16. Final Push for Woman Suffrage
The first wave of suffragists were gone. It was up to a new, educated, and persistent generation of women to earn the right to vote. This final push for women's suffrage saw pageants, parades, marches, boycotts, silent sentinels, hunger strikes, in addition to all the tactics used before. When World War I broke out, women did not back down as they had during the Civil War, escalating the attention to the movement. Women's suffrage eventually passed as a war measure.
How to cite this source?
Remedial Herstory Project Editors. "16. FINAL PUSH FOR WOMAN SUFFRAGE." The Remedial Herstory Project. November 1, 2025. www.remedialherstory.com.
As the women’s suffrage movement in the United States entered a new century, most of its original leaders were now gone. Elizabeth caddy Stanton, Susan B Anthony, Lucretia Mott, and the other white women who were instrumental in the founding of the national American women’s suffrage Association were dead. It was up to a new generation of young college educated women to navigate the tricky dynamic of advocating for political reforms without having an official voice in politics. New leaders emerged like Carrie Catt, Ida B Wells Barnett, Alice Paul, and Lucy Burns. Although their advocacy and focus may have varied, these women lead the national movement in its final push to gain women’s suffrage. State to state suffrage leaders emerged and helped advocate for reform on a state level. There are also leaders like Zitkala Sa and Mabel Ping-Hua Lee who advocated for groups that were yet to be even recognized as citizens, like Native Americans and Chinese Americans.
What were these women and their allies after? A democracy that recognized them as full citizens. Named after Susan B. Anthony who first introduced in 1878, the amendment stated simply: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”
That one sentence took decades of work, sweat, tears, and violence to pass.
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College Degrees
To discuss women’s suffrage in this period, it would be impossible to ignore the role that educational reforms played in the lives of the new generation of women leading the charge. Young women at the turn of the century were attending college at rates never before seen. These women entered into college classrooms where no women have done before. Most often they were not greeted with open arms. In fact they were greeted with hostility. They were often seen as taking a seat from a young man, “who would actually use his degree.“ Young female college students were ridiculed, jeered, bullied, and sexually harassed. That harassment was not only from their peers, but also from their professors. In some cases women were allowed to attend classes, but not earn degrees. Oberlin college, which was one of the first to admit women, was still incredibly discriminatory towards them. For example, on Mondays female students were released early from class so that they could do the laundry for the male students. In other places, their male professors refused to teach them. Or in one instance, as women sat for an exam, their male peers rioted in protest.
Colleges for women were treated like a dangerous experiment: what might these women possibly learn? Colleges that were designed for men who are modeled on the idea of an “academic village.“ Boys would cross from their dormitory to the academic buildings where they attended classes. Colleges designed for women however reinforced traditional ideas of modesty. There was no quad for them. Girls attended classes in buildings modeled after seminaries, or religious buildings.
Yet, across every field, women were joining the ranks of those college educated. Higher education for women was relatively new in the United States. Mississippi college became the first institute for higher education to actually grant a degree to women in 1831: Alice Robinson and Catherine Hall. Then in 1839, Wesleyan College opened and exclusively granted bachelors degrees for women. A decade later, Elizabeth Blackwell, who was born in England, became the first woman to earn a medical degree at an American institution. She had received 10 rejection letters from various colleges. One person even told her that if she really wanted a college degree, she should dress like a man. She did not cross-dress, instead writing, "It was to my mind a moral crusade. It must be pursued in the light of day, and with public sanction, in order to accomplish its end." In 1850, Lucy Stanton became the first Black woman to earn a degree in the US, from Oberlin College. Mary Fellows was the first woman to receive a degree from west of the Mississippi River. It wasn’t until 1873, that California declared that girls should have equal access to higher education. It would take years before that same philosophy was applied across the country.
