Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement,
1890-1920 Columbia University Press, New York, 1965,
 Few
of us have ever felt indebted to Wyoming, We should: in 1869, fully
a generation before any other state, Wyoming granted full franchise
to women. The suffrage movement did not cross the critical geographical
social frontier of the Mississippi until 1913 when Illinois adopted
a presidential franchise for wome. Seven years later the Nineteenth
Amendment was ratified.
Altogether, the campaign for the vote spanned 75 years; it was shoved
to the periphery of three reform movements and drew in 2,000,000 000
before the 19th amendment passed
History of the woman suffrage movement is not the subject of Aileen
Kraditor's book. Nor is the struggle for legal and economic rights.
She deals with the ideology and tactics of the fight for the vote.
Between 1890, when the two suffrage groups with national followings
merged into the National America Woman Suffrage Association, and the
post-war amendment of 1919-20, women fought the prejudices of fathers,
husbands and brothers. They antagonized Congressmen and clergy. They
cajoled the doubtful of their own sex. They spoke, they wrote, they
met with whoever would listen. They had against them the "objective
truths" of the theology, biology, and sociology of their times.
Is it any wonder that woman suffrage took three generations to achieve?
The
original suffragists (not suffragettes--their British counterparts)
were abolitionists. Their
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movement grew from the same reform impulse as the anti-slavery
movement and based its arguments, similarly
on natural rights.
First-generation suffragists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B, Anthony,
and Lucy Blackwell Stone appealed to the Declaration of Independence.
They set out to convince the country that women were created equal to
men and merited the same political responsibilities
Early ideology assumed and articulated progress of civilization from
government by force to government by consent of the governed. The colonial
analogy and bywords, "no taxation without representation,"
had fresh relevance for the generation of women who had recently achieved
the right to own property after marriage and who were gaining education
and working in, significant numbers.
Later strategy allied the suffrage question with various reform goals
of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many women were also temperance
unionists; many fought for good municipal government; some worked for
Americanization of immigrant groups.
There were distasteful alliances in this period also. Exclusionist sentiments,
anti-immigrant (primarily in cities) and anti-Negro (particularly in
the South) strongly influenced suffragist reasoning. In all alliances
the appeal to expediency-we can help you, Mister, if you give us the
means--dominated over the earlier appeal to natural right.
For most of Miss Kraditor's period, suffragists were persuaders, not
activists in a contemporary sense. Particularly after 1900, when their
issue became "respectable," NAWSA rank and file were conservative
and apolitical. The apolitical character also had (Continued on p.9)
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