Carrie Chapman Catt - Woman Suffrage and Politics: The Inner Story of the Suffrage Movement

Bibliographical Note

This Dover edition, first published in 2020, is an unabridged republication of the work originally printed by Charles Scribners Sons, New York, in 1923.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Catt, Carrie Chapman, 18591947 author. | Shuler, Nettie Rogers, 18651939 author.

Title: Woman suffrage and politics : the inner story of the Suffrage Movement / Carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Rogers Shuler.

Description: Mineola, New York : Dover Publications, Inc., [2020] | Includes index. | Summary: With the approach of the one hundredth anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, this book offers an important aid to understanding how women won the right to vote and the extensive debt we owe to those who fought for it for seventy years. Written by Carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Rogers Shuler, two leaders of the movement, this landmark work reveals the inside story, tracing the struggle for womens suffrage from 1848 to 1922. They argue that there was not a lack of public sentiment supporting woman suffrage, rather that certain interests in the American political system controlled public sentiment and deflected information in order to delay the passage of the amendment that would give women the right to vote. They note that twenty-six other countries gave women the right to vote before the United States and offer their own insights as to why this might have been the case Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019041084 | ISBN 9780486842059 (trade paperback) | ISBN 0486842053

Subjects: LCSH: WomenSuffrageUnited States.

Classification: LCC JK1896 .C3 2020 | DDC 324.6/230973dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019041084

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2020

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED
ON BEHALF OF THE WOMEN
WHO HAVE GONE BEFORE
TO
THE WOMEN WHO COME AFTER

Contents

Why the Book Is Written

T he campaign for woman suffrage in America long since ended. Gone are the days of agitating, organizing, educating, pleading, and persuading. No more forever will women descend on State Legislatures and the national Congress in the effort to wrest the suffrage from State and national legislators. The gates to political enfranchisement have swung open. The women are inside.

In the struggle up to the gates, in unlocking and opening the gates, women had some strange adventures. They learned some strange things. Especially startling became their experiences and their information when woman suffrage once crossed the devious trail of American politics. It is with that point of intersection that this book concerns itself. We have left it to others to write the details of suffrage history. Those details fill six huge volumes. We have left it to others to tell the immortal story of the services of individual suffragists. Here we eliminate names to emphasize work. We have left it to others, too, to synthesize American politics. This books essential contribution must be sought in its revelation of the bearing of American politics upon the question of woman suffrage.

It is impossible to make that revelation adequately without a summary of the seventy-two years of campaign for the enfranchisement of women in the United States, together with a survey of American politics for the last fifty-five years of that period. The two are interlocked, neither story is complete without the inclusion of the other, and this story is not comprehensible without the inclusion of both. But our summary of the woman movement will be brief. Our survey of American politics will be brief. Our emphasis will lie where woman movement and American politics met in mutual menace. Our revelations will illumine political crises with which the suffrage cause was closely identified and over whose motivation suffragists had to keep sharp watch.

Throughout the suffrage struggle, Americas history, her principles, her traditions stood forth to indicate the inevitability of woman suffrage, to suggest that she would normally be the first country in the world to give the vote to women. Yet the years went by, decade followed decade, and twenty-six other countries gave the vote to their women while America delayed.

Why the delay?

It is a question that was the despair of two generations of American women. It is a question that students of history and national psychology will ponder through generations to come.

We think that we have the answer. It was, not an antagonistic public sentiment, nor yet an uneducated or indifferent public sentimentit was the control of public sentiment, the deflecting and the thwarting of public sentiment, through the trading and the trickery, the buying and the selling of American politics. We think that we can prove it. Suffragists consider that they have a case against certain combines of interests that systematically fought suffrage with politics and effectively delayed suffrage for years. We think that we can make that case.

We find it difficult to concede to the general opinion that, because of the tendency to overestimate the importance of events with which they are most familiar, those who have been a part of a movement are disqualified to write its history. We are sure that history would be worthless if it took no account of the observations made within a movement by those who have been a part of it. That is why we, who have had an opportunity to become acquainted with facts which throw light upon the political aspects of the woman suffrage question, feel impelled to pass our knowledge on to others.

The sources of all our information when not otherwise indicated are the archives of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, which contain continuous reports and other data from 1848 to 1922. Documents of this kind decline in interest for the general public as the movement they chronicle recedes into the past, but the facts and deductions drawn from them, and here assembled, should prove of significance to the advocates, perhaps especially the women advocates, of each recurring struggle in the evolution of democracy.

CARRIE CHAPMAN CATT.

NETTIE ROGERS SHULER.

CHAPTER 1

How the Woman Suffrage Movement Began

W hen, during the last decade, the great suffrage parades,armies of women with banners, orange and black, yellow and blue and purple and green and gold,went marching through the streets of the cities and towns of America; when suffrage canvassers, knocking at the doors of America, were a daily sight; when the suffragist on the soap box was heard on every street corner; when huge suffrage mass meetings were packing auditoriums from end to end of the country; when lively suffrage stunts were rousing and stirring the public; when suffrage was in everybodys mouth and on the front page of every newspaper, few paused to ask how it all started, where it all came from. It was just there, like breakfast.

To the unimaginative man on the street corner, watching one of those suffrage parades, the long lines of marching women may have seemed to come out of nowhere, to have no starting place, no connection with his grandmother and his great grandmother. To the same man the insistent tapping of those suffrage canvassers, the commotion of the suffrage mass meetings, the repetition of those suffrage stunts, the incessant news of suffrage in the daily press, may have seemed unrelated acts, irrelevant to social history. Yet it was all part of social history, and had immediate connection with other phases of social history. For the demand for woman suffrage was the logical outcome of two preceding social movements, both extending over some centuries: one, a man movement, evolving toward control of governments by the people, the other a woman movement, with its goal the freeing of women from the masculine tutelage to which law, religion, tradition and custom bound them. These movements advanced in parallel lines and the enfranchisement of woman was an inevitable climax of both.