Excerpt: Shanna Stevenson

An excerpt from -

Women's Votes, Women's Voices

by Shanna Stevenson ('71)

After the Washington State Legislature authorized a vote to amend the state constitution for women's suffrage in 1909, suffragists had a long campaign before male voters would cast their ballots on the amendment in November, 1910.  This excerpt describes some of the strategies the campaigners used which are detailed in the book.

Campaign Hurdles

Given the history of resistance to suffrage activities, surprisingly little organized opposition surfaced during the campaign. Writings about the campaign often state that the pro-suffrage strength was never evident to the opposition. Seattleite Eliza Ferry Leary, daughter of the Washington's first governor and "among the highest taxpayers in the State" was the representative of the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage. She accepted the office, but then did nothing.[i] Dr. Cora Smith Eaton King noted that the campaign "was remarkable for the fact that our so-called enemies served in an auxiliary capacity as friends and helpers."[ii] Surprisingly, the "wets" did not actively campaign against the amendment as they had done in 1898. Mrs. Frances Bailey, an anti-suffragist from Portland, Oregon, spoke in some western Washington locations.[iii] Historian Marte Jo Sheeran observed that suffrage was not a high-profile issue during the election, as evidenced by the press accounts of the time.[iv] The anti-suffrage contingent that was typically most vocal-the wets-were busy fighting local-option prohibition battles in 1910. They may have assumed Washington's suffrage amendment would fail as had suffrage votes in Oregon in 1906 and 1908 and in Washington in 1898.

The 1910 ratification campaign cost $17,000, with the largest single contribution of $500 coming from Carrie Chapman Catt, a former Washingtonian who was then serving as president of the International Woman Suffrage Association.[v] Other national contributors included New York suffrage groups and the Massachusetts Suffrage Association, which donated $100 and paid the expenses of Alfred Brown, a suffrage speaker who traveled to Washington. Major organizational contributors, labor unions, and the Grange combined donated $1,000.[vi] Mostly, however, the money came from small contributors. Dr. Cora Smith Eaton King noted that money came from "cake sales, apron showers, sewing bees, and nickels and dimes saved out of the grocery and millinery bills of a thousand women."[vii] Fundraising events ran the gamut from dancing and chocolate parties, food sales, fortune-telling, card parties, and coffee klatches to "Chinese parties," a "Political Equality Whist Club," a "Mountaineer's Campfire," and "Dutch treat luncheons." Even productions of George Bernard Shaw's play, How She Lied to Her Husband, became suffrage fundraisers. Washington Equal Suffrage Association expended about $8,000 on the campaign; Washington Political Equality League, $3,500; and the Equal Franchise Society, $1,500.

Campaigners paid close attention to the wording and position of the ballot title in 1910, since many believed inattention to the title contributed to the earlier failures of women's suffrage votes. In 1889 both prohibition and suffrage were on the same ballot, and in 1898 women's suffrage was paired with the "single-tax" referendum-both controversial topics. Suffrage was one of two amendments to the Washington State Constitution on the 1910 ballot. The second issue was a non-controversial amendment providing for a mid-term gubernatorial election when a vacancy occurred. The word suffrage was not in the ballot title. The choices read: "FOR the proposed amendment to Article 6 of the constitution relating to the qualifications of voters within the state" and "AGAINST the proposed amendment." Both those for and against the suffrage amendment distributed printed slips with instructions for voters. "Vote for the Amendments," was an even simpler pro-suffrage tactic that did not distinguish between the two ballot measures.[viii] According to the History of Woman Suffrage account of the campaign, Senator W. H. Paulhamus of Puyallup gave the campaign advance information as to the exact wording and position of the amendment at the top of the ballot.[ix] This allowed the campaign to simplify the ballot instructions, explaining that voters should "Vote for Amendment to Article VI at the Top of the Ballot." Suffragists mounted seven-by-ten-foot banners at strategic locations with that wording.[x]

The Election

After twenty months of organizing, canvassing, and campaigning, suffragists continued their sophisticated political strategy right up to election day. The August-September 1910 issue of Votes for Women gave nine items for adherents to follow to ensure a November victory:

1. Ask your friends to vote for the amendment. Ask every voter.
2. Ask the business people with whom you deal to help you get the ballot.
3. "Wear a "Votes for Women" pin. This is most important. It will bring the   amendment many a vote and besides it often opens a way to present the subject."
4. Send Votes for Women to your friends and to strangers.
5. Help with the poll list canvass.
6. Distribute suffrage literature (leave in steamers and on street cars).
7. Put up a suffrage poster (even a timid woman can do this).
8. Help in the press work.
9. Let people know you are alive in this campaign and the cause is won.

Confident after several positive editorials in major newspapers throughout the state, campaigners were out in force on rainy November 8, 1910. Organizers stationed two women and one man at each polling place. The women handed out cards asking for the vote on the first amendment while the male observer watched the vote tabulation. From earlier failures suffragists had learned hard lessons about guarding the integrity of the voting process, particularly with the ballot irregularities in 1889.[xi]

The vote result was 52,299-29,676 in favor of ratification of the women's suffrage amendment-a margin of nearly two to one.[xii] Every county voted in favor of the amendment, with greater pluralities in Puget Sound counties than in eastern Washington.  Support cut across party lines as well as racial and ethnic, urban and rural populations; and there was little statistical difference between foreign- versus native-born, or educated versus uneducated voters. Surprisingly, no statistical difference existed between wets and dries on the suffrage issue or between reformers and non-reformers.[xiii] Washington joined the four western states where women had already won the vote-Wyoming (1890), Colorado (1893), Utah (1896), and Idaho (1896). Washington women and suffragists nationwide celebrated Thanksgiving Day on November 24, 1910, in gratitude for Washington women's victory and in celebration of the addition of a fifth star to the national suffrage flag. Governor Marion Hay officially signed the proclamation of adoption on November 28, 1910. Twenty-two years had passed since the Territorial Supreme Court had last taken away Washington women's right to vote.[xiv]

