Making it Official—Women Get the Right to Vote

Alice Paul unveiled a banner in celebration of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment at National Women’s Party headquarters in Washington, D.C. on August 26, 1920.

On August 26, 1920 United States Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby certified the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution which read in toto:

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.

Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Women of this country, after a struggle of 72 years, officially were granted the right to vote in all States and Territories of the union.  The certification by the Secretary was just the dot of the i. 

When the Tennessee legislature approved the amendment by a slender one vote margin on June 9 becoming the decisive 36th state out of the then 48, the victory had essentially been won.  One by one the other recalcitrant dozen begrudgingly approved it later.  In the case of some Deep South states, much later indeed—Florida and South Carolina in 1969, Georgia and Louisiana in 1970, North Carolina in 1971, and good ol’ Mississippi held out until 1984. 

No matter.  Like it or not the foot draggers, like every other state had to register and allow women to vote in the November 1920 election for offices on the local, state, and Federal level. 

The members of the mainstream National American Woman Suffrage Association led by veteran Suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt which had been pushing the amendment since 1916 and Alice Paul’s far more militant organization, the National Woman's Party, which had hectored the Wilson Administration with forbidden picketing of the White House and shamed it by undergoing brutal force feedings during prison hunger strikes, both celebrated the hard won victory. 

Come November one signer of the declaration of the seminal Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 lived to cast her ballot.  Millions of other women did likewise, but not as many as organizers had hoped.  Many women were still under the influence of a culture that had excluded them from public affairs, those in conservative states risked social ostracism if they showed up at the polls, some feared the opposition of their husbands, and others were simply unfamiliar with the formalities of registration and voting. 

It actually took decades for women to participate in elections at levels comparable to men.  Today, however, women are more likely to vote than men in many states and as a group have demonstrably different values than men in deciding who to support.  The so-called Gender Gap has become a significant reality in American politics.  But today, let’s pop a cork in celebration of a great victory not only for women, but for human rights.

The Little Meeting at Seneca Falls that Changed the World

 Most images of Elizabeth Caddy Stanton portray her in grey old age.  But this 1848 picture captures her as the attractive 34 year old mother who played a leading role in the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention.

1848 was the year of revolution in Europe.  On this side of the pond another kind of revolution, one that continues to this day, had its beginnings in a hastily called meeting in a small industrial town in Upstate New York. 

The Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention which was called to order on July 19, 1848, had been hastily called by a group of women who had come together over tea at the home of Jane Hunt to meet a visiting celebrity. Lucretia Mott wasa leading Anti-Slavery advocate and noted public speaker from Boston.  Attending the tea were Mary Ann McClintock; Martha Coffin Wright,  Mott's sister; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a young mother and veteran anti-slavery advocate, and Jane Hunt. 

Except for Stanton, the women were all members of the Society of Friends—the Quakers. Stanton was a Freethinker, although it was unlikely that her friends then understood how radical her religious views were.

Stanton recalled meeting Mott in 1840 at the International Anti-Slavery Convention in London where women in the American delegation were refused to be seated.  She then, according to her account many years later, went on a diatribe about the general condition of women and their lack of economic and political rights. 

The women decided to call a convention to discuss advancing the status of women.  But it had to be done quickly before Mott, the major draw to such an event, left the area.  McClintock, only 27 years old, and Stanton were given the principle assignment of making the arrangements.  The local Wesleyan Methodist Chapel, the frequent site for anti-slavery, temperance, and other reform causes, was secured as a venue for a meeting scheduled only eight days after the tea.  A brief call to meeting was placed in the local Seneca County Courier which was picked up by Frederick Douglas’s North Star and other reform publications. 

Meanwhile Stanton was given the task of drawing up a Declaration and a set of resolutions.  Shrewdly, she drew from Thomas Jefferson’s soaring rhetoric in the Declaration of Independence.  She wrote that “all men and women had been created equal” and went on to list eighteen “injuries and usurpations,” the same number of charges leveled against the King in the original document, “on the part of man toward woman.” 