Between 1880 and 1930, 50 years, colleges of higher education went from about 50% being coed to 75%. The Ivy Leagues were some of the last holdouts, with some exception: Cornell began admitting women in 1870. But most opted for having sister colleges, like the Radcliffe to Harvard. Radcliffe contracted with Harvard professors to teach classes to the female students. But others resisted women’s education like it was the plague. Most Ivy League institutions did not give women equal access until the 1960s and 70s under the women’s movement. And even then there was much resistance. One Dartmouth alumni wrote: "For God's sake, for Dartmouth's sake, and for everyone's sake, keep the damned women out,"
At Princeton, outright misogyny ruled the day: “What is all this nonsense about admitting women to Princeton? A good old-fashioned whore-house would be considerably more efficient, and much, much cheaper."
Eventually, pragmatically, the Ivy Leagues, too, began to accept women into their institutions. Unfortunately it wasn’t because they suddenly embraced women’s liberation. It was because male undergraduates were opting to go to coed institutions rather than male-only institutions. In order to stay competitive and get the best male intellectuals in their doors they admitted women as a “perk” for male students.
Elizabeth Blackwell, Public Domain
Doldrums
But what did all of this education have to do with suffrage? Everything. One of the best anti-suffrage arguments was not granting women the vote would introduce yet another largely uneducated, potentially illiterate, group of people into the voting population. Remember it wasn’t too long ago, and was still within recent memory of most in power that men of color were also granted suffrage. How could women, who don’t work in industry, possibly vote in any informed way on issues of economics or politics? The growing numbers of women graduating with college degrees was proving that narrative false. Women can be informed voters.
Among the first wave of undergraduates with bachelor's degrees was Carrie Chapman Catt who was selected as the president of NAWSA, to succeed Susan B. Anthony. Catt was a formidable choice. She dedicated her entire life to suffrage. Her first husband died shortly after their marriage from typhoid fever, and she married her second husband, who she knew from college at Iowa State. In 1887, after a short career as a legal clerk and teacher, she joined the women’s crusade. George Catt supported his wife. He viewed their gendered roles as this: his job was to provide, hers was to improve the world. They never had kids and after he died, she worked alongside her female housemate and partner, Mary Garret Hay, for the cause of women. Many many years later, when she died, she chose to be buried under a loving inscription next to Hay.
From 1900 to 1904, Catt led NAWSA, but at the end of her tenure, her husband, Susan B Anthony, and her mother all passed away leaving Catt grief stricken. Without her at the helm, NAWSA struggled. Anna Howard Shaw, who held a degree in ministry and a doctoral degree in medicine, took charge. Shaw was a fierce advocate for working class women, but not a champion for all women. She frequently spoke about nativist views, championed white women’s causes, and created a hostile environment for African-Americans within the movement. But while hostile to some, Shaw is a striking example of the importance of suffrage to queer women. After all, queer women often did not have a man providing for them and all the privileges wives had did not necessarily extend to them. Shaw, like many suffragists, lived with a longtime female partner, Lucy Elmina Anthony, the niece of Susan B. Anthony. There was no man to provide for them, so women in these partnerships lived on the often pitiful and discriminatory salaries granted to women.
All over the country they led marches and were successful in getting some states to grant women the right to vote. California gave women the right to vote in 1911 and Tye Leung Schulze made history as the first Chinese-American woman, if not the first Asian woman in the world, to vote in a democratic election. Of the event she said, “I thought long over that. I studied; I read about all your men who wished to be president. I learned about the new laws. I wanted to KNOW what was right, not to act blindly...I think it is right we should all try to learn, not vote blindly, since we have been given this right to say which man we think is the greatest...I think too that we women are more careful than the men. We want to do our whole duty more. I do not think it is just the newness that makes use like that. It is conscience.”
Across the country, women battled against long standing traditions and well-established patriarchal norms. Under Shaw’s leadership women’s suffrage stalled out. They’d been going state by state for decades working to get change and in those decades only nine states had granted women the right to vote: 70 years and only nine states. Something had to give and the women knew it. Perhaps the strategy was wrong? Between women suffragists, great debate broke out. There were the old-school NAWSA women who advocated for the tried and true continued effort in the state to state campaigns. State campaigns were growing and more and more women were joining the movement at the local level. But a young, animated, and educated generation of women were joining the movement.
