The Woman's Hour Read online

  ALSO BY ELAINE WEISS

  •

  Fruits of Victory

  VIKING

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  Copyright © 2018 by Elaine Weiss

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  CREDITS

  First Insert

  Here: New York State Library; here: Library of Congress; here: Wiki-Commons; here: New York Public Library; here: Library of Congress; here: Jackie Partin, Grundy County, Tennesssee; here: Library of Congress; here: University of Rochester Library, Rare Books and Special Collections; here: Tennessee State Library and Archives; here: Bryn Mawr College Special Collections; here: Tennessee State Museum; here: Tennessee State Library and Archives; here: Library of Congress; here: Nashville Public Library Special Collections; here: Library of Congress; here: New York Public Library; here: Library of Congress; here and here: Library of Congress; here and here: Bryn Mawr College Special Collections; here: Library of Virginia; here: National Woman’s Party; here: Library of Congress; here: First Baptist Church, Capitol Hill, Nashville; here and here: Tennessee State Library and Archives; here and here: Library of Congress; here: Tennessee State Library and Archives

  Second Insert

  Here: Library of Congress; here: Nashville Public Library; here: Bryn Mawr College Special Collections; here: Library of Congress; here: National Woman’s Party; here and here: Tennessee State Library and Archives; here: Memphis Public Library; here: Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University; here, here, here, and here: Tennessee State Library and Archives; here: Washington Herald, August 15, 1920; here, here, here, here, and here: Tennessee State Library and Archives; here and here: Calvin McClung Historical Collection, Knox County Public Library; here: Bryn Mawr College Special Collections; here: Library of Congress; here: Library of Congress; here: Bryn Mawr College Special Collections; here: Division of Political History, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution; here: Tennessee State Library and Archives; here: Special Collections, University of California, Davis; here: Marchand Archives, the History Project, University of California, Davis; here: National Susan B. Anthony Museum and House; here: Alan LeQuire

  ISBN 9780525429722 (hardcover)

  ISBN 9780698407831 (ebook)

  Version_1

  In memory of my parents, who took their little girl into the voting booth, let her pull the magic curtain, and taught me to treasure my right to vote

  and my dear friend Natalie Moore Babbitt, who taught me how to be a writer

  The time has come to shout aloud in every city, village and hamlet, and in tones so clear and jubilant that they will reverberate from every mountain peak and echo from shore to shore: “The Woman’s Hour has struck.”

  —Carrie Chapman Catt, “The Crisis,” Presidential Address to the National American Woman Suffrage Association, September 1916

  The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

  —Nineteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution

  CONTENTS

  ALSO BY ELAINE WEISS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  EPIRAPH

  Introduction

  Chapter 1: To Nashville

  Chapter 2: Lay of the Land

  Chapter 3: The Feminist Peril

  Chapter 4: The Woman Question

  Chapter 5: Democracy at Home

  Chapter 6: The Governor’s Quandary

  Chapter 7: The Blessing

  Chapter 8: On Account of Sex

  Chapter 9: Front Porch

  Chapter 10: Home and Heaven

  Chapter 11: The Woman’s Hour

  Chapter 12: Cranking the Machine

  Chapter 13: Prison Pin

  Chapter 14: Fieldwork

  Chapter 15: A Real and Threatening Danger

  Chapter 16: War of the Roses

  Chapter 17: In Justice to Womanhood

  Chapter 18: Terrorizing Tennessee Manhood

  Chapter 19: Petticoat Government

  Chapter 20: Armageddon

  Chapter 21: The Hour Has Come

  Chapter 22: Liberty Bell

  Chapter 23: Election Day

  Epilogue

  PHOTOGRAPHS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Introduction

  ON A SATURDAY EVENING in mid-July 1920, three women raced toward Nashville’s Union Station on steam-powered trains. They each traveled alone, carrying a small suitcase, a handbag, a folder stuffed with documents. They were unremarkable in appearance, dressed in demure cotton dresses and summer hats; their fellow passengers could hardly imagine the dramatic purpose they shared: they had all been summoned to command forces in what would prove to be one of the pivotal political battles in American history.

  This is the story of that battle, the furious campaign to secure the final state needed to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, giving women the most fundamental right of democracy—the vote.

  Carrie Catt, the president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the preeminent suffrage organization in the nation, was on a southbound train from New York City. Josephine Pearson, president of the Tennessee State Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, traveled north from her family home in the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee. Sue White, a young activist for the National Woman’s Party, the “militant wing” of the suffrage movement, came fresh from a protest in the Midwest.

  They converged on Nashville for the explosive climax of American women’s seven-decade struggle for equal citizenship, and there was much at stake: thirty-six state approvals were required for ratification, and thirty-five were in hand. If the Tennessee legislature ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, woman suffrage would become the law of the land and twenty-seven million women would be able to vote, just in time for the fall presidential elections; if the legislature rejected it, the amendment might never be enacted. It all came down to Tennessee.