She also drafted eleven resolutions, most of them dealing with the right of women to own property, conduct business in their own name and other legal and economic reforms.  Ten had been broadly agreed to at the tea.  On her own authority, Stanton added another, which she placed in the ninth spot which read, “Resolved:  That it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.”  The addition even shocked Mott, who was afraid the inclusion of a demand for the right to vote would be so radical that it would discredit the whole document.  By Stanton’s later account Mott exclaimed, “Why, Lizzie, thee will make us ridiculous.”  But all agreed to submit it to a vote of the convention. 

On such short notice the meeting was hardly a national event.  Many prominent women and reformers from Boston, Philadelphia, and New York City were unable to attend—indeed were likely completely ignorant it was taking place.  Attendees would be drawn from the immediate area around Seneca Falls. 

Luckily for the organizers the Finger Lakes region was populated by some of the most progressive and reformed minded people in the U.S.  Heavily populated by progressive Quakers, reform minded Methodists, Universalists and other religious groups, it was a hot bed of early Abolitionism and of other reform movements, especially Temperance, the mother cause for many first generation feminists. 

The call went out not just to women, but to sympathetic men, of whom there were several, including Lucretia’s husband James, a leading anti-slavery crusader and Fredrick Douglas from Rochester.  Stanton’s husband Henry was a lawyer who advised her on points of law while she was drafting the resolutions.  But he had political ambitions and was frightened by the call for the vote for women so he arranged to be out of town during the convention so his name would not be associated with it. 

The convention started in the middle of a rare blistering heat wave.  Temperatures would reach the 90’s both days.  A sizeable crowd, including 40 men, was outside the Methodist church waiting for admittance at 10 A.M.  Unfortunately in the press of events, no one remembered to ask the Sexton to unlock the building.  Stanton’s young nephew had to be boosted through an open window to unbar the door.  

Soon the crowd filled the main floor and overflowed into the balcony.  Men had been asked to attend only the second day, but seeing so many there, they were admitted but asked to refrain from speaking until the next day.  McClintock was appointed secretary. 

The first day was largely taken up by speeches by Mott and Stanton, a humorous reading, and a first reading of the Declaration and Resolutions.  To conduct business the next day, no woman would step forward to claim the chair.  It was considered unseemly for a woman to preside over men.  James Mott was called onto chair the morning session where the Declaration and resolutions were debated.  All of the resolutions passed unanimously except the motion on suffrage, which experienced significant resistance. 

Then Fredrick Douglas took the platform and delivered an eloquent plea of support for the resolution,   “In this denial of the right to participate in government, not merely the degradation of woman and the perpetuation of a great injustice happens, but the maiming and repudiation of one-half of the moral and intellectual power of the government of the world.”  His argument swayed the attendees who voted heavily in favor, although not unanimously and there were some walk-outs. It would not be the last time Douglas and other prominent Black Abolitionists came to the aid of early Feminism. 

Emboldened by the radical turn of events Mott offered a twelfth resolution, although she must have known that it would cause the loss of support for the cause from several clergy present,  “Resolved: For the overthrowing of the monopoly of the pulpit, and for the securing to woman equal participation with men in the various trades, professions and commerce.” The assembly, made up largely of Quakers, a faith without ordained clergy but which allowed women like Mott to be recognized as lay preachers, easily passed the addition.  Predictably some of the clergy in attendance, although never offering objection at the meeting, went back to their churches to denounce the meeting and its document. 

Out of an estimated three hundred in attendance one hundred women and men signed the Seneca Falls Declaration, although subsequent criticism caused some of them to remove their names.  There were separate columns for the endorsements of women and men.  The organizers considered the meeting a success.  Douglas prevailed upon Mott to stay in New York long enough for a second convention to be held two weeks later in Rochester.  Over the next two years similar local or state conventions were held in Ohio—where Sojourner Truth made her famous “Ain’t I a Woman” speech—Indiana , and Pennsylvania. 

The novelty of the event and its radical declaration drew considerable press notice, some of it supportive, but most of it either ridiculing or reviling the meeting and its organizers.  Most of the reformist press was more or less positive. Horace Greely offered tepid support in the New York Tribune.  But rival James Gordon Bennett derisively printed the entire Declaration in the New York Herald expecting that the document was so outrageous that it would self destruct. 

Stanton had another opinion, “Just what I wanted…  Imagine the publicity given to our ideas by thus appearing in a widely circulated sheet like the Herald. It will start women thinking, and men too; and when men and women think about a new question, the first step in progress is taken.” 

