Second-Class Citizen, Part II: 'That Vote Has Been Costly'

Women picket the White House, 1917, quoting President Wilson from his war message on their banner.The demonstrations, led by Alice Paul, challenged Wilson on his inaction; the daily picketing began in January 1917 and continued for 18 months, despite weather, harassment, and arrest.

Carrie Chapman Catt may be a name less familiar to some than the name of her mentor Susan B. Anthony, yet with her considerable organizational skills — a brilliant strategist and former teacher — she was the most recognized name in the U.S. suffrage movement in the early twentieth century. Catt led the National American Woman Suffrage Association in its final, exhaustive push to win the vote for women in the summer of 1920. In her brilliant book, The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote published in 2018, Elaine Weiss described the scene when Catt finally returned to her home in New York once the Nineteenth Amendment was signed into law. Catt sat at her desk and, looking out at her garden, wrote “a poignant charge to the women voters of the nation”:

The vote is the emblem of your equality, women of America, the guaranty of your liberty. That vote of yours has cost millions of dollars and the lives of thousands of women. Women have suffered agony of soul which you never can comprehend, that you and your daughters might inherit political freedom. That vote has been costly. Prize it!

The vote is a power, a weapon of offense and defense, a prayer. Use it intelligently, conscientiously, prayerfully. Progress is calling to you to make no pause. Act!

With 33 years of suffrage work behind her, Carrie Chapman Catt moved on to voter registration and voter education through the League of Women Voters, an organization she helped launch. (Eleanor Roosevelt was one of Catt’s protégées.) When she turned her energies back to anti-war efforts, Weiss explained, Catt was “monitored by the FBI,” possibly for the rest of her life. “Alarmed by Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in 1933, she organized Jewish support groups and lobbied the U.S. government to ease immigration restrictions for refugees.” Mrs. Catt, as she was respectfully known by many, died of a heart attack in 1947 at the age of 88 after a lifetime of service for you and me and the women of the world.

The new century brought many “uppity, contrary women” into the public sphere.... [Continue reading on MEDIUM.] Part II of V.

Second-Class Citizen {book excerpt}

In honor of the 100th anniversary of the signing of the 19th Amendment, when women won the right to vote in the United States, I'm sharing an excerpt from my long-in-the-works book The Spiritual Mission of a Princess.

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SECOND-CLASS CITIZEN

Diana Frances Spencer knew a thing or two about being a second-class citizen although she was born into a wealthy, aristocratic English family and married into perhaps the most renowned royal family in the world.

“‘In the Spencer family the gender issue is a big one,’” biographer Sarah Bradford wrote, citing a Spencer cousin, “‘women are very much second-class citizens.’” Diana’s sense of being “lesser than” began at birth. After Diana’s two older sisters were born, the pressure intensified for her mother to produce a son to inherit the family title; but when a boy was born, the malformed infant died within days.

“Diana was intended to be the replacement child, the longed-for heir,” reported Bradford. “By the time she was born, her parents’ marriage was in trouble, which the arrival of yet another girl did nothing to improve.” So, by all accounts, Diana’s feeling of being a disappointment went deep, wounding her on many levels, diminishing any self-confidence, and perhaps setting up the more suspicious and manipulative nature of her personality. 

It also seems the naïve, yet headstrong Diana felt like a “second-class citizen” in her ill-suited marriage to Prince Charles, an older, cerebral man who was caught in his own web of deep disappointment. She similarly felt “lesser than” in his family’s stuffy, staid and paternalistic world where it appeared, to this heart-centered young woman, the Palace made decisions based on duty first at all costs and desires of the heart be damned. (That strident sense of duty may have worked in earlier monarchic decades, maybe even served a higher purpose at times, but not in the more open, free-spirited modern world emerging—a world Diana came to represent.)

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Many women, for thousands of years of patriarchal laws, have not only felt like second-class citizens, but have been regarded and treated as less important than men. Thwarted by their religions, governments and families, denied education and work opportunities to earn their own income, generations of women had their dreams, ideas and talents squashed. A few found ways to flourish in their personal goals and public ambitions—usually at a great cost or compromise—and there were certain women who used what they had been denied to help set others free.

