The Founding Fathers were a picture of contradiction: radical leftists when they incited war against established government, they were conservatives in creating a new system that was virtually impossible to change.
The Constitution that they wrote, adopted in 1789, was intended to be very difficult to amend. It requires not only a two-thirds vote by both houses of Congress, but also approval by both chambers of three-quarters of state legislatures. Almost any issue is nearly passé by the time it can jump these hurdles.
In 1920, when Congress finally passed the 19th Amendment that enfranchised women, there were 48 states. This meant that feminists had to win a positive tally among the men in 96 state chambers from sea to sea. (For those of you with detailed knowledge, Nebraska had not yet adopted its unicameral legislature.)
Last week, I wrote that Henry Cabot Lodge, Republican of Massachusetts, was Senate president and opposed the amendment enfranchising women. Feminists had worked hard to defeat two opponents and replace them with supporters in the 1918 elections, but – knowing he would lose -- Lodge managed to block senators from voting on the proposed amendment until June 4, 1919. His strategy was clear: by then, most state legislatures would have adjourned, and it would be more difficult for women to win ratifications. Florida became the first focus.
* * *
Assuming that the University of Florida has my history of Florida women in print by next March (Women’s History Month), you will be able to read much more on this. For now, suffice it to say that the Florida Woman Suffrage Association formally lobbied the legislature from the 1913 session onwards. They brought in Montana’s Jeanette Rankin – who in 1916, would be the first woman elected to Congress – and she spoke in Tallahassee in April 1913. According the Jacksonville organizer, Roselle Cooley:
The House of Representatives decided to hear us in a Committee of the Whole, at an evening session. In this case, it meant the whole House, the whole Senate, and the whole town. Seats, aisles, the steps of the Speaker’s rostrum were filled, windows had people sitting in them and in the hall, as far as one could see, people were standing on chairs to hear the first call for the rights of women ever uttered in the Capitol of Florida.
The House quickly rejected their appeal, with 29 in favor and 39 opposed. The Senate vote in late May was closer, but went down at 15-16. Feminists thought they would prevail, but as Cooley summarized, they “lost to the corporations and the whiskey men.”
Florida legislators met only once during their two-year terms back then, so there was no session in 1914. The 1915 session brought less result than 1913, although 1915 was the year that the legislature first allowed municipal enfranchisement for women -- inadvertently.
The new city of Fellsmere on the East Coast (larger than Palm Beach back then) sent its charter to the legislature with women enfranchised for municipal elections -- and no one in Tallahassee noticed the clause. Almost two-dozen towns followed this precedent during the next five years, but all were new. In Tampa, Jacksonville, and other established cities, women remained voteless in municipal elections and all others.
The next year was an election year, not a legislative session one, but 1916 was crucial in that May Mann Jennings informally took over political leadership. A former Florida first lady, she was kin to former Democratic presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan. His wife, Mary Baird Bryan, may have been the first woman in the world to earn a law degree after marriage and motherhood. She had been admitted to the Nebraska bar in 1888.
Both the Jennings and the Bryans retired to Miami, and legislators fell all over themselves to welcome Mrs. William Jennings Bryan (as she always was called in the press) to Tallahassee for the 1917 session. The Tribune Tribune wrote that lawmakers listened spellbound as she spoke for an hour and a half – but not enough of them voted as she asked them to do.
The women were asking for an amendment to the state constitution, which like the federal one, required a two-thirds majority. After much parliamentary maneuvering, 40 representatives voted positively and 27 negatively, five votes shy of two-thirds.
1918 was not a regular-session year, but Governor Sidney Catts called a special session to deal with other matters. Bryan and her association astutely decided not to test the limits of their legislative allies by adding enfranchisement to the limited agenda. Into the vacuum, however, rushed young Helen Hunt of Jacksonville.
She led about fifty Floridians who were associated with the National Woman’s Party (NWP), an organization whose tactics included boisterous demonstrations and provoked arrests. Parties were very different then than now, and most of the “radical chic” NWP members were Republicans. They had opposed all Democrats in the 1914 and 1916 elections, including Democrats who supported the vote. May Mann Jennings warned that they could have a negative influence with the virtually all-Democratic Florida legislature, but young NWP members would not be dissuaded.
