The fight that delayed Arizona women’s right to vote
As we celebrate the ratification of the 19th Amendment this week, it is good to remember what while that amendment made women’s suffrage universal for citizens of the United States, a number of territories and states had already granted suffrage rights to women by 1920.
Wyoming was the first to grant women the right to vote in its territorial constitution, in 1869. The Utah Territory did so a year later. When Wyoming and Utah gained statehood, in 1890 and 1896 respectively, their state constitutions contained women’s suffrage provisions.
By the turn of the century, Colorado (in 1893) and Idaho (in 1896) also had amended their state constitutions to give women the right to vote.
And under the influence of the Progressive Movement, which was riding high in the early years of the 20th century, a number of other states opted for women’s suffrage as a key reform. Washington (1910), California (1911), Oregon (1912) and Arizona (1912) amended their constitutions to give women the right to vote.
By 1919, 15 states – all but two in the West – had provisions in their constitutions giving women the right to vote.
Although only 15 states had provided universal suffrage to women before the adoption of the 19th Amendment, several other states had given women the right to vote in school board and municipal elections, and curiously, for presidential electors.
Writing in a different context in 1932, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis observed that it “was one of the happy incidents of our federal system that a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”
That certainly proved to be the case with women’s suffrage.
This is not to detract from the hard work that began at Seneca Falls, N.Y., in 1847 and the persistence of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Stanton and thousands of other women and men who advocated for women’s suffrage at the national level.
Indeed, while they were working for an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, they were also laboring in the Western states to convince the rest of the nation that the experiment was working.
Like many experiments, the fight for women’s suffrage sometimes failed. Take Arizona, for example.
Arizona’s Constitutional Convention was held in the fall of 1910. The Democrats, who were in control and very much influenced by and committed to the Progressive Movement’s agenda, gathered in Phoenix with many of the delegates pledged to ensure that the Constitution guaranteed the people the right to all forms of direct democracy: initiative, referendum and recall, direct election of senators, laws protective of labor and women’s suffrage.
Three propositions relating to women’s suffrage were introduced at the Arizona Constitutional Convention, one of which would have put the question to a vote of the people.
The debate was spirited, but to the modern ear, discordant.
At one point, influential delegate John Ellinwood (D-Bisbee) saw fit to quote from U.S. Sen. Elihu Root, in opposition to women’s suffrage: “Woman rules today by the sweet and noble influence of her character. Put woman into the arena of conflict, and she abandons these great weapons which control the world, and she takes into her hands … weapons with which she is unfamiliar and unable to wield.”
All three propositions failed, and Arizona adopted a constitution without women’s suffrage.
One of the main reasons for this failure was the opposition voiced by the liquor lobby, which had fought women’s suffrage because they feared that if women gained the right to vote, prohibition would soon follow.
But using the power of initiative, the Arizona Constitution was amended to guarantee women’s suffrage at the first opportunity to do so – in November 1912 – by an overwhelming 2-1 margin.
Whatever influence the liquor lobby had at the Constitutional Convention had evaporated four years later when Arizona voters (including women) adopted prohibition by initiative in a close vote, as the lobby had feared.
So here we are, more than 100 years later. We’re back to drinking alcohol and we can all toast the victory of women’s suffrage.