“Long before she was First Lady, Abigail Adams was a trusted advisor and supporter of husband John’s political efforts, and shared his patriotic fervor,” wrote the authors of Reflecting Freedom.  While he was away with the Congress, she, like thousands of other women before and since, took care of family and farm and whatever business the men left behind when they went off to govern or to war. “John and Abigail shared their devotion to the cause of freedom, their politics, and their ambition for his advancement, but their views were not aligned on one issue. On March 31, 1776, Abigail wrote to her husband John as he worked on the formation of the new nation….”:  

....in the New Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuilar care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determine to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.

 

The notion of “second-class citizen” was so ingrained in the patriarchal mindset at the time (not only about women, but about Native Americans, all people of color, and anyone else considered “lesser than” because of some prejudice against them) that Abigail Adams’ request fell on deaf ears. No one “remembered the ladies”! Moreover, according to Gail Collins’ book America’s Women: “John’s answer was, ‘As to your extraordinary code of laws, I cannot but laugh.’”

Over 200 years later, fifteen-year-old Heidi Schreck from Wenatchee, Washington, put herself through college by giving speeches about the United States Constitution. As an adult, she turned her knowledge and experience into an award-winning Broadway play, “What the Constitution Means to Me.” The play is witty and shocking and revelatory as it discloses that the actual word “woman” is not mentioned in the Constitution. Not once. Not anywhere.

When the American colonies were slugging it out with the British for their freedom, the second-class female citizens of Paris who were “furious and starving, rioted over the high price of bread, leading a march to Versailles in October of 1789 that would help kick off the French Revolution and ultimately dethrone King Louis XVI,” explained Rebecca Traister in Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women. But in those “heady days” of revolution, “when ‘Amazon bands’ of women took to the streets clad in short petticoats and little red Phrygian caps, even Robespierre decided that things had gone too far. ‘All citizenesses’ were ordered to give up their political activities and ‘retire to their separate domiciles’. Their leaders, among them Olympe de Gonge, author of the famous ‘Declaration of the Rights of Women’, were sent to the guillotine.”

This revolutionary spirit was brewing in England at the time as well. Another “uppity woman,” Mary Wollstonecraft—novelist, philosopher, mother of author Mary Shelley, and advocate for women—was writing “A Vindication of Women’s Rights.” Regarded as one of the founding philosophers of feminism, Wollstonecraft’s work inspired generations of women, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the mothers of the suffrage movement in the United States and one who wrote passionately to expose the numerous ways women were considered “second-class citizens.”

Seventy-two-years after the Declaration of Independence was written (and 72 years before women won the vote in the U.S.), Stanton and fellow activist Lucretia Mott—enraged by the continued suppression of women—gathered with three other women and organized the radical notion of a women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. On the convention’s agenda, and perhaps the most revolutionary of all, was the demand for women’s right to vote! Drafting a Declaration of Sentiments, modeled on the document signed by Abigail Adams’ husband John, the women’s deeply subversive text “was also a statement of independence—women’s direct rebuke of male power and a seeming return on Abigail’s promise of rebellion,” explained Traister. By using the famous Declaration of Independence as their blueprint, “the suffragists were employing the language and logic of righteous rage that America revered—the rage of the founders, white men who were furious about limitations set on their liberty.” And by taking this bold stand in 1848—holding a public meeting by, about and for women—Stanton and Mott were holding up a mirror to the current power bloc of white men to show the consequences of women being denied liberties—and declaring “no more.”

When Susan B. Anthony met Stanton a few years later, a chance meeting that changed the world, they formed a lifelong partnership of political activism and organizing. “Elizabeth and Susan were a perfect complement to each other,” continued Eileen Tannich Gose and Kathy Wiederstein DeHerrera in Reflecting Freedom. “Elizabeth had bold and radical ideas and Susan possessed independence and self-discipline. Together, they worked better than they did alone and they made a formidable team—Susan supplied the facts and Elizabeth wrote the speeches.” Elizabeth Cady Stanton became known for her radical, sometimes incendiary, writings; but Susan B. Anthony didn’t mince her words either: “It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union.... Men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less.”