Anna Howard Shaw 1922, Public Domain
Paul and Burns
Two of the most notable women in this group were Lucy Burns and Alice Paul. Both of these women not only had college degrees, but had multiple college degrees. Burns studied at Vassar College and Yale University and later at the University of Berlin in Germany and Oxford College abroad. There, Burns witnessed the militancy of the British suffrage movement.
In 1909 she joined Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst's Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) where she became an expert orator, and was arrested on numerous occasions. She met Alice Paul in a London police station after both were arrested during a suffrage demonstration outside Parliament.
Paul graduated with a degree in biology from Swarthmore College (1905), and earned graduate degrees in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania (M.A., 1907; Ph.D., 1912). Years after suffrage she would also earn two law degrees.
When they came home from England in 1910, Paul and Burns were disheartened at the state of women’s suffrage in the United States. They pressed NAWSA to take harder positions on suffrage and advocate for a federal amendment. The leaders in NAWSA gave Paul control over the Congressional Committee whose job was to press for a Federal Amendment to the constitution, not just a state by state approach. Between 1912 and 1913, Paul and Burns worked to organize the congressional committee and build it into a robust political force.
Lucy Burns November 1913, Public Domain
Suffrage Parade
On March 3, 1913, they held a women’s suffrage parade in Washington DC the day before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration. Paul has begun planning this since well before she was even granted a title in the women’s movement. Her planning was meticulous, she tapped every resource and connection she had in DC and in the Taft administration that was exiting, and her expert use of public relations kept suffrage and the parade in the media so frequently that people associated the parade with Wilson’s inauguration. Women were led down Pennsylvania Avenue by Inez Milholland atop a horse representing Columbia, a symbol of the United States. Following her women were grouped by alma mater demonstrating their expertise and education levels, women were then grouped by state showing that women in every state wanted the right to vote, women were also grouped by profession with various industries given somatic outfits to wear, showing the depth of the suffrage movement and how intersected so many women’s lives.
Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin, a Chippewa, was the first Indigenous woman to graduate from the Washington College of Law in Washington D.C. She was an outspoken advocate of Indigenous communities and also a suffragist. In fact, on the day of her graduation from law school, Baldwin was asked by a reporter if she considered herself a suffragist; in response, she laughed and stated: “Did you ever know that the Indian women were among the first suffragists and that they exercised the right of recall?” In chiding the reporter, Baldwin highlights the fact that Indigenous women—especially those from matrilineal communities—often held and exercised political power amongst their peoples. Still, as demonstrated by her track record as a suffragist, Baldwin clearly believed that women more broadly deserved the right to vote.
Baldwin also marched in the National Woman Suffrage Procession, though on her own terms. At first, the parade’s organizers had apparently asked her to create a float that paid tribute to Indigenous women quite broadly. Baldwin, however, refused to homogenize Indigenous women into a monolithic, stereotypical figure. Instead, she chose to march as a “modern Indigenous woman” and joined the ranks of other attorneys likely from the North Carolina delegation.
Planning for the parade was not, however, perfect. Paul had many factions within the suffrage movement to appease and made concessions to Southern suffragists at the expense of Black suffragists. Black leaders like Ida B Wells Barnett as well as Delta Sigma Theta, a black sorority from nearby Howard University, were left off of the program, and told that they could march in the back. Constrained by all the demands thrown at her, Paul said, “As far as I can see, we must have a white procession, or a Negro procession, or no procession at all.”
After being told that they would have to march in the back, Wells addressed the marchers the night before. Full of tears and trembling, she stated, “if they did not take a stand now in this great democratic parade then the colored women are lost.” Grace Trout, the leader of the Illinois contingent to which Wells belonged, sided with Paul and the segregationists. Wells left the room vowing not to march at all.
