The Woman's Hour

The long road to granting women’s suffrage began decades earlier when Susan B. Anthony attempted to vote in the 1872 national election. Dozens of women across the country did the same in an effort to force legal test cases related to the Fourteenth Amendment. This amendment protected the rights of all citizens. Unfortunately, when these test cases bubbled up to the Supreme Court, their decision defined women not as citizens but as non-voting members of the state. It would take years of pitched battles at the state level before an amendment addressing the needs of the women of the country was introduced into Congress. Even after the Nineteenth Amendment passed both houses, its approval at the state level was an excruciatingly slow process.

When the battle came down to the 36th state needed for ratification, politicians dragged their heels. It was an election year, and neither party wanted to take the blame for enabling women’s suffrage. Delaying the process seemed to be an excellent solution:

It was easier this way, relieving both parties’ anxiety about millions more unpredictable women voters flooding into the polls, upsetting apple carts. And, conveniently, neither party would get credit, or blame, for giving all women the vote (99).

Catt appeals to Republican presidential nominee, Ohio Senator Warren Harding, to endorse the Tennessee ratification effort. He offers warm verbal support for the amendment, but Catt doubts his sincerity. Stranded in Tennessee, she can do nothing to influence him. However, the senator is about to receive a visit from both Alice Paul and Sue White of NWP.  

On July 22, Warren G. Harding waits on his front porch in Marion, Ohio, to receive the Republican Party nomination for president. Harding has a reputation for looking good but saying nothing of substance. Alice Paul and her organization intend to meet with him during the nomination ceremony to force a commitment that he will use his influence to get his party to toe the line.

Paul has chosen her two best orators, Sue White and Louisine Havemeyer, to make public statements urging Harding to deliver the Republican vote in Tennessee. After Harding listens to their impassioned pleas, he gives a diplomatic but ultimately meaningless response. He supports the amendment and hopes the crucial 36th state will ratify soon but doesn’t explicitly say that Tennessee will be that state. As the author wryly observes, “The Antis, now assembling in Nashville, saw only glad tidings in the hesitant words of Senator Harding. They had good reason to believe Harding would do nothing to displease them” (114).

While Catt and Paul plan their Suff campaigns, the Antis mount a counterattack. Famous orator Charlotte Rowe travels to Tennessee to assist in defeating the amendment:

Rowe was […] in the vanguard of national Anti leaders riding into Tennessee like the cavalry—no, like the American Expeditionary Forces—to defend a besieged strategic outpost, bringing fresh supplies and firepower to beat back an enemy assault (116).

Rowe is a walking contradiction. She is a modern career woman, unmarried and childless, who supports herself yet sees a threat in the advent of feminism. She happily uses shock tactics to sway public opinion:

Rowe was what could fairly be called an Anti militant, wielding incendiary words and lobbing explosive accusations into the public square. Like Mrs. Pankhurst, and more than Alice Paul, she relished the power of shock to mold public opinion (119).

Like Rowe, Muckraking journalist Ida Tarbell also wishes to preserve the sanctity of home and hearth, although she has no aspirations to be a homemaker herself. Both women see feminism as the precursor to Socialism and wish to prevent any change in traditional American values and gender roles. Both pressure Warren Harding to withhold his endorsement of the Tennessee amendment, even though he has developed a well-earned reputation for promising his support to both Antis and Suffs.

Meanwhile, Josephine Pearson makes a plea to her fellow Southerners by playing on their greatest racist fears: Women’s suffrage would open the vote to Black women, so that they and their male counterparts could completely upset the balance of power in the South. She cautions, “The fate of white civilization in the South may hang on a few votes either way, and YOUR action may be the deciding influence with YOUR representatives” (130).

Shortly after Catt entrenches herself in Nashville for a pitched battle in the legislature, she receives a public letter accusing her of hypocrisy from Nina Pinckard, leader of the Southern Women’s Rejection League. Pinckard points out that Catt ostensibly wishes to uphold Southern traditions, yet the amendment would grant Black women the right to vote alongside whites.

The thorny issue of race and gender has haunted the suffrage movement almost from the start. Both Susan Anthony and Elizabeth Stanton were livid when Black men were granted the vote, while women were still excluded from the franchise. When Frederick Douglass pointed out that the Black men’s suffrage should take precedence over that of women, a rupture developed between him and the suffrage movement that would take decades to mend.

In the ensuing years, the Suffs adopted a policy of soft-pedaling voting rights for Black women in the South: “When forced to choose between truly equal rights and women’s rights, between insisting on justice for all or accepting injustice to protect their own cause, the Suffs almost invariably chose the easier, less noble, path” (138).

By the time Catt arrives in Nashville, she is still equivocating on race, eager to alleviate the anxieties of white Southerners even if it means repudiating the rights of women of color. To Catt and NAWSA, gaining approval for the amendment is all that matters.