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Image 1: Gustin, E. W., Artist. Election Day!, ca. 1909. Jan 21. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/97500226/

The fight for women’s suffrage began in earnest in the mid-nineteenth century. During the Women’s Rights Convention, held in Seneca Falls, NY, in 1848, over 100 women signed a “Declaration of Sentiments” expressing their belief that women deserved the vote. After the American Civil War, the expansion of United States territory into the west brought new opportunities for women’s suffrage.

On the eve of Woodrow Wilson’s first inauguration in 1913, Alice Paul led a march through Washington, DC, to show support for a constitutional amendment to extend suffrage to women. The participants were attacked by mobs.

The 1916 election presented the women’s suffrage question to voters in many states so they could decide the issue for themselves. However, it did not pass in any of the states where it was on the ballot.

Common arguments against women’s suffrage included:

• Women would merely vote as their husbands instructed; ​
• The entire social order, including family life, would be disrupted should women participate in politics;
• Men would lose their standing in the home and community (see Image 1).

Image 2: The Awakening by Hy Mayer (Puck Magazine, February 20, 1915)

The entry of the US into World War I in 1917 temporarily turned the public’s focus away from suffrage, but the women in the movement kept up the pressure (see Image 3). Women’s work on behalf of the war effort only further proved that women were just as patriotic and as committed to their country as were their husbands, fathers and sons. ​

In an effort to rejuvenate interest in their cause, the suffragettes at times resorted to extremist tactics. The burning of President Wilson in effigy in front of the White House in 1919 was an especially egregious example of these methods. Meantime several women continually picketed the White House and were arrested. The suffragettes were sent to prison where they were treated poorly, and eventually force-fed after going on a hunger strike.

Image 2: Harris & Ewing, photographer. WOMAN SUFFRAGE. BONFIRE ON SIDEWALK BEFORE WHITE HOUSE. District of Columbia United States Washington D.C. Washington D.C, 1918. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2016869613/

In time, President Wilson’s post-War policies striving to spread democracy across Europe were incorporated into the suffragettes’ arguments for seeking the same ideals at home. This included, specifically, the right of women to vote as equals alongside their male compatriots.

The 19th Amendment, granting women the right to vote nationwide, was certified on August 26, 1920. This vote passed during the period Edith Bolling Wilson described in her Memoir as her “stewardship” of the country due to the President’s illness following his stroke the previous year. Some scholars have suggested that this was not coincidental; in Ross (1975: 321), for example, renowned journalist Robert Bender, when addressing the question of who had been running the country during Wilson’s incapacitation, was quoted (March 1920) as suggesting that though “never an ardent suffragist herself, Mrs. Wilson is likely when the full story of the first months is known to have proved herself the finest argument for suffrage that any woman by her work has yet offered to the cause.” ​

And yet, though Mrs. Wilson never spoke publicly against the cause of suffrage, the general consensus is that privately she was not a supporter – a fact that a few of her friends regarded “with some dismay” (Ross, 1975: 321). Nonetheless, as a woman of Southern values and propriety, she could not approve of the tactics of the suffragettes, nor could she ever fully accept – ironic as it may sound in retrospect – that the “realm of politics” was a suitable one for all women to engage in (Roberts, 2023: 117-19).