42 pages • 1 hour read
The Woman's Hour
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Themes
The Epic Fight for Women’s Suffrage
The principal theme of The Woman’s Hour is the excruciating amount of time and energy it took for American women to gain the right to vote. Without knowing what it took to pass the Nineteenth Amendment, modern readers may have assumed that women’s suffrage was easy to establish:
It’s too easy to imagine that the enfranchisement of American women simply arrived, like some evolutionary imperative, a natural step in the gradual march of progress. Or as a gift eventually bestowed by wise men on their grateful wives, daughters, and sisters. The women asked politely, staged a few picturesque marches, hoisted a few picket signs, and without much drama, “Votes for Women” was achieved. That’s not how it happened (2).
In reality, the issue took three generations to resolve itself. Women’s suffrage was violently opposed when first suggested early in the 19th century, and decades were required to soften public opinion toward the concept. Through the furor in Nashville over ratification, the author examines the grueling struggle that began in 1848 and required the sustained persistence of armies of women who refused to accept anything less than full citizenship.
The weeks leading up to ratification in August 1920 were fraught with episodes of political maneuvering, bribery, threats of physical violence, blackmail, press propaganda, and public demonstrations. Each of these incidents is a microcosm of similar events from the previous 80 years. The combat in Nashville brings home the point that freedom isn’t free.
Culture Wars
The contemporary reader may be inclined to see women’s suffrage as a simple issue with a simple solution. However, the author goes to great pains to point out how complex this particular issue was for the people involved in the ratification struggle in 1920:
The controversy over ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment—and, more broadly, the long battle over woman suffrage—wasn’t simply a political argument, it was also a social, cultural, and moral debate, a precursor to what we now call “culture wars,” raising issues that were complex and divisive (3).
For millennia, religion and politics had conspired to define women as lesser beings. Women’s suffrage was first proposed, most people still believed in the literal truth of the Bible story of God making Even out of Adam’s rib. Pulpits all around America preached the fallibility of Eve—and thus all women. Economically, women were chattel belonging to men. Politically, they were defined as “members of the state” rather than citizens. This special class designation allowed them to be tried for crimes and liable for tax payments but gave them no voice in their own government.
Changing the perception of fragile femininity became doubly hard in the Confederate states because of regional ideals of genteel Southern womanhood. These same states also actively resisted Black enfranchisement, fearing former enslaved people would outvote whites. Most surprising of all was the animosity some women felt toward women’s suffrage. Their attacks stemmed from a conservative desire to preserve traditional—or, white supremacist—values. They feared the changes that ratification might bring to gender and race relations. In the South, these anxieties ran rampant. The Antis deliberately played on the fears of Southerners to prevent the inevitable cultural shift that loomed on their narrow horizon.
Defining Democracy
It may seem ludicrous to a modern reader that it took so long to enfranchise the majority of the American population, but democracy has always been a tricky concept to define in this country. In the minds of the founding fathers, the sweeping generalities of the Declaration of Independence were never meant to apply to all people. Instead, the franchise has always been exclusive:
Voting rights have been a contested issue from the very beginning of the American experiment. When the founders wrote “We the People,” they really meant “We the White, Wealthy Men.” Despite much lofty rhetoric, all men were not created equal, and women didn’t count at all (4).
Though established through military conquest, the United States was founded on the ideal of freedom. The inconsistency between this ideal and the practice of democracy continues to plague the politics of America to the present day. At the time of the ratification battle in 1920, giving the vote to women meant enfranchising Black women. This muddied the political waters, especially in the South, which had expended so much effort during the previous half-century to keep its Black population from thriving. Visions of Black men and women voting as a monolithic bloc plagued the nightmares of conservative Tennessee legislators and their brethren in state governments all across the South.
The suffragists themselves displayed a troubling ambivalence toward Black women voters. They attempted to sweep the problem under the rug and downplay the effect that this segment of the voting population would have on the political status quo. Even the radical Alice Paul refused to champion the rights of Black women’s suffrage, preferring to see this as a race rather than a gender issue.
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