99¢ for the first month
99¢ for the first month

The long road to women's suffrage

Cynthia Stead

There is a lot of disagreement about who ought to be counted in the U.S. census this year. Many argue that only American citizens or those with a legal right to be here should be tabulated, but that has never been the case. Since its inception, the census has always counted every human soul who is a resident within its boundaries. Undesirables who might or could never become proper citizens were counted — albeit not always as full persons — including those who did not own property, the illiterate, the senile and disabled, slaves and indentured servants and even women. All of them were deserving of representation. After emancipation most of these people were able to vote as well. Except for women, of course.

But 100 years ago that changed too. On August 26, 1920, the state of Tennessee ratified the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, making it law by reaching the number of states necessary. Along with living through the Spanish Flu, women were given the right to vote.

Suffrage heroines like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Clara Barton, and Susan B. Anthony are praised in schools nowadays, but at the time were vilified and dismissed as ‘"hysterical," the catch-all word used to quietly explain why women are physiologically unfit for full citizenship and should depend upon their male connections for money, property and deciding who will best represent their interests, even to the extent of deciding what those interests really are. Indeed, freed male slaves who had not been counted as a full person had the technical right to vote, if not the actual opportunity in most places.

Efforts to extend the franchise to women began in earnest about 20 years after the Civil War. States like Arizona, Kansas and Nevada granted full voting rights early, and Montana elected Jeanette Rankin as the first female member of Congress in 1916. It is notable that these are frontier states, where women often worked and farmed, creating the image of the frontier wife with a baby on one hip and a rifle on the other.

Other states were a mix in those decades. Illinois allowed women municipal and presidential votes, but not state. Rhode Island allowed women only to vote in presidential elections. Arkansas allowed women to vote in a primary but not in a general. New York was the first eastern state to grant women the right to vote, but acceptance was limited in more urban states. On the day before President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, a suffrage march was attacked and hundreds were injured, but no arrests were made.

Massachusetts has a dubious record. In 1780, it was noted that in the state Constitution, the word "male" was used to indicate the right to vote but not be candidate. From the 1850s on, petitions to vote in local school elections were offered. In 1879, literate women were allowed to vote after passing whatever tests and qualifications municipal authorities deemed appropriate.

But there it remained until 1920. A referendum for full suffrage held in 1895 failed with 96% of women voting yes, and only 32% of men doing so. In fact, the 1915 ratification of the constitutional amendment vote failed, and women here only gained the right to vote through elections in other states. Boston was a national epicenter of anti-suffrage literature and printing. Massachusetts has always been good at announcing what progressive principals and equality ought to be while quietly denying them in their own backyard.

We’ll see a lot of self-congratulation on allowing women to vote on Aug. 26. But that has not translated into women being elected. Women are asked who will take care of their families if they run for office. The language is more shrouded, but the intent is the same. Women are written about in terms of their looks rather than brains, even by friendly reporters. And women famously do not donate to and support female candidates the way men support male ones. There’s an attitude with that half of the electorate that even if you don’t agree with everything a male candidate says or thinks on an important issue or in an emergency, he will know where to "draw the line." With women, there is the possibility they might not, or even worse they might draw that line in the wrong place.

It’s a stigma that attaches itself in a nonpartisan way. Elizabeth Dole, former president of the American Red Cross, was questioned about what she knew as the wife of a senator. Carly Fiorina was kept out of the presidential debates by a process that set benchmarks to participate, and then changed the qualifications when she met them. Hillary Clinton was the first female presidential nominee of a major party and at the time was a sitting senator, but much debate centered upon the likelihood of her husband’s inappropriate behavior if she was elected. Indeed, when Joe Biden announced Kamala Harris as his running mate on Tuesday, it was a matter of iconography as much as ability, as if qualified women were as rare as unicorns.

On Aug. 26, 1920, women gained the right to vote, and were not condescendingly bestowed permission to do so. We deserved representation from the start, now we celebrate the right to choose that representative as well.

Cynthia Stead of Dennis may be emailed at