Braving Scorn And Threats

Women have come a long way —and have a long way to go

CONVENTION. A feminist once wrote that when a woman hears a slighting remark about her role in life, she sometimes also hears a remarkable sound: click. That is the moment of recognition, the sound of things falling into place. Just like that: click. Geraldine Ferraro probably heard the sound when a New York law firm’s senior partner, who had been interviewing her for a job, finally said, “You’re wonderful, but we’re not hiring any women this year.” Click. Or perhaps when her employer explained why other department heads were getting higher pay: “But, Gerry, you have a husband.” Click.

The principal founder of the movement that ultimately brought Ferraro to the Democratic ticket must have experienced a similar moment one day back in 1840. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 24, newly married to an Abolitionist Orator named Henry Brewster Stanton, had accompanied him to London, where he was to be a delegate to the World Anti-Slavery Convention. There she learned that this meeting to combat slavery was barred to all women. Click.

While in London, she met a young Quaker woman from Philadelphia, Lucretia Mott, who had also been barred from the slavery convention. The two of them talked of staging a meeting of their own some day to protest discrimination against women. Eight years passed; then Stanton, living in Seneca Falls, N.Y., heard that Mott was visiting near by. The two got together and decided to organize their meeting. As an agenda, Stanton boldly updated the Declaration of Independence as drafted by Thomas Jefferson. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” said the Stanton version, “that all men and women are created equal…”

As Jefferson had done, Stanton and her fellow rebels set forth their grievances against the tyrannies of the authorities. A respectable married woman of that day could not, in general, own property, testify in court against her husband, sign a contract or keep her earnings. The tyrant responsible for her plight, according to the Declaration of Seneca Falls, was Man, who “has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.”

Such complaints were not unprecedented, but Stanton added a demand that was radical indeed. Over the protests of Mott and several other delegates, she introduced a resolution (which just narrowly passed) declaring that it was women’s duty “to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.”

No matter how strongly some women felt about voting, though, the overwhelming issue of that era was the abolition of slavery, and Stanton’s associates eagerly joined the battle. They made speeches, raised money, collected signatures—often braving scorn and even physical threats—because they believed that abolition implied equal rights for all, Black and White, men and women. But when the Civil War was fought and won, they were appalled to learn that the newly drafted 14th Amendment guaranteed full citizenship to Blacks but only to “male inhabitants.”

The women vehemently protested this betrayal to their former allies, but in vain. Votes for women were not “a practical thing,” said Theodore Tilton. Said another former abolitionist: “It is the Negro’s hour.” Susan B. Anthony angrily retorted, “I would sooner cut off my right hand than ask for the ballot for the Black man and not for woman.” She and Stanton founded the National Woman Suffrage Association.

While the suffragist meetings and protests continued, the first woman who personally challenged the political hierarchy was the electrifying Victoria Claflin Woodhull of Homer, Ohio. Beautiful, energetic and not entirely scrupulous, Victoria and her younger sister Tennessee practiced many of the popular quackeries of the day: seances, psychic remedies, a bottled “elixir of life.” Inspired, she said, by a vision of Demosthenes, Woodhull and her sister went to New York and arranged to introduce themselves to the newly widowed Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, 84. With her “magnetic treatment” Tennessee soothed the railroad tycoon so successfully that he backed the young sisters in opening a lucrative stock brokerage. In 1870, at 31, Victoria announced she was running for President. To argue her cause, she started her own newspaper, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, which favored, among other things, free love, tax reform and world government.

As an orator, Woodhull bowed to no man. “We mean treason; we mean secession…” she declared. “We are plotting revolution; we will [overthrow] this bogus Republic and plant a government of righteousness in its stead.” When someone dared to ask whether she practiced her preachings of free love, she defiantly answered, “Yes! I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may.” Some suffragists were embarrassed by Woodhull’s flamboyance, but Stanton said, “If Victoria Woodhull must be crucified, let men drive the spikes.”

Woodhull, who eventually married a rich English banker, provided a meteoric symbol of change, but it was the regiments of suffragist foot soldiers who steadily kept applying the pressure, state by state. Their key opportunity came with the entry of various Western territories into the union. The new constitution of Wyoming (1890) was the first to include women’s suffrage; then came Colorado (1893), Utah and Idaho (1896).

