a bill nicknamed “the Susan B. Anthony Amendment.” It stated that no citizen could be prevented from voting because of their gender. Unfortunately, the bill took a while to pass. Forty years later, three congressmen went above and beyond to help the Anthony Amendment (now officially the 19th Amendment) pass the House of Representatives. Thetus W. Sims of Tennessee had a painful broken shoulder, but he not only showed up to vote with his arm in a sling, he also lobbied his Southern colleagues to vote for the bill, too. Indiana’s Henry Barnhart was carried into the House on a stretcher to give his vote. And Congressman Frederick Hicks of West Virginia obeyed his dying wife’s request to leave her bedside so he could make sure the amendment passed. But the drama wasn’t over even when the 19th Amendment finally won passage in both the House and the Senate—it still had to be ratified by at least 36 states. The press followed the frantic trip of West Virginia State Senator Jessie Bloch as he rushed home from a vacation in California because the governor had called a special ratification session. He knew the bill wouldn’t pass without him—and he arrived just in time to cast the vote that made West Virginia the 34th state to ratify the Amendment.
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Even more dramatic was the saga of 24-year-old State Representative Harry Burn. His vote made Tennessee the 36th state to ratify the 19th Amendment, and thus was the deciding vote in making women’s suffrage the law of the land. Desperate anti-suffragists demanded that Harry change his “aye” to “nay.” They accused him of taking bribes, ordered his mom to make him change his mind, and generally harassed him until he had to hire bodyguards. But Harry stood firm, proud of his action “to free 17 million women from political slavery.” Read more: http://listverse.com/2014/08/26/10-weird-reasons-why-women-got-the-vote/ 10 Weird Reasons Why Women Got The Vote
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