Despite the publicity at the time many participants did not think of the Seneca Falls Convention as foundational.  Mott regarded as just one of many meetings she attended or addressed and as just a part of an on-going process. 

Many would look to the 1850 National Women's Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts as the true beginning of an organized movement.  By that time Stanton had become the ally of another rising feminist, Susan B. Anthony and women’s suffrage took center stage as the main demand instead of being a controversial add-on. 

It wasn’t until 1876 when the now grey Stanton published the first volume of History of Woman Suffrage that she celebrated the Seneca Falls meeting as foundational, “the greatest movement for human liberty recorded on the pages of history—a demand for freedom to one-half the entire race.”  Despite the derision of rival Lucy Stone, Stanton’s late assessment became enshrined as the central act in a creation story. 

By the time that book was issued, Stanton had been marginalized in the movement.  Even her closest ally, Anthony, sometimes kept her at arms distance because of her scandalous freethinking views on religion.  Many leaders believed the support of church women was essential to furthering the cause and Stanton was a red flag in the eyes of many of them. 

Some historians now believe that Stanton may have inflated the importance of the Seneca Falls meeting in the book to regain her place as central to the movement’s history.  But then again many of those same historians are as uncomfortable with Stanton’s apostasy as were the likes of Lucy Stone. 

Discounting the myths that have grown up around the event—it was not a national convention, men were not only in attendance but played leading roles, and suffrage was not the main focus—the contemporary press accounts of the event and the energy that it gave to ongoing efforts, not the least of which was launching Stanton’s career, make it clear that to be at Seneca Falls was to be present at creation.

Florence Nightingale—The Lady of the Lamp

Britain and America each have iconic nurse heroines.  But other than sharing a common calling, horrific experience in war, and a steely determination, Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton could not have been more different.

Nightingale was the daughter of a wealthy landowner and member of the British ruling class.  Barton came from a struggling but respectable family of middling means.  Nightingale struggled to gain acceptance of nursing as a respectable occupation for gentle women.  Spinster Barton had no choice but to work spending years as a school mistress before volunteering without training to serve the Civil War wounded.  Nightingale came from a family with Unitarian connections but was a devoted Anglican.  Barton was raised a Universalist who had no religious affiliation in later life, but credited her ethics to her childhood faith. Nightingale was interested in the professionalization of nursing, sanitation practices, and what we would now describe as holistic medicine.  Barton cared about the amelioration of suffering and building a new model of active charity and volunteerism.  Disabled by illness and perhaps Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Nightingale had to largely retire from active nursing and administration within a few years of returning from the Crimean War and spent the rest of her long life as a semi-invalid, writer and researcher.  Nightingale never embraced feminism, was in fact openly critical of it and cultivated the support and friendship of powerful men.  Barton, although necessarily careful to curry support for the American Red Cross from the President and Congress, was supportive of women’s suffrage.

But, of course, Nightingale’s famous example inspired and motivated Barton in her own career.

Florence Nightingale was named for the city of Florence, then the capital of the Duchy of Tuscany on May 12, 1820.  Her father, born William Shore, inherited a rich country estate from his mother’s family and assumed their name, Nightingale.  

In 1825 the family returned to England where they took up residence in a large and elegant new country home on the familial estate, Lea Hall in Derbyshire.  The following year her father bought a second estate, Embley Park, in Hampshire.  Soon after he was appointed the High Sheriff of Hampshire.  The family divided their years between the two country seats.

Nightingale was home tutored, like most of her class, but benefited from parents who allowed her to study deeply beyond the narrow instruction usual for women of her class and place.  By here late teens she was as academically accomplished as most university educated men.

Her mother, despite progressive social views and ardent abolitionism, was a Victorian traditionalist when it came to the role of women.  She ardently opposed young Florence’s announcement that she was determined to find a career in service, and particularly in nursing.  Women nurses were not unheard of.  But other than Catholic and Anglican nursing orders, it was considered an unskilled job for the lowest orders of society.  Because they were required to come into close physical contact with patients, including men, it was assumed that they were degraded and likely to service their charges sexually as well.  In fact, secular nurses were regarded as little more than prostitutes.