The stunningly decisive victory in 1910 is widely credited with reinvigorating the national movement. When Washington joined her western sisters in 1910, it had been fourteen years since a state had enacted irrevocable women's suffrage. Male voters in Oregon, South Dakota, and Oklahoma all failed to enfranchise women in 1910. Washington's suffrage victory can be considered a "dam-breaker"; amendments giving women the right to vote quickly followed in several other states and a territory-California in 1911; Oregon, Kansas, and Arizona in 1912; Alaska Territory in 1913; and Montana and Nevada in 1914.

Newspapers generally downplayed the role women played in achieving victory. For example, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer headlined the results with "Women of the State Get the Ballot by Gift of Men." [xv]  In a post-victory summation, Emma Smith DeVoe thanked the men of Washington, "who by their vote gave their mothers, wives, and sisters equal franchise."[xvi] Despite this humility, women's tireless efforts to obtain the vote since the idea of women's suffrage had first been introduced in Washington Territory cannot be denied. Headlines like the Post-Intelligencer's suggested that women's voting had been given to them by men, implying (perhaps to reassure men) that gender hierarchy had been retained and that women continued to benefit from men's magnanimity rather than through any efforts of their own. The truth is, however, that the achievement women's suffrage in Washington indicated a major "renegotiation of gender boundaries" in the state.[xvii]

Washington also set the standard for a modern campaign strategy that other states later employed-using several kinds of media, forming coalitions, and conducting a sophisticated, organized campaign. Historian Rebecca Mead characterized the campaign as a "hybrid" that used some older conservative educational strategies as well as more modern media tactics.[xviii] Washington suffragists passed a symbolic "Votes for Women" banner on to California after the 1910 victory to inspire the 1911 campaign there. By the late 1910s, however, it became evident that the state-by-state strategy had run its course. A national amendment would have to be the path to victory since some states-particularly in the south and northeast-had entrenched opposition to women's suffrage.

[i] Dr. Cora Smith Eaton King et al., "Washington," in Elizabeth  Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Ida Husted Harper, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, (Rochester: J. J. Little & Co., 1881-1922): 6:681.

[ii] Dr. Cora Smith Eaton King, "The Anti's" and Dr. Matthews." Notes and Correspondence on History, 1919-20, DeVoe Papers.

[iii] "Progress of the Campaign Over the State," Votes for Women 1, no. 6 (May, 1910): 9.

[iv] Marte Jo Sheeran, "Woman Suffrage Issue in Washington, 1890-1910," Master's thesis, University of Washington, 143.

[v] T. Alfred Larson, "The Woman Suffrage Movement in Washington," Pacific Northwest Quarterly 67, No. 2 (April 1976): 61.

[vi]C. H. Baily, "How Washington Women Regained the Ballot," Pacific Monthly 26 (July 1911): 10.

[vii] HWS 6:682. Eastern Contributors included Henry B. Blackwell and Alice Stone Blackwell, Mass. $250; Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Lesser, California, $100; Mrs. H.E. Flansburg, New York, $100; Miss Janet Richards, Washington, D.C., $100; the Rev. Olympia Brown, Wisconsin, $25. Contributions to the Equal Franchise Society included $200 from Fanny Garrison Villard, $2050 from Mrs. Susan Look Avery, of Kentucky; $300 from Mrs. Elizabeth Smith Miller and Miss Anne Fitzhugh Miller of New York, as well as several other eastern contributors-about $3,000 in all.

[viii] "Don't Forget to Vote for the Amendments at the Top of the Ballot," Votes for Women 1, no. 10 (October, 1910): 23.

[ix] Dr. Cora Smith Eaton King, "Washington," 6:675.

[x] "The Great Victory in Washington," Votes for Women, Vol. 1, no. 11 (December, 1910), 1.

[xi] Marte Jo Sheeran, "The Woman Suffrage Issue in Washington, 1890-1910," Master's thesis, University Washington, 1977: 144.

[xii] Only 59.3 percent of those casting ballots in the general election voted on the suffrage issue. The reason for this anomaly is unknown, but the ballot wording may have confused some voters.

[xiii] Sheeran, "Woman Suffrage Issue in Washington," 149-50.

[xiv] "Women Are to Give Special Thanks." November 13, 1910, DeVoe Scrapbooks, DeVoe Papers.

[xv] Seattle Post-Intelligencer, November 10, 1910, p. 11.

[xvi] "Women Are to Give Special Thanks," November 13, 1910, DeVoe Scrapbooks, DeVoe Papers.

[xvii] John Putnam, "A ‘Test of Chiffon Politics': Gender Politics in Seattle, 1897-1917." In "woman Suffrage: The View from the Pacific," special issue, Pacific Historical Review 69, no. 4 (November 2000): 605.

[xviii] Rebecca Mead, How the Vote Was Won, (New York: New York University Press, 2004): 99.

From Women's Votes, Women's Voices: The Campaign for Equal Rights in Washington by Shanna Stevenson, Published by the Washington State Historical Society, 2009. Used with permission of the Washington State Historical Society. This excerpt, in whole or in part, may not be reprinted, photocopied, posted on another website or distributed by any means without the written permission of the copyright holder. The book is available through Washington State University Press.