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Woman Suffrage in Western America
Utah Historical Quarterly
Vol. 38, 1970, No. 1
Woman Suffrage In Western America
BY T. A.LARSON
THE ADOPTION OF WOMAN SUFFRAGE by popular vote in communities of any size was impossible before the 1890's. A small number of woman's rights advocates, male and female, had been campaigning since the Seneca Falls, New York, convention of 1848, but the masses were unmoved. Horace Greeley was probably right when he said in 1867 that at least three-fourths of the women of New York State "do not choose to vote." More than twenty years later the California suffragist Clara S. Foltz could still say "O, how much I do wish we could rally the women to the necessity of doing something for their own cause. . . . 'The women don't want to vote' ... is the 'stunner' that we friends of the cause have to meet at every hand. . . . ," A few years later, in 1902, Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper wrote "In the indifference, the inertia, the apathy of women lies the greatest obstacle to their enfranchisement."
Mary Wollstonecraft as early as 1792 had pointed to the need for women to have educational opportunities comparable to those for men, but broadened opportunities came very slowly in the nineteenth century. It was impossible to get rank and file women interested in voting until more of them had been educated up to it. Most male voters could not be expected to favor female suffrage until more women had become interested, and their interest would not develop without prolonged education and agitation.
Pioneering suffragists encountered scathing ridicule. Their pleas for justice and equality evoked arguments that sound strange today but evidently were plausible to most of their contemporaries. Typical objections to woman suffrage included these: woman's place is in the home; most women do not want the vote; women are already represented; only bad and ignorant women would vote; there is no precedent; it is contrary to the Bible; women who lack the strength to enforce laws should not help make them; if women vote, they must fight; there are too many voters already; it will only double the vote, without changing the result, since women will vote as their husbands do; if they do not vote with their husbands, there will be domestic discord.
Some suffragists thought it best to work for an amendment to the United States Constitution, which would require a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress and approval of the legislatures of three-fourths of the states. Not until 1919, however, could they get Congress to submit the proposal to the states. Other suffragists, considering it impossible to secure passage of a national amendment, preferred to spend their energies in campaigns for amendments to state constitutions. But amending a state constitution, which required passage by both houses of the legislature and then approval by popular vote, was not much easier than amending the U.S. Constitution. In Kansas, where conditions appeared to be as favorable as anywhere in the country, the legislature submitted a woman suffrage amendment to the people in 1867, but it was rejected by a vote of more than two to one. In other states the legislatures regularly refused to submit such an amendment to the people. In exceptional cases — Michigan in 1874, Colorado in 1877, Nebraska in 1882, Oregon in 1884, Rhode Island in 1886, Washington in 1889, and South Dakota in 1890 — the legislatures did submit the amendment, but the voters uniformly rejected it. Not until 1893, in Colorado, could the suffragists win a statewide election.
In the territories, however, woman suffrage could be adopted without a popular vote, and, indeed, woman suffrage bills came close to being passed by the legislatures of Washington and Nebraska territories in 1854 and 1856, respectively. A simple majority, either in Congress or in a territorial legislature, with the approval of the executive in each case, was all that was necessary.
The New York Times, December 17, 1867, proposed in an editorial that woman suffrage be tried in Utah Territory, presumably by act of Congress. The Times thought that if women had the vote in Utah they might outlaw polygamy and thereby please many people in the East. A year later, on December 14, 1868, George Washington Julian, Republican congressman from Indiana, introduced a bill to give women the right to vote in all the territories. In the following February, a spokesman for "The Universal Franchise Association," Professor J. K. H. Willcox, in testimony before the House Committee on Territories said that Julian's bill, if passed, would attract women to the West from the "overcrowded East" by "offering them greater security in person and property" and in so doing would lessen the unequal distribution of the sexes, raise wages, reduce the amount of prostitution, and destroy polygamy in Utah. This bill for establishing woman suffrage in all the territories died in committee, as did another Julian bill introduced March 15, 1869, which proposed to give women the right to vote in Utah Territory but not in other territories. By this time the New York Times had decided that the women of Utah would not vote against polygamy, and that moreover the people of Utah, male and female, would welcome an act of Congress extending suffrage to the women of that territory.
The suggestion that woman suffrage might first be tried in the territories thus was dropped in Congress but not before it had received considerable publicity in 1867, 1868, and 1869. In view of the alluring prospects described by Professor Willcox before the House Committee on Territories it is not surprising that the idea was picked up by legislators in six western territories in 1869 or 1870. Four of them — Colorado, Dakota, Idaho, and New Mexico—failed to adopt bills that were introduced, but two others, Wyoming and Utah, gave their women the right to vote. Dakota missed its golden opportunity for fame when its legislature failed by just one vote to pass a woman suffrage bill in January 1869. Next to consider such action was the very first legislature in the new territory of Wyoming, and it capitalized on the opportunity which Dakota had let slip through its hands. Wyoming enacted woman suffrage, including the right to hold office, December 10, 1869. Two months later, February 12, 1870, Utah Territory gave women the right to vote but not to hold office. Utah women actually voted on two occasions before Wyoming women could vote in September 1870.
