The Law and You: Women’s right to vote hard fought for – Plattsburgh Press Republican

August 26 is the 100th anniversary of women in the United States achieving the right to vote in federal elections.

That is the date the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, prohibiting denial of the right to vote on the basis of sex, and August 26 is celebrated yearly as Womens Equality Day. Before the 19th Amendment, women could vote only in some state elections, including New York beginning in 1918.

August 1920 is often described as when women were given the vote. Characterizing this as a gift could not be farther from the truth. Women fought for more than 70 years to gain this fundamental right. They gave speeches, signed petitions, organized, lobbied, marched in parades with tens of thousands of male and female supporters, picketed the White House, and went to jail.

Yes, at least 168 women were jailed in 1917-19 because they silently stood outside President Woodrow Wilsons White House holding banners. Some simply said: Mr. President, How Long Must Women Wait for Liberty? Others were more political. No one had picketed the White House before the women suffragists did so; now it is common to express First Amendment rights there.

The little I learned about President Wilson in my school years gave me the impression that he was an intellectual who had been Princetons president, an isolationist who did not want to bring the United States into World War I, and an idealist who founded the unsuccessful League of Nations after that war. More recently, I have learned that he forced black employees out of the federal civil service, and refused for years to support passage of a constitutional amendment expanding the right to vote to women. Instead, he sought to silence and remove the picketers who sought his endorsement.

The first Womans Rights Convention was in 1848, in Seneca Falls, New York. Among other declarations, it called for women to have the right to vote. At the time, this seemed extremely far-fetched to some. For years thereafter, many efforts were made to have the law recognize women as voters.

In the 1872 presidential election, Susan B. Anthony and 14 other women actually voted in Rochester, New York, being permitted to do so by the local officials. The women who voted and the election inspectors who allowed it were all arrested on federal warrants. They were prosecuted, tried and convicted. A $100 fine was imposed on the illegal voters, which they refused to pay. Three election inspectors were jailed, until President Ulysses S. Grant pardoned them after a month.

In 1875, the United States Supreme Court ruled in a Missouri case that women had no federal right to vote under the U.S. Constitution, even when their state granted it. As western territories became states, several included women as voters. The first was Wyoming in 1869, then Utah 1870, Colorado 1893, and Idaho 1896.

Along with efforts to have states extend the right to vote, a U.S. Constitutional Amendment was introduced. By 1885, the Grange, a farmers organization, supported womens suffrage; in 1886, the Womens Christian Temperance Union sent a petition to Congress with 200,000 signatures. Even so, Congress voted against such an amendment in 1887. Gradually, more and more states permitted women to vote, but there was still opposition. In 1915, suffrage bills were defeated in Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, and the US Congress again voted against the woman suffrage amendment.

Both men and women made efforts to change this on multiple fronts. Finally, in 1917, New York voters authorized women to vote. The White House picket lines started in January 1917, with the goal of convincing President Wilson to support the 19th Amendment. It took him two more years, but he finally did so. The presidential election of 1920 was the first one that women could vote in.

Although many assumed that women who could vote could also serve on juries, that did not necessarily follow. Women were not regularly allowed on juries nationwide until 1968. Some states still had optional jury service for women, instead of it being automatic, as it was with men, until the Supreme Court ruled against that practice in 1979.

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Resource

The Fight for Womens Suffrage . . . and What They Never Told Us! http://youtu.be/rmAWkijpdr4 a slideshow of old photographs and articles prepared by Penelope Clute

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The Law and You: Women's right to vote hard fought for - Plattsburgh Press Republican