Alice Paul, the National Woman's Party and the Vote by Bernadette Cahill

Author:Bernadette Cahill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2015-04-30T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

Intended Consequences

After the November 2 general election in 1920, some daily newspapers reported on the culmination of the United States’ peaceful revolution of the day before. On this first day after women all across the country were finally able under law to help choose their elected representatives equally with men, often lengthy features told of women crowding the polls, using their maiden names and carrying their dogs to the polls. Others reported apparently deliberately insensitive poll workers asked women their age and shouted it out. Soon, life and death appeared, with an aged suffragist dying three days after casting her vote and a woman missing the opportunity to vote because she was giving birth.1 Some of the stories referred to the “woman vote” affecting the poll numbers2 and others dismissed it.3 Local issues, however, often took priority over the effect of this culminating act of the peaceful national sex revolution in voting, partly because women had previously won equal voting rights in some states, while elsewhere, both previously and during the NWP campaign, they had won unequal voting rights. Whether the voting rights were equal or unequal, women’s presence at the polls had already become so much a part of normal life that it was not newsworthy.4 There could easily have been another reason for this: suffrage was ignored at that point not only because had it won, but also because it pertained to women. And, as American history has so amply demonstrated, women can be ignored.

So insignificantly does women’s ingress to the voting booth seem to have featured in official minds across the nation, in spite of the 72-year struggle to win this one advance, that few records were kept distinguishing men and women voters. As a consequence of the neglect of this pivotal juncture in United States history, statistics are mostly unavailable to gauge accurately what the female vote in the 1920 elections might signify. The country had to wait until December 19 for an estimate of the total, which came up at between 28 million and thirty million votes cast. Although we lack a proper count, women voters were estimated to have voted at three-fifths of the male rate,5 low given the huge and terrifying specter that the prospect of votes by women had raised in debates during the preceding years, a specter used repeatedly as a reason to deny suffrage. Such numbers and the continued nonemergence in the 1920s of the huge threat of a voting bloc of women helped politicians, newsmen, observers and historians in the ensuing decades to start, and continue, to ignore or write off this new piece of national history as not being worth all the fuss. These failures haunt the truth of suffrage history even today, as scholars, if they do not actually ignore the amendment, continue to dismiss its importance in spite of the monumentality of the achievement.6 Yet, among the huge range of truths about votes by women waiting to emerge over time, one specific truth of the

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