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27 March 2007
Historian Stresses Importance of Women's Suffrage
Right to vote was first step in effort to achieve equality, Cooney says
Washington -- Prejudice against women has been a problem throughout history and still undermines efforts to achieve equality between men and women, says historian Robert Cooney.
This prejudice "is the challenge the suffragists faced, and they attacked it both politically and culturally," Cooney, author of Winning the Vote: The Triumph of the American Woman Suffrage Movement, said in a March 15, 2007, webchat with participants in Iran, Madagascar and Egypt.
Suffragists knew that without the right to vote, without political power, women "didn't have a chance" to change their position in society, he said. However, he observed, "those in power rarely give up their power easily."
Additionally, "[m]any men at the time believed that women were not capable of participating in politics, that it would degrade them and lead to the disintegration of the family," he said.
Lobbying, campaigning, demonstrating and persuading were all necessary -- sometimes for decades -- to persuade men to give women the right to vote in the United States, Cooney said. The suffragists appealed to men and women, persuading male voters and politicians state by state to see the justice of their appeal, according to Cooney.
International affairs also played a role in securing for American women the right to vote by helping "to spread the word and encourage women in many countries to work for full equality," Cooney said, noting that a number of countries approved equal suffrage for women before the United States did in 1920.
STRATEGIES OF PERSUASION
Those who fought for the right of American women to vote succeeded because of the strategies they used: start locally; use nonviolent means, whether legal or illegal; play the game of politics; and be prepared to persevere.
The women began to seek the right to vote in individual state and territorial legislatures, Cooney said. This expanded to a demand for a national constitutional amendment guaranteeing women this right, since such an amendment requires just three-fourths of state legislatures to approve.
Besides availing themselves of legal avenues such as lobbying legislators, suffragists also took direct but nonviolent -- if occasionally illegal -- actions: casting votes without the right to do so; picketing the White House; holding massive parades to win public support and other tactics to make their cause exciting and popular.
“As they won elections, they created their own momentum, and learned the art of politics,” Cooney said.
One other vital quality was the suffragists’ ability to persevere in their quest for equality through three generations -- a total of 70 years, according to Cooney. Speaking to USINFO after the webchat, Cooney said that it must have been difficult for those women, who believed so deeply in their cause, to die not having seen their goal achieved, while inculcating their daughters to soldier on.
CHANGING ATTITUDES
Cooney said women were as difficult -- or even more difficult -- to persuade as men of the importance of expanding women's roles.
Responding to a questioner who said that in Muslim societies women are relegated only to domestic roles and believe such limitations are "essential for their happiness for their feminine nature,” Cooney said: “Suffragists had to fight hardest against such an attitude ... convincing women of the need for personal involvement in larger concerns outside the home since so much affecting the home is decided in the halls of government.”
Many women in the United States today still do not choose to look beyond traditional domestic roles, Cooney added.
However, Susan B. Anthony, one of the movement’s most famous protagonists, “felt that individual women should pursue everything they wanted,” Cooney said, “because then they would personally encounter the prejudices that she was talking about in the larger society and would have to act.”
Although winning the vote was an important step for women's rights, it did not guarantee full equality, Cooney said. After the suffrage amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1920, activist Alice Paul wrote the Equal Rights Amendment to address other ways that women faced discrimination. "This bill has been debated for 80 years and still has not been passed," he said.
The right to vote was only the first step in the effort to expand the role of women in the political process, according to Cooney. "I've always drawn a distinction between women winning the right to vote and what happened afterwards," he said. "Winning equal voting rights paved the way for other changes and for women's political power, but it didn't guarantee women's acceptance by voters."
In the United States, it has taken generations for women to have an impact on electoral politics, but women now are making their mark in universities, corporations, foundations and governments with leadership roles similar to those of men, according to Cooney.
Cooney stressed the importance of having women in leadership positions.
"I think that by elevating women anywhere we enhance women's role[s] at the international level," he said. "When women show their ability -- as a representative, prime minister, secretary of state or whatever -- they show those who doubt them that women are capable and prepared to meet modern challenges."
See transcript of the webchat, a publication on Women of Influence, and a publication on Women in Politics.
