The Struggle for Women’s Right to Vote Comes of Age

American women pushed through almost 75 years of constant struggle to win the right to vote in federal elections. Sixty more years would go by before their votes made any difference.

When the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1920, 26 million potential voters were added to the electorate. But nothing happened.

Despite the League of Women Voters’ optimistic slogan, “Every Woman a Voter in 1920,” the newly enfranchised did not flock to the polls. And the women who did vote seemed to vote along the same lines as men.

Political squabbles between husbands and wives did not cause divorce rates to soar, as anti-suffragists had predicted. But the utopian society that suffragists seemed to promise did not materialize either.

So what was all the fuss about?

Why did Susan B. Anthony bother to get herself arrested for “knowingly, wrongfully and unlawfully” voting in 1872?

Why did Alice Paul, jailed for picketing the White House in 1917, go on a hunger strike and endure painful forced feedings?

And why did tens of thousands of women circulate petitions, publish articles and give pro-suffrage speeches at church meetings and on street corners where they often faced gangs of street bullies?

We are about to find out.

The hard-won women’s vote is finally coming into its own as the new millennium begins.

Women are just now in the position to make an obvious and dramatic difference in the electorate. Everything that has gone before was just laying the groundwork, said Ellen Carol DuBois, UCLA history professor and author of many works on women’s suffrage.

In fact, the gender gap in voting did not even begin to show up until the late 1980s, when budget cuts in welfare and education programs--areas that concern women more than men--became issues.

In the 1990s, women began winning elected office in notable numbers and in 1996 the women’s vote swung the presidential election for Bill Clinton, said Patricia Ireland, president of the National Organization for Women. In 1998, women voters played a large role in Senate races.

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Suffrage also has helped de-genderize issues that once were seen simply as women’s concerns, such as health insurance, managed care, schools and child care. Both major parties are addressing those issues now.

Issues that weren’t considered women’s issues before, such as Social Security and Medicare, have become important to women today, according to a survey by the League of Women Voters.

Women make up 51% of the population and, since 1980, have been voting at higher rates than men. Women hold 25% of all elected positions.

Traditionally, women voters tend to favor Democrats, Democratic women candidates in particular. But allegiances could change as Republicans embrace more women’s issues and run their own female candidates.

“I think women of my generation have just worked so hard to have it all that we haven’t been as involved politically as we would like to have been,” said Cynthia Cornell Novak, an assistant professor of humanities at Pepperdine University in Malibu. Novak, who just turned 50, said she counts herself among the women who plan to become more politically active in the new millennium.

While excited about the possibilities of female voting power, Novak said she also is perplexed by women’s inability to come together on issues such as violence and children’s health.

But unity has never come easily to women’s suffrage, which grew out of temperance and antislavery movements.

Suffragists split after the Civil War over whether to support the 14th and 15th amendments enfranchising black males and put their own voting rights aside, or to push for a separate amendment giving women the vote. Later, they divided over whether to pursue suffrage at the state or federal levels and over the use of militant techniques such as picketing, parading and heckling.

By the time the 19th Amendment giving women the vote finally passed, there was so much division that Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby signed the declaration at home with no ceremony to avoid a clash in his office between the suffrage movement’s factions.

It only reached his hands because of a state lawmaker who wanted to avoid domestic division in his own house. Tennessee gave the amendment the crucial 36th vote for ratification. And that state Legislature finally passed it after Republican Harry Burn changed his vote--all because of a note in his pocket from his suffragist mother.

“Be a good boy,” the note said, and vote for suffrage.