“Happiness, not in another place, but this place. Not for another hour, but this hour.” – Walt Whitman
When the American Woman Suffrage Association was formed in 1869, its goal was to support Massachusetts associations which could support a state constitutional amendment.
Many former abolitionists joined the New England Woman’s Club, which Julia Ward Howe and several other concerned citizens founded in 1869. The women’s club movement began after the Civil War when women who had participated in War relief efforts wished to continue to meet and collaborate.
The Club provided a respectable meeting place where middle-and upper-class women could find camaraderie and could pursue cultural and philanthropic activities. The club movement would come to play an important role in the suffrage movement.
By the end of the 1800s, increasing numbers of Massachusetts Republicans supported municipal suffrage for women. Many Republicans believed that the votes of Protestant women would save the state from “rum and Romanism.” Many reformist Republicans had been convinced that women’s housekeeping skills would address the many challenges posed by “urbanization, industrialization, and immigration.”
Some Republicans continued to believe that suffrage was a natural right of citizens. Counterpoint to that was many Democratic Party beliefs that those who supported woman suffrage were “either a knave or a fool.”
Boston was a center of a new wave of anti-immigration sentiment that swept through conservative Republican circles. Those conservatives believed in governance by the elite and opposed any expansion of the franchise, particularly to uneducated immigrants from eastern and southern Europe.
The referendum found that “one-third of men and 96% of women who voted favored expanding suffrage.” Alice Stone Blackwell maintained that suffrage was inevitable and that the presumed indifference of many women was inconsequential.
Her father wrote that a geographic analysis of election results showed that “intelligent, active, wide-minded” middle class men favored woman suffrage. In 1892 the state legislature enacted a statute providing that a “voter must be able to write his name and read at least three lines of the state constitution.”
There were rays of sunshine in western states.
Women continued to vote in the territory of Wyoming. When it was admitted to statehood in 1890, women were fully enfranchised in that state. Several years earlier in 1887, Kansas had enacted a law permitting women to vote in municipal elections. During that campaign, suffragists wore yellow ribbons to represent the Kansas sunflowers.
They chose it because “as the sunflower follows civilization, follows the wheel track and the plow, so woman suffrage inevitably follows civilized government.” Suffragists in other states followed suit and the yellow sunflower became a symbol of the movement.
History, that ship carrying us into the future, records that the 19th Amendment granted American women the right to vote which was ratified on August 18, 1920 to end almost a century of drama and conflict. Women had found all the rights and responsibilities of American citizenship.