Unaware of these internal conflicts between women’s organizations, a Jacksonville representative introduced the resolution written by his constituent, Helen Hunt. Even strongly Democratic Governor Catts seemed oblivious to NWP’s reputation as Republicans, and he asked the legislature to approve the resolution.
It differed importantly from those in the past, in that it was not intended to amend the Florida Constitution, but rather the US Constitution. Yet, even though the sponsor pointed out that Democratic President Woodrow Wilson recently had endorsed the federal amendment, this was not enough for Florida’s conservative Democrats. The resolution failed in the House, 31-37.
When Congress finally sent the 19th Amendment to the states on June 4, 1919, Florida’s legislature was scheduled to adjourn at noon on Friday, June 6. On Thursday morning, Governor Catts sent a message:
While this office has not received verification from Washington, still The Associated Press would not dare publish something of so vast importance as this, if it were not true.
The legislature...will adjourn tomorrow and it has an opportunity, while now in regular...[session] to be the first state in the sisterhood of states to ratify this great movement.
Therefore, as governor of our great state, I earnestly recommend that you ratify this action...and add an imperishable laurel to your state, which can never die; the fact of being the first state of the Union to recognize women as an equal with her brother man.
His language was stirring, but according to the Tribune, legislators paid “no attention to the governor’s message.” That was not surprising, but some were surprised when May Mann Jennings did not rally her thousands of troops. But -- after years of disappointments -- she and other leaders had become wary enough to see that adding this big question to the last day’s agenda likely would doom it to defeat.
Their head count showed that they could get a majority vote, but the extraordinary majority needed to take up a bill so late in the session probably would be impossible – and the consequences of losing could be harmful in other states.
The sub-head of the June 7, 1919 edition of the Tampa Daily Times summed up the situation: FLORIDA WILL NOT BE FIRST STATE TO RATIFY SUFFRAGE AMENDMENT; Women Leaders Not Willing to Take Chance on Putting Land of Flowers in Line as the First to Turn it Down.”
Florida’s feminists dismissed possible personal glory for themselves rather than risk the disaster of having the amendment fail in its first test. Given legislators’ propensity for double-dealing, and knowing how they rush out of Tallahassee like schoolboys set loose for vacation, Jennings and others doubtless made the right call. Lawmakers adjourned on Friday, and on Tuesday morning, three states – Wisconsin, Illinois, and Michigan – competed with each other to be first. Florida’s legislature would not meet again until 1921, after its women had voted in 1920.
* * *
To Senator Lodge’s dismay, Massachusetts ratified in June 1919, along with Ohio, New York, Kansas, Pennsylvania, and Texas. With the first three Midwestern states, that made nine of the necessary 36. In a time before air conditioning, everything shut down in July and August, and the summer could have been fatal to momentum. But Carrie Chapman Catt, who led the mainstream national organization, was very politically astute.
While the Senate delayed in the spring, she lined up governors who were willing to call special sessions for ratification. This is extremely difficult to do. Governors hate calling sessions not only because of the expense, but also because legislators can go awry on other issues. Catt nonetheless managed to get the women of her two-million member organization to persuade thousands of legislators to sign pledges for a single-day, one-issue session without pay.
Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, and Montana joined the list in July, but August brought only Nebraska. Momentum picked up in the fall, and by the end of 1919, eight more states had ratified. In chronological order, they were Minnesota, New Hampshire, Utah, California, Maine, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Colorado. January meant the beginning of regular sessions, and Kentucky, Rhode Island, Oregon, Indiana, and Wyoming – which had been first to grant the vote in 1869 – gave their approval.
February added six more: Nevada, New Jersey, Idaho, Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. March brought just two: West Virginia and Washington. West Virginia’s ratification on March 10th was especially dramatic. An opponent who had resigned a year earlier and moved to Illinois tried to claim that he still was entitled to vote; meanwhile, another senator rushed by train from California, while proponents successfully kept their narrow majority. The story is worthy of a docudrama.
That was 34 of 36 states, and on March 22, Catt persuaded Washington to give up on its desire to be the last, glorious one. The Washington Territory first enfranchised women 1883, and they wanted the drama of the final vote to extend the right to their sisters in other states. Its ratification was the 35th of the essential 36.
