October 23, 2006
Suffrage Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 01:20 PM EST On this date in 1915 one of the largest American woman suffrage protests took place, drawing upwards of 33,000 women to the streets of New York, where they paraded in dramatic fashion for the franchise. Decades before Martin Luther King, Jr., electrified 250,000 civil rights marchers in Washington, D.C., to flood Fifth Avenue with so many protesters was to shake the very foundations of the political culture.
Yet for all its tactical radicalism, the woman suffrage movement had in some ways grown conservative. Whereas the first generation of American women’s rights leaders that gathered in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848 declared unequivocally that “all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights: that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” leading suffragettes in 1915 had changed their tune. Rather than invoke the gender-neutral, natural-rights language of the American Revolution, they conceded the importance of separate spheres for men and women and, by extension, the essentialism of gender difference.
“Women’s place is Home,” Rheta Childe Dorr affirmed in 1910. “But home is not contained within the four walls of an individual house. Home is community. The city full of people is the Family. The public school is the real Nursery. And badly do Home and Family need their mother.”
The modern world was too complex to sustain rigid divisions between public and domestic spheres, explained leading women’s rights advocates like Dorr and Jane Addams. People now lived in closer quarters, bought most of their food and household items from stores, and came into daily contact with urban blight and vice. In short, “if woman would keep on with her old business of caring for her house and rearing her children,” Addams explained, “she will have to have some conscience in regard to public affairs lying outside of her immediate household.”
In the wake of their victory in 1920, suffrage activists split not only over where to channel their political energies. They also split between so-called social feminists, who continued to embrace the separate-spheres view of the world and press for special labor and environmental protections for women, and adherents of the National Women’s Party, which re-embraced the natural-rights language of Seneca Falls. In many ways, winning the vote was the easy task. Defining feminism would prove harder.
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