Of course, she would march. Wells stood on the sideline as the march began the next morning. And when the Illinois delegation walked past her, she calmly and collectively stepped into the street and joined them. This was a women's march, not a white women’s march. And women were going to get the right to vote together, not parceled off by race and class.
Mary Church Terrell, founder of the National Association of Colored Women marched with the all-Black delegation at the back. She later stated that she believed Paul and other white suffrage leaders would sacrifice Black women in order to get white women the vote. Paul of course denied that, but didn’t stop catering to racists within the movement.
As the marchers made their way down Pennsylvania Avenue things seemed to be going well. Paul had planned ahead because the DC police had threatened not to protect her and asked for a regiment to be standing by. Thankfully she had.
What started as jeers from the crowd turned into a riot. Over 100 people ended up in the hospital as the DC police abandoned their positions along the parade route and let misogynists attack the women on the street. Newspapers blamed the DC police. Women’s suffrage was on the front page! Woodrow Wilson, the new president, was not the top story. If he wanted to have a successful presidency, women’s suffrage would have to pass.
Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin 1910, Public Domain
Homogenize (Verb.), make uniform or similar.
Monolithic (Adj.), (of an organization or system) large, powerful, and intractably indivisible and uniform
Mary Church Terrell, Public Domain
1916 Election
But Woodrow Wilson was not easy to break. While he said he supported women’s suffrage, he didn’t think that it was politically possible to pass it. We should also mention that he was formerly the president of Princeton, one of the Ivy League schools that didn’t support women getting degrees. Wilson came to suffrage events and gave speeches where he supported their work, but refused to take a policy position on it. So when he was up for reelection, Paul and Burns refused to endorse him.
The suffrage parade was not all good for women’s suffrage. Paul and Burns his true colors were beginning to show and their radical tactics for achieving women’s suffrage were not supported by other women in the movement. By February 1914 Paul and Burns were ousted from NAWSA and all of the funds they had raised for the congressional committee stripped from them. They rebranded as the National Women’s Party, a rival organization with more aggressive and radical positions than Shaw’s NAWSA.
As suffrage was fracturing and dividing over tactics, Carrie Chapman Catt returned to steer NAWSA through its final push for suffrage. In 1915, she returned as president of NAWSA. Catt proposed her “Winning Plan” which compromised between the factions to simultaneously fight for suffrage at the state and federal levels. She also received a 1 million dollar bequest from New York City magazine editor and publisher Miriam Folline Leslie “for the cause of woman suffrage.”
During the election year, the NWP traveled state to state to urge people to vote against Wilson and instead endorse a candidate who would support women’s suffrage… though none emerged. Wilson and his Republican opponent Charles Evan Hughes endorsed the state by state approach to women’s suffrage. Paul met with Hughes on behalf of her members and women who could vote in various, mostly western states. After the meeting she was disappointed, she said:
“Voting women will not accept a mere endorsement of the principle of suffrage. They are solely interested in the best method of protecting their own political rights and of emancipating the rest of their sex. The Republican Party wants the women’s votes. They are essential to the success of the party next fall. But it will not receive them by default.”
The fact that a presidential candidate met with her, just shows how powerful politicking had become.
The NWP was narrowly focused, willing to endorse whichever candidate would support national suffrage. NAWSA on the other hand, backed Woodrow Wilson because of his continued effort to keep America out of World War I. Wilson won the election and within a month took the United States to war. For women on both issues, the reelection of Woodrow Wilson was a disappointment. Like in the Civil War decades before, many women became engrossed in the war movement. They served as nurses, within the new branch of the Marines for women, rolling bandages, volunteering, building victory gardens, and whatever needed to be done to support the country in war.