  There were powerful forces opposing federal woman suffrage as it approached the legal finish line: political, corporate, and ideological adversaries intent upon stopping the Nineteenth Amendment. Some of the most vociferous foes of enfranchisement were the women “Antis” such as Josephine Pearson, who feared that women’s entrance into the polling booth would hasten the nation’s moral collapse. The “Suffs” had reason to worry, as the amendment had already been rejected by nearly all the southern states, for the same blatantly racist reasons as put forth by Tennessee: if women got the vote, black women would also be entitled to the ballot. The presidential candidates were playing their own games, using woman suffrage as a pawn. This was the moment of reckoning, and both sides were willing to use every possible weapon to prevail.

  Over the course of the next six weeks, the three campaign commanders were joined by more than a thousand women and men from around the state and across the country—Suffs, Antis, governors and senators, political operatives, corporate lobbyists, and beleaguered legi
slators—all pouring into Nashville to enter the fray. The conflict quickly devolved into a vicious face-off, brimming with dirty tricks and cutting betrayals, sexist rancor, racial bigotry, booze, and the Bible, with the ghosts of the Civil War hovering over the proceedings and jitters lingering from the Great War amplifying the tension. The outcome remained in doubt until the very last moment.

  The intensity of this battle in Nashville, the strength and nature of the suffrage opposition—led by women!—the racial dimensions of the conflict, and the uncertainty of the outcome may seem surprising to us now, even shocking. It’s too easy to imagine that the enfranchisement of American women simply arrived, like some evolutionary imperative, a natural step in the gradual march of progress. Or as a gift eventually bestowed by wise men on their grateful wives, daughters, and sisters. The women asked politely, staged a few picturesque marches, hoisted a few picket signs, and without much drama, “Votes for Women” was achieved. That’s not how it happened.

  The very idea that women should have the right to participate in a government “by and for the people” was long considered radical, even dangerous, in the United States. Despite Abigail Adams’s exhortation in 1776 to her husband, John, to “remember the Ladies” when forming the new American democracy, our esteemed Founding Fathers had absolutely no intention of giving women a voice in public affairs. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women were condemned from the pulpit and in the press for thinking about suffrage; they were spit upon and pelted with rotten eggs for speaking out about it; and they were jailed for demanding it.

  The struggle for woman suffrage was a long, bitter fight. It was waged on street corners and atop soapboxes, in city halls, Grange Halls, and the halls of Congress; it was fought in parlors and kitchens and bedrooms, under statehouse domes, at the bench of the U.S. Supreme Court, and finally in the Capitol building in Nashville and the elegant lobby of the nearby Hotel Hermitage.

  Winning the vote required seventy-two years of ceaseless agitation by three generations of dedicated, fearless suffragists, who sought to overturn centuries of law and millennia of tradition concerning gender roles. The women who launched the movement were dead by the time it was completed; the women who secured its final success weren’t born when it began. It took more than nine hundred local, state, and national campaigns, involving tens of thousands of grassroots volunteers, financed by millions of dollars of mostly small (and a few large) donations by women across the country.

  The movement developed great women orators, talented executives, and tenacious lobbyists. It nurtured feminist philosophers and astute politicians who—though they had no legal standing or governmental representation—learned to manipulate the levers of political power and pull the strings of public opinion. Women who had never had public lives were emboldened to speak out, to march in the streets, even to raise picket signs in public protest for the first time. Some were more strongly radicalized in their quest for civic equality and became willing to commit acts of civil disobedience and go to jail in pursuit of the franchise. Through the decades, “the Cause” changed the way women saw themselves and transformed society’s view of women.

  The controversy over ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment—and, more broadly, the long battle over woman suffrage—wasn’t simply a political argument, it was also a social, cultural, and moral debate, a precursor to what we now call “culture wars,” raising issues that were complex and divisive. Allowing women to vote had the potential to not only upend the electoral process and the political status quo, but also alter societal and personal relations and—according to suffrage’s opponents—disturb the home and endanger the family. The political became the personal, and for many men, as well as some women, it was frightening.

  That women might oppose enfranchising and empowering their own sex seems counterintuitive, even preposterous, but the stance of the females against suffrage, the Antis, opens a fascinating window on the role of social and religious conservatives in our public policy decisions. Like the key sociopolitical issues of today—from reproductive rights to same-sex marriage—attitudes toward woman suffrage divided communities, families, and friends, thrusting women into opposing camps.

