A Fractured Fight for the Vote

Join blog writer, Anticus, in exploring the complexities in fighting for suffrage in Boston and New York.

In 1869, Wyoming became the first state in the union to enfranchise women. We might imagine an alternate history in which the success of women’s suffrage in Wyoming inspired unity among activists across the nation seeking voting rights for women. We might also imagine how that success eased the fears of those who were opposed to women’s suffrage. (After all, Wyoming did not collapse into sociopolitical chaos, as some feared it would.) But that is not the history we have.

Starting in earnest in the 1850s, advocates in various states had tried to persuade their state governments to extend voting rights to women. Then, during the Civil War, from 1861 to 1865, women’s suffrage activism was put on hold. After the war was over, the movement resumed  and in 1869 Wyoming enfranchised women statewide.

But instead of unifying around the realization that it was possible to win suffrage for women, the movement became bitterly divided over the question of race. The flash point was the Fifteenth Amendment, which was then under consideration and not yet ratified. The Fifteenth Amendment said that voting rights could not be denied “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” but it did not address voting rights based on sex. Those who were disappointed by the exclusion of women in the amendment had to decide: Would they support the Fifteenth Amendment on the principle that any step toward universal suffrage was good even if more remained to be done? Or would they oppose the Fifteenth Amendment until women were included so that barriers of race and sex could come down together? Or would they oppose the Fifteenth Amendment and argue for barriers of sex to be eliminated while maintaining racial barriers?

Massachusetts-based women’s rights activist Lucy Stone remained committed to universal suffrage. So did Boston-based activist and poet Julia Ward Howe. Despite their disappointment about the Fifteenth Amendment, when it did not seem politically achievable to bring down barriers of race and sex at the same time, they decided to support the Fifteenth Amendment while continuing to fight for women. They thought that anyone who is governed should have a say in that government. For Stone, Howe, and other Massachusetts suffragists, any step toward that ideal was a good step to take, in any order those steps became politically achievable. 

New York state-based suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony made a different choice. They opposed the Fifteenth Amendment. At times, their argument for (some) women’s suffrage was that voting was a privilege that should be bestowed on the worthy. The characteristics they believed the worthy possessed were characteristics—racial and class identities as well as educational background—which they themselves possessed.

The rift in the suffrage movement never entirely healed. The separate organizations formed by Stanton and Anthony and their allies on one side and by Stone, Howe, and their allies on the other eventually merged to form the National American Women’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA)—but not until 1890. By then, the Fifteenth Amendment’s promise to remove racial barriers to the ballot had been marred by Jim Crow policies in the states where the vast majority of African Americans lived. NAWSA did not concern itself much with that mass disenfranchisement. African American activists for universal suffrage (who were also active in anti-lynching and other civil rights campaigns) such as Boston-based Josephine Saint Pierre Ruffin, Chicago-based Ida B. Wells, and D.C.-based Mary Church Terrell worked with NAWSA when they could, but also organized separately.