Votes for Women!: Chapters 7–10

The amendment said, in part, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.”

She told them if they were to refuse her rights as a citizen, she would bring charges against them in criminal court and she would “sue each of [them] personally for large, exemplary damages!”

She was charged with violating section 19 of the Enforcement Act of 1870, which made it illegal for someone to willfully cast an illegal ballot.

When she realized she was going to have to go downtown to the courthouse, Anthony excused herself and went upstairs to change clothes, leaving the flummoxed marshal waiting in the parlor.

If she was incarcerated, her lawyer could file a writ of habeas corpus, which gives prisoners the right to challenge their imprisonment.

If she was incarcerated, her lawyer could file a writ of habeas corpus, which gives prisoners the right to challenge their imprisonment.

She was livid.

And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people—women as well as men.

Undaunted, Anthony organized another lecture tour and addressed crowds in Ontario County for twenty-one days in a row.

“If the same act had been done by her brother under the same circumstances, the act would have been not only innocent, but honorable and laudable,” Selden argued.

All the stock in trade I possess is a $10,000 debt, incurred by publishing my paper—The Revolution—four years ago...

And I shall earnestly and persistently continue to urge all women to the practical recognition of the old revolutionary maxim that ‘Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.’

They lost in the lower courts, so they appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that the federal protections of a citizen’s right to vote superseded any state law that says otherwise.

They chose a spot close to the exposition’s fairgrounds so that people attending the events would walk past the headquarters and could be asked to sign petitions about women’s rights.

Despite congressional apathy and obstruction, the suffragists remained steadfast.

Despite congressional apathy and obstruction, the suffragists remained steadfast.

Anthony’s bright-red shawl—the only flash of color in her otherwise dark and drab wardrobe—became iconic.

“Surely Mrs. Stanton has secured much immunity by a comfortable look of motherliness and a sly benignancy in her smiling eyes,” wrote one newspaper reporter, “even though her arguments have been bayonet thrusts and her words gun shots.”

Stanton could think on her feet, and she refused to be intimidated by those who dared to heckle her as she spoke.

It made no mention of Lucy Stone, from whom Anthony had been estranged since their falling-out over Stone’s marriage, or the rivalry between Anthony’s National and Stone’s American Woman Suffrage Association.

She tried to be impartial in her writing, even though she saw the movement through her mother’s eyes.

She felt that her radical ideas were out of step with an issue that seemed to have grown stagnant.

“When the division was made twenty-two years ago, it was because our platform was too broad, because Mrs. Stanton was too radical,” Anthony said. “A more conservative association was wanted. And now if we divide and Mrs. Stanton shall be deposed from the presidency you virtually degrade her.”

She wrote, “Church and state, priest and legislators, all political parties and religious denominations have alike taught that woman was made after man, of man, and for man, an inferior being, subject to man.”

Stanton spelled out the current understanding of women’s status in the introduction, where she wrote that the Bible “teaches that woman brought sin and death into the world, that she precipitated the fall of the race....Marriage for her was to be a condition of bondage, maternity a period of suffering and anguish, and in silence and subjection, she was to play the role of a dependent on man’s bounty for all her material wants....Here is the Bible position of woman all summed up.”

Religious leaders denounced it as blasphemous.

Churchgoers considered it irreverent.

This resolution...will be a vote of censure upon a woman who is without a peer in intellectual and statesmanlike ability; one who has stood for half a century the acknowledged leader of progressive thought...

When our platform becomes too narrow for people of all creeds and of no creeds, myself shall not stand upon it....I shall be pained beyond expression if the delegates...are so narrow and illiberal as to adopt this resolution.

“Much as I desire the suffrage,” she wrote, “I would rather never vote than to see the policy of our government at the mercy of the religious bigotry of such women.”

They are, she argued, “far more so than 99/100 of married people....Mr. Stanton...is a very cheerful sunny genial man, hence we can laugh together....He loves music so do I, he loves oratory so do I...but our theology is as wide apart as the north and south pole....My views trouble him. I accept his philosophically....if he could do the same we should be nearer and dearer I have no doubt.”

The suffrage movement was entering a phase that many historians refer to as “the doldrums.”

Severe cataracts had left Stanton virtually blind, and heart failure made her weak and breathless.

“Once I was the most hated and reviled of women,” she said. “Now it seems as if everybody loves me.”

Then she ended her remarks with this statement: “There have been also others just as true and devoted to the cause—I wish I could name every one—but with such women consecrating their lives, failure is impossible!”

“The world is profoundly stirred by the loss of our great General,” Shaw said in her eulogy, “and in consequence the lukewarm are becoming zealous, the prejudiced are disarming, and the suffragists are renewing their vows of fidelity to the cause for which Miss Anthony lived and died. Her talismanic words, the last she ever uttered before a public audience, ‘Failure is impossible,’ shall be inscribed on our banner and engraved on our hearts.”

Critics called these women “suffragettes,” a word intended to be disparaging, but the women embraced the term as one of power and rebellion.

Blatch said, “The suffrage movement...bored its adherents and repelled its opponents.”

She wanted the grand procession to take place on March 3, 1913, the day before the inaugural parade for the twenty-eighth president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson.

Paul had moved to Washington, DC, in December 1912, after assuming leadership of NAWSA’s congressional committee, but the organization’s leadership remained wary of her, and they wanted to keep the radicalism of the British suffragettes out of their organization.

She told one supporter, “We are endeavoring to make the procession a particularly beautiful one, so that it will be noteworthy on account of its beauty even if we are not able to make it so on account of its numbers.”

She proselytized about suffrage to anyone who would listen and recruited volunteers to help with the work.

“When you ask her a question, there ensues, on her part, a moment of stillness so profound you can almost hear it,” another suffragist said.

“I think I have never seen anybody who can keep so still as Alice Paul…..Superficially she seems cold, austere, a little remote. But that is only because the fire of her spirit burns at such a heat that it is still and white. She has the quiet of a spinning top.”

It seemed a petty concern but an easy issue to address. To keep the peace, Paul changed the green to gold and ordered two thousand replacement pennants.