Hoping to shorten the process, California Senator Aaron Sargent had introduced in 1878 an amendment to the Constitution: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged…on account of sex.” After nine years of stalling, the Senate voted the measure down. Early in 1918, apparently because so many women had done so much war work, the amendment finally was passed by the House. In the galleries, a tearful crowd of suffragists started singing “Praise God from whom all blessings flow.” The next year, the Senate added its grudging consent, 66 to 30. This time there was no singing by the women. “To their weary senses,” said Suffragist Leader Carrie Chapman Catt, “the only meaning of the vote just taken was that the Senate had at last surrendered…given in to the people it represented.”

The 19th Amendment seemed to promise much. It had long been urged not only as a matter of women’s rights but as a purification of the political system. Its supporters claimed that women, because of their supposedly higher nature, would vote for measures humane and virtuous, and that they would do so en masse. “The civilization of the world is saved,” gushed Democratic Presidential Nominee James Cox in 1920. “The mothers of America will stay the hand of war.”

Many politicians were naturally terrified at the prospect of runaway reform. To win the new voters’ support, Congress hastened to appropriate $1.25 million for health education for mothers and children. Michigan and Montana passed equal-pay laws. By 1921, some 20 states had granted women the right to serve on juries. But it took only a few years for professional politicians to make three key discoveries: 1) many women did not vote, 2) women did not vote as a bloc, and 3) they often voted exactly like their husbands. The bosses could sigh with relief; the status quo was safe.

That was all too clear in the selection of the first woman to serve in the Senate. She was Rebecca Felton, 87, a veteran suffragist from Georgia. When a Georgia Senator died in 1922, a new man was elected to replace him, but the Governor decided to make a gesture by appointing Felton to the vacant seat until the new Senator could be sworn in. So the Senate suspended its rules for exactly one hour.

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal brought new political opportunities for women, partly because innovation suited the spirit of the 1930s, partly because Eleanor Roosevelt was a highly active First Lady, partly because Mary Dewson of the Democrats’ women’s division organized upwards of 60,000 female precinct workers to get out the female vote. Roosevelt appointed the first woman to the Cabinet (Labor Secretary Frances Perkins), the first female federal appeals court judge, the first female minister to a foreign country. Still, even in 1940,16 states still said a wife could not sign a contract, and eleven said she could not keep her own earnings. World War II solidified women’s gains, for millions went to work at jobs they had never had before. In aircraft plants, for example, the number soared from 4,000 to 310,000 between 1941 and 1943. There was even a uniformed Women’s Army Corps, and for the first time, women served in the military in significant numbers.

These changes were none too solid, though. When the soldiers returned home, they wanted their jobs back, and all the pressures of a male-run society combined to create the age of domesticity and “togetherness,” and a baby boom in suburbia. The few women who kept claiming a political role came to be regarded as harmless or eccentric. The formidable Margaret Chase Smith, who served 23 years in the Senate, most of them as the lone woman there, was occasionally mentioned as a possible Republican vice-presidential candidate. But it was typical of the times that when somebody asked her what she would do if she suddenly woke up and found herself in the White House, she answered, “I’d go straight to Mrs. Truman and apologize. Then I’d go home.” When Smith made history in 1964 by being the first woman to have her name placed in nomination as a major party-candidate for the presidency, she was dismissed with exactly 27 convention votes.

Vice-presidential bids were more common. As early as 1924, the Democratic Convention considered, and rejected, South Carolina Committeewoman Lena Springs. The last strong bid was by Frances (“Sissy”) Farenthold of Texas, who won 404 Democratic delegate votes in 1972 but was beaten by Thomas Eagleton. The small parties that occupy the fringes of American politics have been more willing to support women. In 1980 there were seven nominations for the No. 2 spot, including LaDonna Harris as vice-presidential choice of the Citizens Party and Angela Davis as that of the Communists. Such gestures, however, remained little more than that.

Even after two decades of renewed political activism among women, equality remains a goal rather than a reality. In 1982 only 55 women ran for the 435 House seats, and only 21 won. Only three women ran for the Senate, and all three lost. In 1974 Ella Grasso of Connecticut became the first woman to win a governorship without having followed her husband into the statehouse. Today Kentucky’s Martha Layne Collins is the only female Governor out of 50.

Why do more than 50% of Americans still hold less than 5% of the elected political positions? The easy answer is that attitudes are slow to change. As recently as May 1983, a Gallup poll indicated that 16% of both men and women would oppose a qualified woman from their party for President. Hardly less important, though, is that men have clung to the machinery of politics. Various political-action committees donated $35 million to the last congressional elections, and $31 million of that went to incumbents. Of the little available to challengers, women got 7%. Click. —ByOttoFriedrich