For a national movement, these regional differences often caused conflict, and made it nearly impossible to craft a single message of women’s suffrage that reflected the true diversity of American women. Each one was individual and relied on local suffragists who, more times than not, supported suffrage for reasons that conflicted with the national message of the National American Women Suffrage Association. No matter what Henry Mayer depicted in his centerfold in Puck, not a single one of the state suffrage campaigns was easy. When we add in Southern suffrage, a post-war addition to the national suffrage movement, the very real conversations on race, the 15th Amendment, and the role of women in the franchise come to light. The suffrage victories in the West and the Midwest came in stages, sometimes-as in the case of Washington-were repealed, and centered on local and regional conversations about immigration, temperance, and citizenship. While many of the initial women’s rights activists came from New York, women’s suffrage found its initial successes not in the Empire State, but in the West and Midwest.įrom the vantage point of hindsight, these western victories can look deceptive, easily won as the torch of liberty strides over them toward the East. Each time they voted it down… if it even left committee. Several times since the beginning of the women’s rights campaign, suffragists had presented the New York state legislature with the opportunity to extend voting rights to women. But for many suffragists and their supporters, the real prize was New York, the most populous state, the state that would signal the domino-like toppling of all the other stalwart states. Nearly all of those states were in the West and the Midwest. By the time the suffrage amendment was ratified in 1920, women in 27 states, 56% of the nation, held full voting rights. Not even close.īy the end of 1914, more than 4 million women had voting rights equal to men in 11 states, all in the West, leaving women elsewhere still reaching for the light of Liberty's torch of freedom. Mayer’s illustration provides an intriguing depiction of the American suffrage movement but doesn’t tell the whole story. Now, she’s bringing the vote-the key to citizenship and democracy-back to her eastern sisters. While signaling a new dawn for the nation, in many ways it also harkens back to John Gast’s 1872 painting American Progress, which depicts a winged, white, ghost-like woman sweeping westward settlement, capitalism, and Native and African American displacement - all the trappings of American progress. Look forward, women, always utterly cast away The memory of hate and struggle and bitterness Bonds may endure for a night, but freedom come with a day, And the free must remember nothing less.Ĭombined, this centerfold and the magazine’s special edition were meant to capture the contemporary spirit of the late 19th and early 20th centuries most current, democratic movement: women’s suffrage.
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