But Republican governors in Connecticut and Vermont adamantly refused to call special sessions, and Catt had nowhere to go except South. That was not a propitious scene, as Alabama and Georgia specifically rejected the amendment in 1919. In chronological order during early 1920, they were joined by Virginia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Maryland, Delaware, Louisiana, and North Carolina. You can see that all except Delaware were former Confederate states – and Delaware was the last state to abolish legal slavery. Maryland legislators were especially rabid opponents, even paying their colleagues to lobby legislatures in other states.
Thus, in August, it all came down to Tennessee, which had been waiting for the US Supreme Court to rule in a suit filed by an Ohio opponent. In Hawk vs. Smith, the court declared that states could not impose burdens greater than a majority of two chambers, and the Tennessee Senate ratified on August 10.
Some representatives, however, were so strongly opposed that they holed up in Decatur, Alabama, to deprive the House of its quorum. Other dramas added to the wild scene of its ultimate 49-47 passage -- but even after that, the leadership refused to send the ratification on to Washington. On August 24, a freshman legislator displaced them and put the resolution in the mail. When Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby received it on the morning of August 26, the right of all American women to vote was added to the Constitution.
Connecticut and Vermont belatedly ratified the 19th Amendment in September 1920 and February 1921. Florida waited until 1969, when it did so to acknowledge the 50th anniversary of the League of Women Voters.
Carrie Chapman Catt summed it up. Since the first call for the vote in 1848, she counted 480 campaigns in state legislatures; 56 statewide referenda to male voters; 47 attempts to add the right during revisions of state constitutions; 277 campaigns at state party conventions and 30 at national conventions; and 19 campaigns in 19 different Congresses.
Literally thousands of times, men cast their votes on whether or not women could vote. Literally millions of women (and men) worked for the cause their entire lives and went to their graves with the victory unwon. No peaceful political change ever has required so much from so many for so long, and August 26 should be a national holiday!
Doris Weatherford writes a weekly column for La Gaceta, the nation's only trilingual newspaper. With pages in Spanish, Italian, and English, it has been published in Tampa since 1922.
The Constitution that they wrote, adopted in 1789, was intended to be very difficult to amend. It requires not only a two-thirds vote by both houses of Congress, but also approval by both chambers of three-quarters of state legislatures. Almost any issue is nearly passé by the time it can jump these hurdles.
In 1920, when Congress finally passed the 19th Amendment that enfranchised women, there were 48 states. This meant that feminists had to win a positive tally among the men in 96 state chambers from sea to sea. (For those of you with detailed knowledge, Nebraska had not yet adopted its unicameral legislature.)
Last week, I wrote that Henry Cabot Lodge, Republican of Massachusetts, was Senate president and opposed the amendment enfranchising women. Feminists had worked hard to defeat two opponents and replace them with supporters in the 1918 elections, but – knowing he would lose -- Lodge managed to block senators from voting on the proposed amendment until June 4, 1919. His strategy was clear: by then, most state legislatures would have adjourned, and it would be more difficult for women to win ratifications. Florida became the first focus.
* * *
Assuming that the University of Florida has my history of Florida women in print by next March (Women’s History Month), you will be able to read much more on this. For now, suffice it to say that the Florida Woman Suffrage Association formally lobbied the legislature from the 1913 session onwards. They brought in Montana’s Jeanette Rankin – who in 1916, would be the first woman elected to Congress – and she spoke in Tallahassee in April 1913. According the Jacksonville organizer, Roselle Cooley:
The House of Representatives decided to hear us in a Committee of the Whole, at an evening session. In this case, it meant the whole House, the whole Senate, and the whole town. Seats, aisles, the steps of the Speaker’s rostrum were filled, windows had people sitting in them and in the hall, as far as one could see, people were standing on chairs to hear the first call for the rights of women ever uttered in the Capitol of Florida.
The House quickly rejected their appeal, with 29 in favor and 39 opposed. The Senate vote in late May was closer, but went down at 15-16. Feminists thought they would prevail, but as Cooley summarized, they “lost to the corporations and the whiskey men.”