Despite her mother’s opposition, in 1844 Nightingale launched a round of visiting hospitals in London and elsewhere, observing conditions and techniques and eventually volunteering her services.  She rejected an ardent suitor, politician and poet Richard Monckton Milnes, for fear that marriage would interfere with her calling.  She continued her hospital visits for 14 years, eventually attracting the attention and support of others.

In 1849 Nightingale undertook extensive travels in Europe, Turkey, and Egypt.  He mother probably hoped the Grand Tour would divert her from her purpose.  She was dead wrong.  She used the trip to make visits to hospitals and study nursing techniques.  She spent time with in Egypt she visited a convent of nursing sisters of St. Vincent de Paul in Alexandria, where she was impressed by the order and discipline that made their care superior to anything she had found in Europe. 

 Later on the journey she spent considerable time at the Institute of Protestant Deaconesses at Kaiserswerth in Germany. The institute had been founded for the care of the destitute in 1833 and had grown into a training school for women teachers and nurses.  She described the event as the turning point of her life.  She returned to the Institute in 1851 for four months of medical training—the only formal nursing education she ever received.  She vowed to establish similar training programs in England.  Her accounts of her experiences there, The Institution of Kaiserswerth on the Rhine, for the Practical Training of Deaconesses, etc, was her first major publication and drew attention for her plans in England.  

Nightingale’s sister also published her extensive correspondence describing in detail her experience in Egypt and “The Orient” which showed her as a gifted travel writer and astute observer of life and customs in other lands.

During these travels Nightingale also made contact with important British political figures also traveling abroad, especially Sidney Herbert, who she met in Rome.  Herbert was a former Secretary at War in the Tory government Sir Robert Peel and would be called back to that post during the Crimean War.  He became a lifelong devoted friend and supporter of Nightingale. 

Back home, Nightingale resumed her round of hospital visits will arguing for opening nursing to respectable women and for formal schooling for them.  

In 1852 she finally got a position where she could put her ideas into practice as the Superintendent of the Institute for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen in London.  It may not have been tending to the poor as she one day hoped to do, but it was a start.  In her relatively short tenure at the Institute, she inaugurated formal training for her nurses. 

About the same time, probably against his wife’s wishes but bowing to the inevitable, Florence’s father settled an £500 annual income on her allowing her to live comfortably while pursuing her career.

What interrupted Nightingale’s new job was the onset of the Crimean War, as foolish a major power conflict as was ever fought.  France under the newly minted Emperor Napoleon III, Britain and Russia chest bumped over the rotting but still alive corpse of the Ottoman Empire.  The immediate cause of the war, Russia’s occupation of Ottoman provinces along the Danube ostensibly in defense of Orthodox rights, was voided when Austria threatened to join the coalition against the Tsar and Russia withdrew its troops.  Undeterred, the war went on anyway, fought mostly in naval actions on the Black Sea Beginning in 1853 and on the Crimean Peninsula with the siege of the port of Sevastopol in September of 1854.  Large, stupidly let Ottoman, French, and British Armies slogged it out against stubborn Russian resistance, cholera, and other epidemics.

Considered the first modern war because of the use of steam powered war ships, iron clad floating batteries, railroads, telegraph lines, massed artillery, the war quickly turned into a charnel house.  And for the first time reporters traveling with the armies got word back to London and Paris by wire within hours of actual events.  Newspapers quickly filled with grim stories.

Word also got back to England about the suffering of the British wounded in comparison to the French, who had better organized medical services and hospitals.  Nightingale offered her services and her friend Herbert, back as Secretary at War, quickly accepted the offer and promised her full support and all of the supplies she needed.

Nightingale set sail for the war zone on October 21, 1854 in charge of a hastily recruited force of nurses including 10 Roman Catholic nuns, 8 Anglican Sisters of Mercy, 6 nurses from St. John’s Institute, and 14 from various other hospitals.  

She declined the services of Mary Seacole a Black Jamaican traditional doctor.  Seacole traveled to the Crimea anyway at her own expense and served valiantly near the front lines.  Briefly honored upon her return to England, her memory was virtually erased as Nightingale’s reputation soared.

Florence’s group arrived early in November 1854 at Selimiye Barracks in Scutari, Istanbul, 250 miles across the Black Sea from the Crimea.  Thousands of British wounded were warehoused there with almost no support.  This would be Nightingales main base throughout the war.

