More on The History of Womens Rights

The Suffrage Movement Checked by the Civil War. Advocates of woman
suffrage believed themselves on the high road to success when the Civil
War engaged the energies and labors of the nation. Northern women became
absorbed in the struggle to preserve the union. They held no suffrage
conventions for five years. They transformed their associations into
Loyalty Leagues. They banded together to buy only domestic goods when
foreign imports threatened to ruin American markets. They rolled up
monster petitions in favor of the emancipation of slaves. In hospitals,
in military prisons, in agriculture, and in industry they bore their
full share of responsibility. Even when the New York legislature took
advantage of their unguarded moments and repealed the law giving the
mother equal rights with the father in the guardianship of children,
they refused to lay aside war work for agitation. As in all other wars,
their devotion was unstinted and their sacrifices equal to the
necessities of the hour.
The Federal Suffrage Amendment. Their plans and activities, when the
war closed, were shaped by events beyond their control. The emancipation
of the slaves and their proposed enfranchisement made prominent the
question of a national suffrage for the first time in our history.
Friends of the colored man insisted that his civil liberties would not
be safe unless he was granted the right to vote. The woman suffragists
very pertinently asked why the same principle did not apply to women.
The answer which they received was negative. The fourteenth amendment to
the federal Constitution, adopted in 1868, definitely put women aside by
limiting the scope of its application, so far as the suffrage was
concerned, to the male sex. In making manhood suffrage national,
however, it nationalized the issue.
This was the signal for the advocates of woman suffrage. In March, 1869,
their proposed amendment was introduced in Congress by George W. Julian
of Indiana. It provided that no citizen should be deprived of the vote
on account of sex, following the language of the fifteenth amendment
which forbade disfranchisement on account of race. Support for the
amendment, coming from many directions, led the suffragists to believe
that their case was hopeful. In their platform of 1872, for example, the Republicans praised the women for their loyal devotion to freedom,
welcomed them to spheres of wider usefulness, and declared that the
demand of any class of citizens for additional rights deserved
"respectful consideration."
Experience soon demonstrated, however, that praise was not the ballot.
Indeed the suffragists already had realized that a tedious contest lay
before them. They had revived in 1866 their regular national convention.
They gave the name of "The Revolution" to their paper, edited by
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. They formed a national
suffrage association and organized annual pilgrimages to Congress to
present their claims. Such activities bore some results. Many eminent
congressmen were converted to their cause and presented it ably to their
colleagues of both chambers. Still the subject was ridiculed by the
newspapers and looked upon as freakish by the masses.