Florida legislators met only once during their two-year terms back then, so there was no session in 1914. The 1915 session brought less result than 1913, although 1915 was the year that the legislature first allowed municipal enfranchisement for women -- inadvertently.
The new city of Fellsmere on the East Coast (larger than Palm Beach back then) sent its charter to the legislature with women enfranchised for municipal elections -- and no one in Tallahassee noticed the clause. Almost two-dozen towns followed this precedent during the next five years, but all were new. In Tampa, Jacksonville, and other established cities, women remained voteless in municipal elections and all others.
The next year was an election year, not a legislative session one, but 1916 was crucial in that May Mann Jennings informally took over political leadership. A former Florida first lady, she was kin to former Democratic presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan. His wife, Mary Baird Bryan, may have been the first woman in the world to earn a law degree after marriage and motherhood. She had been admitted to the Nebraska bar in 1888.
Both the Jennings and the Bryans retired to Miami, and legislators fell all over themselves to welcome Mrs. William Jennings Bryan (as she always was called in the press) to Tallahassee for the 1917 session. The Tribune Tribune wrote that lawmakers listened spellbound as she spoke for an hour and a half – but not enough of them voted as she asked them to do.
The women were asking for an amendment to the state constitution, which like the federal one, required a two-thirds majority. After much parliamentary maneuvering, 40 representatives voted positively and 27 negatively, five votes shy of two-thirds.
1918 was not a regular-session year, but Governor Sidney Catts called a special session to deal with other matters. Bryan and her association astutely decided not to test the limits of their legislative allies by adding enfranchisement to the limited agenda. Into the vacuum, however, rushed young Helen Hunt of Jacksonville.
She led about fifty Floridians who were associated with the National Woman’s Party (NWP), an organization whose tactics included boisterous demonstrations and provoked arrests. Parties were very different then than now, and most of the “radical chic” NWP members were Republicans. They had opposed all Democrats in the 1914 and 1916 elections, including Democrats who supported the vote. May Mann Jennings warned that they could have a negative influence with the virtually all-Democratic Florida legislature, but young NWP members would not be dissuaded.
Unaware of these internal conflicts between women’s organizations, a Jacksonville representative introduced the resolution written by his constituent, Helen Hunt. Even strongly Democratic Governor Catts seemed oblivious to NWP’s reputation as Republicans, and he asked the legislature to approve the resolution.
It differed importantly from those in the past, in that it was not intended to amend the Florida Constitution, but rather the US Constitution. Yet, even though the sponsor pointed out that Democratic President Woodrow Wilson recently had endorsed the federal amendment, this was not enough for Florida’s conservative Democrats. The resolution failed in the House, 31-37.
When Congress finally sent the 19th Amendment to the states on June 4, 1919, Florida’s legislature was scheduled to adjourn at noon on Friday, June 6. On Thursday morning, Governor Catts sent a message:
While this office has not received verification from Washington, still The Associated Press would not dare publish something of so vast importance as this, if it were not true.
The legislature...will adjourn tomorrow and it has an opportunity, while now in regular...[session] to be the first state in the sisterhood of states to ratify this great movement.
Therefore, as governor of our great state, I earnestly recommend that you ratify this action...and add an imperishable laurel to your state, which can never die; the fact of being the first state of the Union to recognize women as an equal with her brother man.
His language was stirring, but according to the Tribune, legislators paid “no attention to the governor’s message.” That was not surprising, but some were surprised when May Mann Jennings did not rally her thousands of troops. But -- after years of disappointments -- she and other leaders had become wary enough to see that adding this big question to the last day’s agenda likely would doom it to defeat.
Their head count showed that they could get a majority vote, but the extraordinary majority needed to take up a bill so late in the session probably would be impossible – and the consequences of losing could be harmful in other states.
The sub-head of the June 7, 1919 edition of the Tampa Daily Times summed up the situation: FLORIDA WILL NOT BE FIRST STATE TO RATIFY SUFFRAGE AMENDMENT; Women Leaders Not Willing to Take Chance on Putting Land of Flowers in Line as the First to Turn it Down.”