Romantics have imagined that western leadership in woman suffrage stemmed from chivalry and notions of equality and democracy rooted in the frontier environment. Others have associated western leadership with the Puritan ethic and with the Populist and Progressive movements. Pendleton Herring has written that "The struggle for woman suffrage was a long battle fought largely outside party lines and by the organized women themselves." Herring's generalization has some validity for the national story but for western territories more appropriate is this one offered by Alan P. Grimes: "In newly emerging societies, decidedly significant political actions may be the result largely of pure chance, coincidence, or a fortuitous combination of circumstances."
Accounts of what actually happened in Wyoming and Utah, and why, have been so confused that attempts to set the record straight are in order. The differences between Utah Territory and Wyoming Territory, and between their woman suffrage experiences, are so striking that separate treatment is appropriate. Dr. Thomas Alexander tells the Utah story in a separate article while the Wyoming story will be related here.
The Wyoming territorial legislature which passed the woman suffrage bill in December 1869 was small — nine men in the upper house, twelve in the lower. Only one member had had any previous legislative experience. All members of both houses belonged to the Democratic party. Rather late in the session the president of the upper house gave notice that he would introduce a bill for woman's rights. Fifteen days later he introduced his bill and it passed the upper house by a vote of six to two with little debate. Vigorous opposition w^as encountered in the lower house where eventually a favorable vote of seven to four was obtained, after an amendment had been incorporated raising the voting age from eighteen to twenty-one. The upper house accepted the amendment, and the governor, a Republican, signed the bill after much soul searching.
Remarkably, there was no suffrage society in the territory, and the legislature had received no suffrage petition. There had been, however, some discussion of woman suffrage in Cheyenne newspapers just before and during the legislative session, centering around two lectures by itinerant eastern suffragists, Anna Dickinson and Redelia Bates. Both of these young women were very attractive. Their personalities had greater impact than their messages, but undoubtedly they charmed their audiences, which included a number of legislators; and they may well have won a few votes for their cause.
The man who introduced the bill was William H. Bright, age fortysix, a Virginian who had served in the Union Army as a major in the Office of the Chief Quartermaster in Washington, D. C, in 1864. After the war he became a special agent in the Post Office Department in Salt Lake City, and then in 1868 moved to South Pass City, Wyoming, where he opened a saloon. Bright had enjoyed little if any formal schooling. In later life, when queried, he explained that he had introduced the suffrage bill because he thought it right and just and because he thought that if Negroes had the right to vote, as they did, women "like my wife and mother" should also have the franchise. "Bright is already immortal," judged the Cheyenne Leader, foremost newspaper of the territory, February 12, 1870. For twenty years after the event, contemporaries agreed that Bright deserved major credit for placing Wyoming at the head of the woman suffrage parade, but thereafter he was almost forgotten as the claims of others came to the surface.
Bright's place as sponsor of the bill is a matter of public record, and his contemporaries gave him full credit. But what persuaded the other legislators to vote as they did? Unfortunately, the assembly journals, although they give motions and votes, do not record the debates. They indicate how men voted, but not why, and press coverage was disgracefully laconic. Nevertheless, a general summary statement which can be documented to a considerable extent runs as follows. William H. Bright, encouraged by Secretary of the Territory Edward M. Lee and probably others, introduced the bill mainly because he believed it right and just. A few other legislators recognized the merit of his argument from justice, but this was a minority opinion. A majority vote in both houses was obtained by resort to economic and political arguments. Men who were unmoved by the justice argument embraced the idea that to adopt woman suffrage would give the struggling territory, whose population was declining, much free advertising and would attract women who up to that time had been in very short supply. The territory had only one thousand women over twenty-one, compared to six thousand men. As soon as the bill was approved by the governor, Cheyenne's leading newspaper noted editorially: "We now expect at once quite an immigration of ladies to Wyoming. We say to them all, come on. There is room for a great many here yet."
