Last week, “Suffs” came to town. The show, a Tony award-winning musical depicting the fight for women’s suffrage in the United States, was very well done. I laughed and cried and found myself delighted by the songs and the story.
I also found myself feeling angry and sad. I felt angry and sad at that it took more than 70 years for the 19th Amendment to pass. Seventy-two, to be precise, from the first Seneca Falls convention in 1848 to ratification in 1920. I found myself feeling angry and sad at the numerous injustices faced by women advocating for the vote. From name-calling to arrests, beatings and force-feeding in jail, suffragists faced an uphill battle. In fact, until 1916, the number of active anti-suffragists outnumbered the suffragists — and many of those opposed to women having the vote were themselves women.
Arguments against suffrage made in the early 1900s included claims that women belonged in the home, that they didn’t really want to vote, that their vote would either double or annul their husband’s vote, that they shouldn’t worry their pretty little heads (which, by the way, weren’t “developed” enough to be able to understand politics), and that politics would harden women and change their nature.
Elihu Root, who served as the Secretary of State under President Theodore Roosevelt, was outspoken in his arguments against women’s suffrage at a Capitol hearing. His speech featured text from an argument against suffrage that he made in 1894, when he was practicing as a lawyer.
“Woman rules today by the sweet and noble influence of her character. Put woman into the arena of conflict and she abandons these great weapons which control the world and she takes into her hands, feeble and nerveless for strife, weapons with which she is unfamiliar and which she is unable to wield,” he writes. “Woman in strife becomes hard, harsh, unlovable, repulsive …”
Root won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1912 for his advancement of international relations.
Perhaps one of the most offensive arguments against women’s suffrage was that voting while pregnant would lead to both physical and mental birth defects in the unborn child. A book written by Benjamin Vestal Hubbard around 1915 has section titled “Physiological Conditions Make Woman Suffrage Impractical.” In it, Hubbard explains just how ill-suited women are for the strenuous task of voting.
“Many women, at the time of holding primary elections, will be in a delicate condition, and to expose herself to excitement will jeopardize the physical and mental well-being of the child that is to be,” he writes. “Better to let the government go to smash than bear a physically imperfect or idiot child. The government can be reformed but the child cannot.” For the love ...
The suffrage movement in Utah
“Suffs” covered the suffrage movement from the viewpoint of Alice Paul, but missed an opportunity to at least mention the avant-garde nature of Utah’s support of women’s suffrage.
When Utah became a territory in 1850, all free white male inhabitants over the age of 21 had the right to vote if they were U.S. citizens. On Feb. 12, 1870, the men in the territorial legislature voted unanimously to expand voting rights to “every woman of the age of twenty-one years who has resided in this Territory six months next preceding any general or special election, born or naturalized in the United States, or who is the wife, widow or the daughter of a native-born or naturalized citizen of the United States.”
On Feb. 14, 1870, a full 50 years before the ratification of the 19th Amendment, Seraph Young cast the first vote in the nation under an equal suffrage law.
After 17 years of women voting in Utah, they lost the vote when Congress passed the Edmunds-Tucker Act. The act outlawed polygamy and revoked the right of women to vote, whether they were in polygamous marriages or not.
In 1895, Utah was working on a constitution, one that would be submitted as part of the territory’s application for statehood. While Utah largely supported giving the vote back to women, there was opposition, and the question of women’s suffrage became the hottest issue being discussed. According to historian Sarah Hancock Jones, delegate Orson F. Whitney insisted, “I believe in a future for woman … I do not believe that she was made merely for a wife, a mother, a cook, and a housekeeper. These callings, however honorable … are not the sum of her capabilities.” He went on to argue, “They tell us that woman suffrage in the Constitution will imperil Statehood. I don’t believe it. But if it should, what of it? There are some things higher and dearer than Statehood. I would rather stand by my honor, by my principles, than to have Statehood.”
In the end, women’s suffrage was enshrined in our state Constitution in Article 4, Section 1: “The rights of citizens of the State of Utah to vote and hold office shall not be denied on account of sex. Both male and female citizens of this State shall enjoy equally all civil, political and religious rights and privileges.”
Women in positions of influence were actively involved in the suffrage movement, women like Dr. Martha Hughes Cannon, who became the nation’s first female state senator; Emmeline B. Wells, who advocated for suffrage while also serving as the General Relief Society President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; and Zina D. H. Young, also a General President of the Relief Society from 1888 to 1901 and also the vice president of the National Council of Women from 1891.
I found myself feeling sad that the voices of those early Utah women and their active political involvement was largely lost (until recent efforts by Better Days have brought awareness back to them.) I’m sad — and honestly, a bit angry, at what seems to be a growing chorus of voices advocating for getting rid of the 19th Amendment and stripping all U.S. women of their right to vote. It’s more than a little frustrating to feel like progress involves two steps forward and one and a half steps backward.
But then, “Suffs” reminded me that while the work never ends, I, too, can keep marching:
Remember every mother that you came from
Learn as much from our success as our mistakes
Don’t forget you’re merely one of many others
On the journey every generation makes
We did not end injustice and neither will you
But still, we made strides so we know you can too
Make peace with our incomplete power and use it for good
‘Cause there’s so much to do
The gains will feel small and the losses too large
Keep marching, keep marching