Victory for the Vote by Doris Weatherford

Author:Doris Weatherford [Weatherford, Doris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781642500547
Publisher: Mango Media
Published: 2020-02-02T02:50:23+00:00

Opposition to suffrage was strongest in Eastern urban areas. This headquarters was in New York City.

(Library of Congress)

It appeared that the National American and its great leader, Susan B. Anthony, were indeed losing their political edge, but they continued to work hard—especially given their age. At 75, Anthony spent much of 1895 in California, where women finally were holding the first suffrage referendum in this oldest Western state. The National American poured more resources into California than any campaign thus far—about $19,000. Anthony hired California journalist Ida Husted Harper as the campaign’s publicist. As in Kansas and so many other places, the women thought they were winning—and they probably were ahead—until the liquor industry poured big dollars into a last-minute campaign against them. California went down by 26,744 votes out of 247,454 cast; a change of just slightly more than 13,000 votes would have carried it. The women had editorial support from some 250 newspapers, but most were small compared with the opposing San Francisco Chronicle and Los Angeles Times. Instead of following up on this near victory, however, Harper moved to Rochester with Anthony, where she worked on her biography and on the fourth volume of the History of Woman Suffrage.

A quieter campaign with less outside influence, on the other hand, proved successful in the same year in Idaho. Oregon’s Abigail Scott Duniway had prepared the way in the decades prior to statehood in 1890, for many Idahoans subscribed to her New Northwest. The National American sent Carrie Chapman Catt to run her second statewide campaign here in 1896, and she won by an amazing margin: 122,126 for, 5,844 against. It gave Catt a 2–0 record, for she also had won the Colorado victory, and she was demonstrably the movement’s best political organizer. However, the leaders who lost California did not seem to grasp the point that Catt’s work effectively made: Western men would never vote for suffrage as long as Eastern women dominated campaigns and linked them to prohibition.

The Idaho referendum was also significant because, for the first time ever, a court sustained the women’s victory instead of snatching it away. Anti-suffragists sued to overturn the election: they argued that instead of a majority on this issue (which women won), a constitutional amendment required a majority of all who voted in any aspect of the election (which they would have lost). Idaho’s Supreme Court ruled unanimously that this legalism had not applied in other elections and would not in this one.

It was also a good year in Colorado, which elected three more women—all from minor parties—to its legislature. Moreover, Utah women finally regained the vote in 1896, when the Mormon Church renounced polygamy in exchange for statehood. Utah set another precedent this year when Dr. Martha Hughes Cannon became the first woman in the nation elected to a state senate. A physician, she was also the fourth wife of a Mormon official and had once exiled herself in England to protect him from arrest on polygamy charges. No

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