The road to the vote was complex. First, despite references to the women’s-rights movement as a suffrage campaign, in fact the movement’s early demands did not include the vote. Until the 1880s or 1890s, most feminists—and there is controversy about whether they could be called feminists—thought that asking for suffrage was too radical, too provocative. Woman suffrage would mean invading male control of public space and public policy, and most 19th-century women’s-rights advocates were not challenging the gender system that assigned separate spheres to men and women. Instead they were asking for rights within the conventional women’s sphere: the right to education, because educated mothers would produce better male citizens; the right to retain her own property after marriage (to help women protect themselves from abusive and gold-digging husbands; and the right to child custody, easily the reform most valuable to women, few of whom were willing to leave an abusive man if it meant losing one’s children. Only in 1878 was the first bill calling for a woman suffrage amendment introduced.
Second, the 19th constitutional amendment, ratified in 1920, did not enfranchise women for the first time. Feminists had won limited voting rights in numerous states and localities for several decades, by using arguments that avoided a direct challenge to male political power. Women sometimes gained the right to vote for county and state school boards, judges, clerks of the courts, for example. Male voters could be more generous when women’s votes could help particular causes, as when Utah granted full suffrage to women in 1869 in an attempt to increase the Mormon vote. (It worked for a while, but in 1887 the federal government, influenced by the sectarianism of several Protestant denominations, disfranchised them, on the grounds that Mormonism was anti-Christian.) Still, women had already won at least partial suffrage in 27 states and the Alaska territory prior to the national amendment. These victories, between 1890 and 1919, began in the western states, in part out of the desire to attract women to areas where they were scarce, and in part because in rural and sometimes pioneering conditions, the gendered separate spheres were less imbedded. But as late as 1915 advocates were still arguing for woman suffrage not as a matter of rights but as a means of producing “better-trained children.”
Although New York was no trailblazer on the issue, it was the first eastern state whose male voters agreed to enfranchise women, and this only after several painful defeats. A major 1915 referendum on a proposal to allow women to vote in state elections lost by huge margins, 2 to 1 in many locations. The New York Times editorialized that enfranchising women would “result in needless political turmoil, weaken the state, stir up discord in society and in the home … It is the privilege of men to care for the woman.”1 The loss must have been galling for suffrage advocates.