Woodrow Wilson, c. 1919, Public Domain
Silent Sentinels
But unlike most women, the National Women’s Party did not relent. Starting on January 10, 1917, the women’s party began sending “silent sentinels” as they were referred to, to picket outside of the White House and keep relentless pressure on Woodrow Wilson to pass the amendment. They held "watchfires," where they burned copies of Wilson's speeches, and called him a hypocrite. They picketed six days a week, rain or shine. When the United States joined the war effort, what little support they had from onlookers in DC diminished. The suffragists were seen as unpatriotic, belittling a president while he was at war. For many, the president’s focus should have been solely on bringing American boys home, but Paul and Burns did not back down, they doubled down. They pointed out the hypocrisy of fighting for democracy abroad while American women could not fight at home. Insultingly, they used Wilson’s words against him:
“WE SHALL FIGHT FOR THE THINGS WE HAVE ALWAYS HELD NEAREST TO OUR HEARTS.”
When the United States’ ally, Russia sent a delegation to meet with Wilson and discuss their mutual role in preserving democracy, Lucy Burns and Dora Lewis held a banner that read:
“We, the Women of America, tell you that America is not a democracy. Twenty million American Women are denied the right to vote. President Wilson is the chief opponent of their national enfranchisement.”
For mothers the connection between war and suffrage was obvious: the president was drafting their sons to go to war and they had no say in it. For many women suffrage became a symbol of anti-war sentiments.
But things eventually became tense. As women picketed outside the White House, onlookers became increasingly hostile and agitated. Soldiers harassed the women. In June of 1917, police tried to confiscate the women’s banner, which obviously violated free-speech. Women resisted. They were arrested. Eventually the government came up with a scheme to charge them with blocking traffic because they were attracting so much attention. The women argued their case in court claiming that they were “political prisoners.“ And that they were arrested because they disagreed with the ruling political party. Arrested day after day, at least 150 different women were imprisoned during this period. They refused to pay their fines and were taken to the Occoquan Workhouse prison in Virginia to work off their debts. Once released, they would be back out on the picket line the next day.
Silent Sentinels of Maryland picket the White House for suffrage in early 1917, Public Domain
Night of Terror and Hunger Strike
Resistance to suffragists became violent and hostile. Paul and Burns were also arrested. Paul was sentenced to 7 months in Occoquan in October 1917. She began a hunger strike. The prison guards responded by force feeding her: forcing a tube down her throat and dropping raw eggs into her mouth twice a day. Then they tried to say she was insane and took her to a psychiatric hospital. The superintendent, William Alanson White, refused to admit her, stating that she was "perfectly calm, yet determined."
Outside the prison, suffragists rallied behind her. Many went to picket the White House for suffrage and also picket on behalf of Paul.
On November 14, 1917, 33 suffragists from the NWP were brutally beaten and tortured by 40 male prison guards, to “teach them a lesson.” This night went down in history as the “Night of Terror.” Testimony shared in a later investigation proved that the suffragists were dragged, beaten, choked, slammed, pinched, and kicked. Dora Lewis' arm was twisted behind her back. They twice slammed her into an iron bed where she fell unconscious and bleeding. Alice Cosu thought Lewis was dead and the panic caused her to suffer a heart attack. She was denied medical treatment until the next morning. Burns tried to check in with everyone and make sure they were ok. She started a roll call, which led her to be identified as the leader. The guards handcuffed her arms to the cell bars above her head, leaving her bleeding on tiptoe until they took her down. Burns and the other suffragists went on hunger strike for three days following the Night of Terror. Burns was removed and taken to a different prison where she too was force-fed by putting a tube through her nostril, a process that caused horrible nose bleeds. Burns spent more time in prison than other American suffragists. While all of this was going on, it was not public knowledge. The press had yet to find out this information, and American support of the NWP remained low.
Dudley Field Malone, worked as an attorney and campaign adviser to Wilson. He resigned to represent the Silent Sentinels in court. He also took letters that the suffragist had written in prison and secretly released them to the NWP newspaper, The Suffragist. The night of terror, Paul and Burns’s treatment, and the unjust arrests of the picketers was major news across the country And helped bring support for the suffrage cause. Not only did he help get all of the women released from prison, he also had their wrongful arrests overturned by the unanimous vote. Malone would go on to marry Doris Stevens, an important and active silent sentinel imprisoned at Occoquan.