Around the time of this first Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, Harriet Tubman was planning her escape from a Maryland plantation. Born a slave (records mark the date around 1825), Tubman grew into a barely five-foot-tall, fiercely determined abolitionist leader and political activist. She escaped from slavery, found her way to freedom above the Mason Dixon Line, yet returned south and, using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad, guided many slaves to their freedom. This Moses of her people said: “I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.”

The new century brought many “uppity, contrary women” into the public sphere! One of those groundbreakers was Margaret Sanger. Sanger, a “nurse who had watched her own mother die from the strain of too many childbirths, promoted birth control,” explained Gose and DeHerrera. “In 1914 she was arrested for obscenity charges for mailing birth control literature, and two years later she was jailed for opening a birth control clinic in the Brooklyn slums.” The authors write how this was a time when “many women wanted to control the number of children they bore. Also, pregnancy was risky; during World War I the U.S. women who died in childbirth outnumbered the men who died in battle.” Margaret Sanger continued her work for women of all classes and became even more effective in saving women’s lives after 1921 when she founded the organization later known as Planned Parenthood.

A suffrage leader of a younger generation, Alice Paul and her more extremist National Women’s Party, took the suffrage movement public during the 1910s in a big, bold and “unladylike” manner (just speaking out in public was considered “unladylike.”) Paul organized huge parades with women demonstrating and marching through city streets—although in very fashionable “ladylike” outfits—demanding the right to vote. She also led demonstrations in front of the White House beginning in January 1917. They targeted President Woodrow Wilson—“using his own words to accuse him of his inaction on behalf of women”—and for 18 months, with women from every state participating, they picketed “every day, despite weather, harassment, and arrest,” Gose and DeHerrera reported in Reflecting Freedom. President Wilson, at the end of World War I, attempted to support a “new world order” for peace through the League of Nations, so Paul sent him a message: “There will never be a new world order until women are a part of it.” The president soon announced his support of women’s suffrage.

Once the 19^th Amendment was signed into law in 1920, Alice Paul, and hundreds of other women, didn’t stop there—especially since it took decades more for women of color to be allowed to exercise their right to vote. Paul knew that the fight for gender equality was not over and in 1923, on the 75^th anniversary of the original Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York, she organized a second meeting to introduce and launch the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. And in 2020, we were still working on it!

All of these revolutionary women were not only guides to freedom for others—and many did not live to enjoy the freedoms they fought for—but they also acted as clarion calls of courage for us today, to awaken us all, so we demand our “unalienable rights.” ~

{The Story of a Blue Dress}

In celebration of the Suffrage Centennial in the United States (one-hundred years after Congress passed the 19^th Amendment in June 1919 and when it was ratified in August 1920, giving women the vote), I'm giving a series of fashion-related presentations over the next year. This is one of the stories I shared in my talk “Dressed to Protest: What Women Wore to the Revolution” at the kick-off event in Sylva, North Carolina.

The Story of a Blue Dress

“At last the preposterous dream of seventy years began to be realized,” wrote Eileen Tannich Gose and Kathy Wiederstein DeHerrera in Reflecting Freedom: How Fashion Mirrored the Struggle for Women’s Rights. 

In January 1918, Jeanette Rankin from Montana (the first and only woman in Congress) introduced the suffrage-granting Anthony Amendment (named after Susan B. Anthony who had first introduced it in 1878) in the House of Representatives where it passed the needed two-thirds majority by a single vote.

Thrilled at the 19^th amendment passing in the House, National American Women’s Suffrage Association president Carrie Chapman Catt “was certain that congressional victory, after 40 exasperating years, was near,” Elaine Weiss explained in The Woman's Hour. Carrie’s enthusiasm overpowered her usual patient pragmatism, as well as the current wartime austerity, and she ordered a new silk dress—her “ratification dress”—to wear as she campaigned through the states, fashioning it in her favorite color—sapphire blue.