  While this book chronicles a great triumph—women mobilizing for their own political freedom—it also poses some uncomfortable questions about the sincerity of American democracy, questions as urgent today as they were in 1920. Our cherished national self-image is of a proud democratic republic, one where the citizen’s right to vote is both a sacred trust and the cornerstone of our government by the people: but that image is only a partial reflection of reality. From the nation’s founding, Americans have had—and continue to have—a deeply ambivalent attitude toward full participatory democracy and a conflicted stance toward universal suffrage.

  Voting rights have been a contested issue from the very beginning of the American experiment. When the founders wrote “We the People,” they really meant “We the White, Wealthy Men.” Despite much lofty rhetoric, all men were not created equal, and women didn’t count at all.

  The rest of our national history can be seen as a continuing push toward—and reaction against—expanding the franchise to include those groups of citizens purposely left outside. Fear of the mob, fear of the other, and fear for the erosion of white political hegemony made for slow and hesitant progress, punctuated by contractions and reversals. Access to, or denial of, the ballot became an instrument for gaining political party advantage, a dynamic put to use in Nashville and one that remains prevalent today, as voting rights for minority groups continue to be jeopardized by intimidation and violated by suppression, all for partisan ends. The cry of “states’ rights” and antipathy toward federal oversight of voting rights were voiced loudly in Nashville in the summer of 1920 and still echo in newspaper headlines today.

  Holding the franchise, exercising the vote, is a form of power, so this book is—as suffrage leader Alice Paul once described her primary goal—about women claiming their rightful power of citizenship. And it is also about the forces that strenuously resisted that claim. “Power concedes nothing without a demand,” insisted the great universal suffragist Frederick Douglass, and he taught this essential lesson to the early advocates of votes for women.

  But this sort of power cannot be wrested simply through demand: it requires a huge societal shift, a slow change of public attitudes, eventually translated into public policy. Such change can be brought about only by decades of patient persuasion and persistent pressure, transforming an idea once considered unthinkable into something inevitable. Winning the franchise was a crucial milestone in American women’s struggle to secure their legal, economic, and societal rights, claiming their place in the modern world; but that struggle continues.

  As this is an American story, it is, inevitably, about race. The cause of woman suffrage was, from the very beginning, entwined with contemporary efforts to emancipate and enfranchise the nation’s black citizens, but the relationship between the movements was often tense. When the Nineteenth Amendment reached its decisive hour in a southern city, the legacy of that historic alliance was tested, and prevailing racial bigotry played a dominant role. The long shadow of the Civil War and its violent aftermath also affect these events; the threat to southern traditions and institutions, the power of states’ rights, and the emotional scars of the Confederacy’s defeat all come into play in Nashville, fifty-five years after the war’s last battle.

  There is a heartening, even thrilling, lesson to be found here, too: ordinary women banding together to become activists, keeping faith through decades of humiliation and discouragement to challenge an oppressive system and force change. There is also a chastening lesson to be learned from the moral compromises these mostly white, middle-class suffragists make in pursuit of their own freedom, leaving their black sisters, and some of their own ideals, behind. And in the actions of the forces aligned against suffrage there is an instru
ctive example of just how far some Americans were willing to go to protect their own careers, business interests, and entitlement by preventing others from obtaining their rights.

  The crusade for woman suffrage stands as one of the defining civil rights movements in the history of our country, and its organizing strategies, lobbying techniques, and nonviolent protest actions became the model for the civil rights campaigns to follow in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

  Although these events took place almost a century ago, the story’s compelling themes—power and political will, race and gender equality, states’ rights and voting rights, and corporate influence in politics—remain urgent, present-day concerns.

  It all begins with three women on their way to Nashville.

  Chapter 1

  To Nashville

  CARRIE CHAPMAN CATT had spent a long night, day, and early evening on trains clattering over a thousand miles of track from New York City to Nashville. In the hours she wasn’t reading field reports and legal documents, rimless eyeglasses perched on her nose, she read the newspapers and indulged in the guilty pleasure of a detective novel.

  By the time the train pulled into Nashville in the dusky twilight, it was hard to make out the copper-and-bronze statue of the messenger god Mercury perched atop the Union Station tower, greeting travelers to the bustling capital city. Minerva, the warrior goddess, might have been a more fitting figure for the president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Susan B. Anthony’s anointed heir, the supreme commander of its great suffrage army, the woman they called “the Chief.” Carrie Catt had been summoned to lead her troops into the fray one last time. At least she dearly hoped this might be the last time.

  She’d already devoted half of her life to the Cause, three decades of constant work and travel. Her hair was silver and wavy, and she wore it short and brushed close, parted in the center, easy to groom on the run. Her face, once angular and strikingly handsome, was fleshier now. Her heavy eyelids drooped a bit, and the line of her jaw had softened, but she retained the same sly, thin-lipped smile, piercing blue eyes, and arched eyebrows that made her look either surprised, amused, or annoyed depending upon how she deployed them. She was definitely not amused this evening; she was worried, and she wasn’t sure she could take the strain much longer.