Paul wrote: "Seems almost unthinkable now, doesn't it? It was shocking that a government of men could look with such extreme contempt on a movement that was asking nothing except such a simple little thing as the right to vote."
African American Women
Meanwhile, NAWSA was busy fighting for Catt’s Winning Plan. Catt’s leadership secured several key states: New York, Michigan, Oklahoma, and South Dakota in 1917 and 1918. Catt was winning in one respect and losing in another. She consistently catered to racists within the movement.
Mary B. Talbert was a member of the NACW and NAACP. In 1915 she wrote in The Crisis, “with us as colored women, this struggle becomes two-fold, first, because we are women and second, because we are colored women.”
Black women were often belittled in how they might use the vote. Nannie Helen Burroughs aptly retorted, “What can she do without it?” Burroughs and other Black women made clear that Black women “needs the ballot, to reckon with men who place no value upon her virtue, and to mould [sic] healthy sentiment in favor of her own protection.”
Adella Hunt Logan concurred, adding: “If white American women, with all their natural and acquired advantages, need the ballot, that right protective of all other rights; if Anglo Saxons have been helped by it... how much more do black Americans, male and female need the strong defense of a vote to help secure them their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?”
Racism, discrimination, and racial violence forced Black women toward civil rights activism, in addition to suffrage. Perhaps overly optimistic, Angelina Weld Grimké, the great niece of abolitionist and suffragist Angelina Grimké Weld, stated, “injustices will end [between the sexes when woman] gains the ballot.”
Mary Burnett Talbert, Public Domain
Ratification
Then finally, in 1918, Wilson put the weight of his presidency behind the cause of suffrage and supported a national constitutional amendment. But why the sudden change of heart? Was it the public pressure from the torture of Paul and Burns? Or was it pragmatic given how many states Catt was able to secure? We may never know. Wilson claimed he was not swayed by the “radicals” in the NWP, and stated that the amendment's purpose was to help win World War I.
The amendment passed Congress the next year on August 26, 1920. It thus began a long ratification process.
Ratification in Tennessee
To ratify an amendment to the Constitution, it needs to be approved by three quarters of the states— a very high bar. Suffragists at the state level fought to have the amendment ratified. It took a year, but finally the 36th state came to ratify the amendment: Tennessee.
Tennessee was the last possible hope that the Amendment would get ratified. Like elsewhere in the country, the all male legislature met to discuss the Amendment and, yet again, debate women’s status as citizens. Harry T. Burn was one of these state representatives. He supported suffrage, but the men in his district did not. Debate in Tennessee raged on in what became known as the War of the Roses. Pro-suffrage legislators wore yellow roses, while anti-suffragists wore red. There were accounts of bribery, negotiations, and lots of drinking. Legislators would be seen wearing a yellow flower one day and a red one the next.
In this context Febb Burn, Harry’s mom wrote him a letter. She said, “Hurrah, and vote for suffrage, and don’t keep them in doubt… Don’t forget to be a good boy and help Mrs. ‘Thomas Catt’ with her ‘rats.’ Is she the one that put rat in ratification? Ha! No more from Mama this time. With lots of love.”
Her son, wearing the red anti-suffrage flower, and with his mothers letter in his pocket, dramatically changed his vote in favor of suffrage. Pandemonium followed.
When things calmed, the roll call resumed. Anti-suffragists appeared to be winning. Then, after sitting silently through his turn, Banks Turner broke his silence as the antis were clearly winning and cast a vote: “Mr. Speaker, I wish to be recorded as voting Aye.”
Women’s suffrage passed by ONE vote at the very last second. The chamber was in uproar, but the vote was won.
Harry T. Burn, Public Domain
Conclusion
By the end of this era, so much remained in question. What would happen for these newly enfranchised women? Would there emerge a women’s voting block? Would women of color be granted full access to the vote, or would they too be subjected to discrimination at the polls? How long would it take for noncitizens, Chinese and indigenous women to gain the vote? What would the next battles for women’s liberation look like?