Florida’s feminists dismissed possible personal glory for themselves rather than risk the disaster of having the amendment fail in its first test. Given legislators’ propensity for double-dealing, and knowing how they rush out of Tallahassee like schoolboys set loose for vacation, Jennings and others doubtless made the right call. Lawmakers adjourned on Friday, and on Tuesday morning, three states – Wisconsin, Illinois, and Michigan – competed with each other to be first. Florida’s legislature would not meet again until 1921, after its women had voted in 1920.
* * *
To Senator Lodge’s dismay, Massachusetts ratified in June 1919, along with Ohio, New York, Kansas, Pennsylvania, and Texas. With the first three Midwestern states, that made nine of the necessary 36. In a time before air conditioning, everything shut down in July and August, and the summer could have been fatal to momentum. But Carrie Chapman Catt, who led the mainstream national organization, was very politically astute.
While the Senate delayed in the spring, she lined up governors who were willing to call special sessions for ratification. This is extremely difficult to do. Governors hate calling sessions not only because of the expense, but also because legislators can go awry on other issues. Catt nonetheless managed to get the women of her two-million member organization to persuade thousands of legislators to sign pledges for a single-day, one-issue session without pay.
Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, and Montana joined the list in July, but August brought only Nebraska. Momentum picked up in the fall, and by the end of 1919, eight more states had ratified. In chronological order, they were Minnesota, New Hampshire, Utah, California, Maine, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Colorado. January meant the beginning of regular sessions, and Kentucky, Rhode Island, Oregon, Indiana, and Wyoming – which had been first to grant the vote in 1869 – gave their approval.
February added six more: Nevada, New Jersey, Idaho, Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. March brought just two: West Virginia and Washington. West Virginia’s ratification on March 10th was especially dramatic. An opponent who had resigned a year earlier and moved to Illinois tried to claim that he still was entitled to vote; meanwhile, another senator rushed by train from California, while proponents successfully kept their narrow majority. The story is worthy of a docudrama.
That was 34 of 36 states, and on March 22, Catt persuaded Washington to give up on its desire to be the last, glorious one. The Washington Territory first enfranchised women 1883, and they wanted the drama of the final vote to extend the right to their sisters in other states. Its ratification was the 35th of the essential 36.
But Republican governors in Connecticut and Vermont adamantly refused to call special sessions, and Catt had nowhere to go except South. That was not a propitious scene, as Alabama and Georgia specifically rejected the amendment in 1919. In chronological order during early 1920, they were joined by Virginia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Maryland, Delaware, Louisiana, and North Carolina. You can see that all except Delaware were former Confederate states – and Delaware was the last state to abolish legal slavery. Maryland legislators were especially rabid opponents, even paying their colleagues to lobby legislatures in other states.
Thus, in August, it all came down to Tennessee, which had been waiting for the US Supreme Court to rule in a suit filed by an Ohio opponent. In Hawk vs. Smith, the court declared that states could not impose burdens greater than a majority of two chambers, and the Tennessee Senate ratified on August 10.
Some representatives, however, were so strongly opposed that they holed up in Decatur, Alabama, to deprive the House of its quorum. Other dramas added to the wild scene of its ultimate 49-47 passage -- but even after that, the leadership refused to send the ratification on to Washington. On August 24, a freshman legislator displaced them and put the resolution in the mail. When Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby received it on the morning of August 26, the right of all American women to vote was added to the Constitution.
Connecticut and Vermont belatedly ratified the 19th Amendment in September 1920 and February 1921. Florida waited until 1969, when it did so to acknowledge the 50th anniversary of the League of Women Voters.
Carrie Chapman Catt summed it up. Since the first call for the vote in 1848, she counted 480 campaigns in state legislatures; 56 statewide referenda to male voters; 47 attempts to add the right during revisions of state constitutions; 277 campaigns at state party conventions and 30 at national conventions; and 19 campaigns in 19 different Congresses.
Literally thousands of times, men cast their votes on whether or not women could vote. Literally millions of women (and men) worked for the cause their entire lives and went to their graves with the victory unwon. No peaceful political change ever has required so much from so many for so long, and August 26 should be a national holiday!
Doris Weatherford writes a weekly column for La Gaceta, the nation's only trilingual newspaper. With pages in Spanish, Italian, and English, it has been published in Tampa since 1922.