She found appalling conditions:

There were no vessels for water or utensils of any kind; no soap, towels, or clothes, no hospital clothes; the men lying in their uniforms, stiff with gore and covered with filth to a degree and of a kind no one could write about; their persons covered with vermin . . .

We have not seen a drop of milk, and the bread is extremely sour. The butter is most filthy; it is Irish butter in a state of decomposition; and the meat is more like moist leather than food. Potatoes we are waiting for, until they arrive from France . . .

Nightingale appealed through correspondent William Russell of the The Times for supplies and assistance.  The Times organized relief drives and supplies began to trickle in by year’s end.  

Despite improvements and the best efforts of her overworked nurses, death rates actually climbed in the hospital in the months after Nightingales arrival due to sanitary conditions and overcrowding.  Cholera, typhus, and typhoid swept the wards.  Over 4,000 men died there over the winter.

Meanwhile the government commissioned a prefabricated hospital and dispatched it to the scene under the civilian leadership of Dr Edmund Alexander Parkes.  When it arrived and was set up nearby, its death rates were less than 1/10th of those at Suctari under Nightingale’s care.  

In March of 1865 a Sanitary Commission arrived from home which flushed the sewers at Suctari, after which deaths dropped sharply.  Nightingale did not recognize the connection however, and credited the improvement to nutrition and nursing care.  

Despite their limitations, Florence and her nurses worked tirelessly, none more so than their leader.  In addition to her administrative duties, she spent much time in the wards.  And because the prejudice against nurses persisted among Army authorities, only Nightingale was allowed on the wards at night to aid the ill trained and sometimes brutal male orderlies.  She visited bedsides carrying a lantern, earning her the nickname Lady of the Lamp among her charges.

Russell spread the word of her service back home where she was hailed as a hero.  The Nightingale Fund for the training of nurses was set up under the stewardship Herbert while she was still abroad and an astonishing £ 45,000 was raised by 1859.

In May of 1855 Nightingale finally made it to the Crimea, inspecting hospitals near the front at Balaclava.  While there, she fell ill with “Crimea Fever” and lay dangerously near death for 12 days.  She returned to Suctari weakened.  But she resumed her duties and even returned Balaclava in March of 1856, remaining there until after active fighting ceased on the peninsula when the hospitals there were closed in July.

In August Nightingale boarded a French ship and returned privately to England where she was hailed as a great heroine.  She was introduced to Queen Victoria herself and presented the monarch with a report on conditions.  Her fame even crossed the Atlantic where Henry Wadsworth Longfellow memorialized her in Santa Filomena:

Lo! in that house of misery
A lady with a lamp I see
Pass through the glimmering gloom,
And flit from room to room.

In 1860 with money from the Nightingale Fund the Nightingale Training School at St. Thomas' Hospital opened in London.  Nurses there were trained in a course of study designed by Florence.  She was, however, too ill to accept the superintendency of the new school.  She also raised money for the Royal Buckinghamshire Hospital   near her family home.  But her days as an active nurse and administer were over.

Nightingale busied herself with a close study of statistics from the various hospitals and medical facilities in the war.  What she discovered caused her to dramatically re-assess her own views.  In 1859 she published her findings in Notes on Matters affecting the Health, Efficiency and Hospital Administration of the British Army in which she acknowledged the supreme importance of sanitation in reducing hospital deaths.  In 1859 an army medical college was opened at Chatham and the first military hospital was established in Woolwich in 1861 following the advice laid out by Nightingale.

That was followed in 1860 with Notes on Nursing which laid down the educational program adopted at the St. Thomas school and others throughout Britain. 

When the Sepoy Rebellion broke out in India in 1857, Nightingale volunteered once more to go abroad.  But her health would not permit it.  Instead she undertook a deep study of India and wrote many articles about the sub-continent over the next several years, including a detailed proposal for digging wells in Indian villages.

Nightingale continued to write and was honored time and again over the next decades.  She participated as far as she was able in events like the Queens Diamond Jubilee.  

Nightingale died in London, on August 13 1910 at the age of ninety and was buried in the family plot at East Wellow, Hampshire after an offer of burial in Westminster Abbey was turned down by her family. Memorial services took place in St. Paul's Cathedral.