Suffragette tidbits

For those of you who wish to remember those who fought for the right to vote for women, here are some trivia facts that you might find interesting:

1.  The term suffragette was made up by The Daily Mail in England to make fun of the more radical women who campaigned for the right to vote. The grammatically correct term was suffragist.

2.  In England, there was a less radical and a more radical women’s group. The less radical one was The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. The more radical one was the Women’s Social and Political Union. For those who remember 1970’s American history, this would be akin to the split that happened between the pacifist followers of Dr. Martin Luther King and the Black Panthers and Malcolm X.

3.  The women’s suffrage movement was led by mostly working-class women. This is not surprising since upper-class women were cossetted and often had the best of both worlds. I suspect that the phrase “bird in a guilded cage” would certainly apply to those ladies.

4.  The first democratic country to grant women the vote was New Zealand in 1893. Some women in England were granted the right to vote in 1918, but they had to be over 30 and either householders or university graduates.

5.  The United States granted women the right to vote in 1920 by the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution. It should be noted that the full effective right to vote for African-Americans–whether male or female–was delayed until the mid 1960’s because of the Jim Crow laws existing in the United States.

6.  Women in the United Kingdom gained the full right to vote in 1928. This was four years after my mother was born, so it is not far away history.

7.  The most famous American campaigner for women’s suffrage was Susan B. Anthony, whose image would one day decorate a dollar coin. I consider this to be very faint praise since the dollar coin is the least used and least popular coin in the United States. In fact, many people do not even realize we have a dollar coin.

8.  The prize for the first modern republic to grant women’s suffrage actually goes to the Corsican Republic, a no longer existent country destroyed by France, which gave full suffrage to women in 1755.

9.  The fight for women’s suffrage began in the 1820’s in the United States. At mid-century, there was a split between the women’s suffrage movement and the African-American suffrage movement as the African-American movement supported a simple amendment and refused to endorse an amendment that would give suffrage to both African-Americans and women. Thus African-American men were willing to keep their women, in fact all women, disenfranchised in order to make passage of an amendment giving the vote to them an easier proposition. The Civil War ended the debate as it brought about both emancipation of all African-Americans and suffrage to only the men. In passing, this meant that the great woman campaigner for both emancipation and suffrage, Sojourner Truth, lived to see herself free but never lived to see herself a voter.

10. Finally, and most grieviously, women had the right to vote in the United States for a time. It was slowly taken away from them. Below is the timeline of shame:

1777 – Women lose the right to vote in New York.

1780 – Women lose the right to vote in Massachusetts.

1784 – Women lose the right to vote in New Hampshire.

1787 – The new US Constitution places the qualifications for voters in the hands of the States. Women uniformly lose the right to vote, except in New Jersey.

1807 – Women lose the right to vote in New Jersey. Suffrage for women ends, and all power is now concentrated in, and only in, white male hands. Please note that in 1802 one of Congress’ rules for the naturalization of incoming immigrants was that they had to be “free white persons.” Non-white immigrants could not become citizens. Fortunately, after the Civil War, anyone–not female–born in the USA received the right to vote, although it was not until the 20th century that, finally, any immigrant could be naturalized, if they met the other requirements.