Substantial contemporary evidence supports the opinion that desire for free advertising was of major importance. General Edward M. Lee, secretary of the territory, judged free advertising to have been the most important factor. He explained in an article which appeared in The Galaxy magazine, June 1872:
It was Secretary Lee's responsibility to work closely with the legislature. His job gave him a better opportunity than anyone else had to understand why the legislature acted as it did. In the same year, 1872, in a suffrage address in Boston, Lee said: "The movement at first was commenced by certain public men as an advertising dodge for the Territory, and not at all as an earnest measure." He said much the same in an address in Indianapolis. Three prominent citizens who were in Cheyenne or Laramie in 1869 made corroborating statements, apparently without any contradition from contemporaries. The Laramie editor James H. Hayford wrote in 1874: "We advocated [woman suffrage] in the first place merely for its novelty and for the attention it would attract to our new Territory." He said this again and again. Associate justice of the Wyoming Supreme Court John W. Kingman, speaking before the Massachusetts legislature in 1876, said that some of the members voted for it thinking it would attract attention to the territory. Judge Kingman later wrote that among the arguments advanced for the bill, "The favorite . . . and by far the most effective, was this: it would prove a great advertisement, would make a great deal of talk, and attract attention to the legislature, and the territory, more effectually than anything else." Morton E. Post, who had been a grocer in Cheyenne in 1869 and later had served as delegate to Congress, recalled in 1886: "The right of suffrage was originally extended to women as a matter of advertisement for the Territory."
Coupled with the purpose to get free advertising was a desire to embarrass the governor. Although Secretary Lee in the quotation above stressed free advertising, he concluded by saying that the lower house concurred "in anticipation of an Executive veto." Republican Governor John A. Campbell, unlike Republican Secretary Lee, was at loggerheads with the Democratic legislators. They overrode some of his vetoes, only to lose to him in the courts. They despised him personally because, unlike themselves and Lee, he did not drink, gamble, or use tobacco. They had reason to believe that he was opposed to woman suffrage and would veto the bill. His veto would cause him to lose the esteem of a few Cheyenne ladies who often had feted the bachelor governor. During four days while the bill lay on his desk two of the territorial judges and two Cheyenne ladies urged him to discard his prejudices and turn the tables on his political enemies, and so he did by signing the bill.
The ardent Wyoming suffragist, Judge John W. Kingman, a Harvard graduate of unquestionable integrity, in an address before the Massachusetts legislature in 1876 summarized the motivational pattern governing the voting of legislators on the suffrage bill as well as anyone can: "Some of the members urged it from conviction, others voted for it thinking it would attract attention to the Territory, others as a joke, and others in the expectation that the Governor would veto the measure."
While woman suffrage was instituted with remarkably little opposition in Wyoming and Utah, never again would victories come so easily. Looking back over the long struggle which culminated in the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, Carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Rogers Shuler ruefully concluded that "The better the campaign, the more certain that suffrage would be defeated at the polls." Aileen Kraditor's explanation for this paradox is simply and accurately that "antisuffragism was essentially defensive." The normal pattern of action and reaction appeared in Colorado in 1870. Among the six territories where woman suffrage was an issue in 1869 or 1870 only Colorado had extensive newspaper coverage, petitions, letters to the editors, and full-dress public debate in the legislature. As in Wyoming, partisan strife between a Republican governor, Edward M. McCook, and a Democratic majority in the assembly may well have affected the outcome. Governor McCook in his opening message recommended adoption of woman suffrage. By so doing he probably did his cause more harm than good since the majority Democrats generally rejected his leadership. Woman suffrage received more attention than any other subject in the session. After airing thoroughly most of the familiar arguments pro and con, the lower house rejected the prosposal, fifteen to ten after the upper house had voted for it, seven to six.
After the setback in Colorado, enthusiasm for suffrage extension in the West soon waned, the final excitement of 1870 centering in California where a newly organized state suffrage association collected more than 3,000 signatures on a petition and sent many representatives, both male and female, to Sacramento to offer a personal appeal which availed nothing. In that same year, 1870, woman suffrage was under legislative consideration in most of the other states outside the South, but no state legislative body could be convinced. For the next thirteen years eastern suffragists, who knew all of the theoretical arguments and often elaborated on them in The Woman's Journal, in The Revolution (until it suspended publication in 1872), and on the lecture platform, had to turn to Wyoming or Utah for information about the practical working of woman suffrage.
Despite the fact that many more women were involved in the Utah experiment, eastern suffragists gave more attention to woman suffrage in Wyoming because they considered the Utah experiment seriously compromised by theocracy and polygamy. Moreover, Wyoming gave women the right to hold office as well as to vote and soon had female jurors and a female justice of the peace. Wyoming, consequently, took the front position in the suffrage show window. For many years that territory got more free advertising than any of the legislators of 1869 reasonably could have anticipated. Mrs. Esther Morris, who served satisfactorily as justice of the peace in 1870, enjoyed much publicity. Likewise, female grand and petit jurors received well-deserved praise for their work in 1870 and 1871. Nevertheless, the Wyoming experiment was almost terminated in 1871. While friends of woman suffrage had been gratified by results, the Democrats who constituted a majority of the legislators in 1871 had had enough. They proposed repeal because the women had voted Republican and had indicated a desire to close saloons on Sunday. A few Republicans, however, by the margin of one vote, kept the Democrats from overriding Governor John A. Campbell's veto of the repeal measure.