However, “the ratification dress hung in Carrie’s closet for a full year-and-a-half as the Senate dithered and filibustered and twice more voted down the amendment.” When she received the phone call in early June of 1919 that the amendment finally squeaked through, Carrie first “broke into a wild dance, stomping all over her house, whooping and singing,” then she calmly went to work, putting her ratification plans into motion.

“It was finally time to put on the blue dress, but before she could, it needed to be remodeled and shortened by a seamstress, as fashion styles had changed so rapidly in the meantime,” continued Weiss. “Though the dress had hung in her closet for an infuriating 18 months, Carrie Catt eventually put it to good use”—in its more stylish silhouette—“as she blazed through the states, chasing the thirty-six required legislative ratifications.” And, after more than a year traveling over the country, she wore it once more in the last state to vote—hot, stifling Tennessee in August of 1920 (and probably wearing it with one of those new-fangled girdles!)

But Carrie was to wear the dress again on August 27—the day after the amendment was signed into law—during the glorious celebratory parade in New York City honoring women’s newly-won suffrage. She stood in the back of an open car to salute the cheering crowd, tall and proud, her hat tilted to one side, the other arm holding the gigantic bouquet of blue delphiniums (her favorite flower) and suffrage-yellow chrysanthemums, where “she seemed at once the victorious general and the beloved queen,” Weiss described.

The next day, when Carrie finally returned home to Juniper Ledge in New York, she sat at her desk and, looking out at her garden, wrote “a poignant charge to the women voters of the nation”:

The vote is the emblem of your equality, women of America, the guaranty of your liberty. That vote of yours has cost millions of dollars and the lives of thousands of women. Women have suffered agony of soul which you never can comprehend, that you and your daughters might inherit political freedom. That vote has been costly. Prize it!

The vote is a power, a weapon of offense and defense, a prayer. Use it intelligently, conscientiously, prayerfully. Progress is calling to you to make no pause. Act! ~

[Sources: Eileen Tannich Gose and Kathy Wiederstein DeHerrera from Reflecting Freedom: How Fashion Mirrored the Struggle for Women’s Rights and Elaine Weiss from The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote.]

{Women's Suffrage Centennial Celebration}

In celebration of the Suffrage Centennial in the United States, from June 2019 (one hundred years after Congress passed the 19^th Amendment) to August 2020 (one hundred years after it was ratified), I am giving various “Dressed to Protest: What Women Wore to the Revolution” presentations. In addition to showing how women used costume as “political armor” to finally get the vote, I share stories about a number of the courageous women involved in the seven-decades-long campaign. 

I ended my first presentation recently with this short story below about Carrie Chapman Catt, with a powerful quote from her still relevant today. She was a protege of Susan B. Anthony and president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association from 1900 to 1904 and then again in the dramatic final years of the campaign from 1915 to 1920.

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Once Carrie Catt returned home to Juniper Ledge in New York after the hot, exhausting Tennessee fight—and after the glorious NYC parade honoring women’s newly-won suffrage where she stood in the back of a car in her royal blue “ratification dress” to salute the cheering crowd, tall and proud, her hat tilted to one side, the other arm holding the gigantic bouquet of blue delphiniums (her favorite flower) and suffrage-yellow chrysanthemums, where “she seemed at once the victorious general and the beloved queen,” as Elaine Weiss described in The Woman’s Hour—Carrie sat at her desk and, looking out at her garden, wrote “a poignant charge to the women voters of the nation”: 

The vote is the emblem of your equality, women of America, the guaranty of your liberty. That vote of yours has cost millions of dollars and the lives of thousands of women. Women have suffered agony of soul which you never can comprehend, that you and your daughters might inherit political freedom. That vote has been costly. Prize it!

The vote is a power, a weapon of offense and defense, a prayer. Use it intelligently, conscientiously, prayerfully. Progress is calling to you to make no pause. Act! ~

[First of several random posts about the Suffrage Centennial over the next year plus.]