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It’s difficult to believe but female Pittsburghers once fought against giving women the franchise, recounts Ellie Wymard
Believe it or not, some female Pittsburghers fought against giving women the right to vote.
On Aug. 26, 1920, Pittsburgh Mayor E.V. Babcock called for sirens, whistles and church bells to celebrate the passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guaranteeing women full voting rights. The struggle for suffrage that began decades earlier ended with the announcement of Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby early that morning that Tennessee had tipped the scale, completing the ratification by three-fourths of the states.
It is difficult to imagine a Pittsburgh woman not elated by this “joyous … moral and political victory.” But while city women invested time, talent and treasure in the effort to gain equality, others rallied around the motto “I didn’t raise my daughter to be a voter.”
The drumbeat for suffrage was slow to build here. Pittsburgh didn’t become “acutely conscious about the significance of suffrage until 1909 when a man — not a woman — made a speech on the rights of women before a pitifully small audience in a United Presbyterian Church in Oakland,” remembered Lucy Kennedy Miller in a 1940 Pittsburgh Press interview.
Miller emerged as the city’s leader for suffrage after inviting a group of women, mostly under the age of 30 and graduates of women’s colleges, for luncheon meetings at her home to hear nationally known suffragists speak about their efforts.
“We sat around on chairs and on the floor — wherever there was room — and hung on every word,” said Miller, a Vassar alumna. Within one year, these young women founded the state Suffrage Organization in 1912. Memberspresented their cause at local gatherings and traveled to Harrisburg and back to lobby state representatives, who “regardedus as villains,” Miller said.
Forty-six years before this, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony formed the American Equal Rights Association, the first organized national effort to achieve women’s suffrage through a constitutional amendment. More conservative activists like Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe concentrated on amending state constitutions.
When the U.S. Senate defeated the first vote on women’s rights in 1887, factions emerged to focus on gaining the vote at state levels. Following this model, determined Pittsburgh women converged on Harrisburg. They successfully persuaded state legislators to pass suffrage amendments in 1913, 1915 and 1917, but all of them failed at the polls.
Prior to the 19th Amendment, women had the right to vote in 15 states, starting with Wyoming in 1890. But Pennsylvania women could not vote until the 19th Amendment became federal law. Pennsylvania was the seventh state, however, to ratify the constitutional amendment — on June 24, 1919 — after Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Kansas, New York and Ohio.
Every step of the way, suffrage advocates were impeded by the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, known as the antis, a strong movement across the country from 1911 to 1920. Their plan in Pittsburgh was similar to the suffragists’ but with entirely different goals.
It is paradoxical that 58-yearold Julia Morgan Harding, who founded the Twentieth Century Club in 1894 as a forward-looking organization for women in the new century, also called together the first meeting of the Pittsburgh Association Opposed to Women Suffrage, an organization committed to preserving the status quo. By her invitation, 50 women who were “zealous opponents” of granting women the ballot gathered at Hamilton Hall in Oakland on Feb. 12, 1912.
“’Why I didn’t know you were one of us,’ was frequently heard as new arrivals entered the meeting,” according to a reporter covering the event for the Pittsburgh Gazette Times. “Some of the city’s most fashionable maids and matrons” were among the 100 women who attended a follow-up meeting to approve a draft of bylaws and elect Harding the official president of the PAOWS. Their first priorities were to organize a publicity bureau and sponsor a series of lectures by “men and women of note [who will] further the cause by the annihilation of sentiment which would give women the ballot …”
The state platform of the AOWS, led by Mrs. Charles Brock, advocated “that women, according to their leisure, opportunity and experience, should take part increasingly in civic and municipal affairs [but] this can best be done by women, without the ballot, as a nonpartisan body of disinterested workers.” Voting came too close to politics, an endeavor unworthy of women.
By Nov. 16, 1912, the antis had gained 10,000 signatures against suffrage in Pennsylvania, encouraging Harding and Brock to continue their mission. In April 1914, Harrisburg was the site for the first anti-suffrage convention in the United States, devised by Harding and Brock to make sure that Pennsylvania voters maintained their stance against the amendment, as they had in 1913, when it came up again for a vote in November 1915. Three hundred delegates were inspired by speakers from states where suffrage had recently been defeated.
The weekend before voters went to the polls on Nov. 2, Harding made a final appeal in the Oct. 31 edition of The Pittsburg Dispatch. Starting with the premise that “a democratic government is lawful only when conducted by a majority of the governed,” she concluded that “enfranchisement of all women to please 10 percent of the women is government by oligarchy.” For her, suffragists were “most undemocratic” until they could show that “51 percent of the women want to vote” and prove that the social order was better in states, such as Colorado, where women already had voting rights.
Quoted in the same newspaper, Brock called the suffrage movement “merely a cult, conducted by a few women who want to vote because Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton started this doctrine sixty-five years ago.” A few months earlier, after visiting Western suffrage states, she said, “[It’s] all a bluff,” according to Anne Myra Benjamin’s book “Women Against Equality: A History of the Anti Suffrage Movement In the United States from 1895 to 1920.”
The battle over the ballot ruined all romantic myths about sisterhood but proved the truth that in a democratic process, people often vote against their own best interests.
On the long-anticipated voting day, suffragists minding the polls were advised not to “bubble with exuberance, wear fluffy ruffles, nor regard yourself as important.” But they did distribute fliers with ready answers to the arguments against voting rights:
“Some Say: The majority of women don’t want the vote.
“We Say: This statement is without proof. In every state where petitions for suffrage … have been sent to the legislature, thenumber who want the ballot is always many times greater than thenumber who do not.
“Some Say: A woman’s place is in the home.
“We Say: She leaves it to go to the market and to pay taxes. Why not to vote? Home making conditions are largely regulated by law, and the ballot has become a domestic necessity.”
At the end of the day, reason and decorum mattered little. A majority of approximately 250,000 votes defeated a woman’s right to vote in Pennsylvania.
Pittsburgh suffragists quickly made plans to introduce a third amendment to Harrisburg, in 1917. While World War I interrupted their efforts, the participation of 40,000 suffragists in the war effort changed the political dynamic. Taking advantage of the new climate and increased donations to the coffers, “A few of us hurried off to Washington to get an amendment to the Constitution,” Lucy Kennedy Miller said. She and Jennie Bradley Roessing also spent $5,000 to make phone calls all over the country, subsidized by the Pennsylvania-suffrage organization.
When the Pennsylvania Legislature met in full session to ratify the 19th Amendment on June 24, 1919, Miller and Roessing were present. They had launched the suffrage campaign in Pittsburgh and remained committed until the victory was won. After the vote, Miller was invited to address the Legislature, the first woman to do so. With more work to do, she became a charter member of the Allegheny County League of Women Voters, which grew out of the suffrage movement here.
“During the intervening years since we have achieved universal woman suffrage,” Miller said in the 1940 interview, “we have lost sight of the struggle for the vote which at times seemed hopeless.” If forgotten during her lifetime, what now?
Perhaps ceremonies for the 100th anniversary in 2020 will rise above expressions of nostalgia for bygone days in favor of probing the suffragist legacy as a way of exposing all manner of current inequalities and inspiring action.