Thereafter, leading citizens of the territory who had been opposed or skeptical generally became converts. It dawned on them that stable, law-abiding, family men who wanted to put down roots and civilize the territory needed the votes of their wives to prevail against transient bachelors who made up the majority of male voters. After 1871, as more and more citizens recognized its benefits, woman suffrage was never in jeopardy. Testimonials from Wyoming governors, judges, newspaper editors, and clergymen were quoted in the tracts distributed in every woman suffrage campaign for the next forty years. Up-to-date testimonials were solicited on several occasions when unfavorable reports had appeared in the eastern press. In time it became evident to intelligent observers, most of whom had never expected a miraculous transformation of society, that the experiment was a modest success. Meanwhile, opponents wrote less about the evils of woman suffrage and more about the absence of any good results. To be sure, there was chronic disappointment for those who expected women voters to win influence in nominating conventions, be elected to office, eliminate gambling and prostitution, or bring prohibition. And those who thought that suffrage would attract women to the territory were disabused of that notion. Economic considerations, as usual, determined migration decisions. Suffragists in the East resented suggestions that they should move to Wyoming to get the vote, preferring as a rule to fight for their rights where they were.
After many discouragements suffragists were heartened by victory in 1883 in Washington Territory. Probably many of them had shared, more or less privately, the doubts which Colonel T. W. Higginson, one of the editors of The Woman's Journal, now expressed:
Four years later, however, in 1887, the women of Utah and Washington lost the franchise, through an act of Congress (Edmunds-Tucker Act) based on opposition to polygamy in Utah, and through a court decision based on partisan politics and other factors in Washington. "Rum did it," said some observers in Washington, where women by their votes for prohibition had antagonized the powerful liquor interests.
Suffragists, it should be noted, often differed in the West, as in the East, over tactics. For instance, Mrs. Abigail Scott Duniway, the West's outstanding suffragist, often recommended what she called a "still hunt." She urged her associates in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho to win over legislators by quiet persuasion rather than by noisy rallies. She was not always consistent. A great orator, she made many speeches throughout the Northwest. Also she aggressively prompted woman suffrage in her magazine, The New Northwest. In 1886 she warned women in Washington that they would lose the vote if they persisted in their drive for prohibition. On other occasions she told eastern suffrage leaders to stay home or watch from the sidelines during western campaigns.
In 1890, the long-hoped-for breakthrough in a state came when Wyoming entered the Union with woman suffrage in its constitution. Three neighboring states soon followed, Colorado in 1893, Utah and Idaho in 1896. This cluster of victories in contiguous states in the Rocky Mountain West caused great jubilation in suffrage circles. With renewed hope and drive, suffragists continued their pursuit of victories in other states. Nationally a favorable development had occurred in 1890 with the merger of the two great suffrage organizations under the name National American Woman Suffrage Association. Nevertheless, the suffragists suffered through another long period of frustration until they won Washington in 1910 and California in 1911. Success in California was particularly exciting because it was the first populous state to enter the fold. As some observers predicted, victory in California gave special impetus to the suffrage movement throughout the country.
The successful California campaign of 1911 evokes wonder and admiration. What a contrast there was between the coming of woman suffrage to Wyoming and Utah in 1869 and 1870, with nothing that can be called a campaign, and the splendid, many-sided effort in California in 1911. After forty years of disappointments and defeats the California suffragists had combined new devices with old ones. They used parades, lobbying, petitions, "Votes-For-Women" clubs, organized letter writing, gifted speakers, endorsements, special trains, auto tours, rallies, teas, leaflets in English and in foreign languages, suffrage songs, propaganda postcards, limericks, posters, pins, buttons, pennants, billboards, and newspaper publicity.
Other state victories followed quickly, first in the West, then in the Middle West and East. By 1914, all states from the Rocky Mountains on west, except for New Mexico, had full woman suffrage, while east of the Rockies only Kansas had accepted the inevitable. Thereafter, a combination of factors — education, agitation, organization, momentum, and war-—brought success in additional states and finally, in 1920, a great national victory in the form of the Nineteenth Amendment.
Unquestionably, western territories and states had led in the suffrage parade. Many western people have assumed that the "frontier spirit" had something to do with it. With respect to some phases of the suffrage movement they may be right, but, as in territorial Wyoming and Utah, other forces, too, must be taken into account.
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