Today in Feminist History: A Sisterly Celebration of Suffrage (April 28, 1924)

Today in Feminist History is our daily recap of the major milestones and minor advancements that shaped women’s history in the U.S.—from suffrage to Shirley Chisholm and beyond. These posts were written by, and are presented in homage to, our late staff historian and archivist, David Dismore.


April 28, 1924: Though this is the fifth annual national convention of the League of Women Voters, it’s the first one to be held in a Presidential election year since the battle for the suffrage amendment ended in victory on August 26, 1920, so it’s an especially exciting meeting.

Since women can no longer be barred from any State’s polls on account of sex, and tens of millions of new women voters have registered and voted in the past four years on all ballot measures, the League takes stands on all the important issues of the day, and enforcement of the Prohibition law continues to be one of them. Of course, the fight here was only over how strong and explicit to make the League’s statement of its unwavering support for the nation’s Noble Experiment, something the group’s founder, Carrie Chapman Catt, enthusiastically supports.

An early draft of this year’s Prohibition resolution simply called for “bringing about respect for the law by cooperation and active work for law enforcement,” with no specific reference to the Prohibition Amendment. But after a stirring speech by Cornelia Bryce Pinchot and intense lobbying by the Pennsylvania delegation, the final resolution read: “Laxity in enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution is not only a scandal and dishonor to our nation, but tends to weaken the regard for law in general.” 

Mary Garrett Hay, who led the New York City branch of the Woman Suffrage Party in 1917, when women won the vote in a Statewide referendum, chose to look to the future and not the past. With both major parties holding national conventions this summer, her speech contained some advice that should be just as valid in decades to come as it is today:

“Don’t take what the men hand out to you. Take for yourselves the kind of things you want in the platforms and tell the men so. Keep your backbone at the conventions. When they want your vote for a candidate of whom you don’t approve, don’t give it, even for a unit vote. Let the men see that women are going to help to lead them to the right kind of platforms and the right kind of candidates.”

Though the decades-long national battles over both prohibition of alcohol and prohibition of sex discrimination at the polls have finally been settled by the 18th and 19th Amendments, there are still some issues that provoke fierce debate around the country, and the controversy over legalizing birth control certainly brought out strong feelings here. After intense arguments were made on both sides of the issue, it was decided that the L.W.V. would not yet take a stand, but that each State chapter is free to do so. The League rejected endorsement of a Constitutional amendment giving Congress the power to regulate marriage and divorce laws, but did go on record as favoring America’s entry into the Permanent Court of International Justice. 

Four years after passage of the suffrage amendment, we have not by any means achieved a utopian society, but the predictions of anti-suffragists that disastrous social consequences would inevitably follow if women won the vote have been proven to be just as ridiculous as they sounded at the time they were made. 

Though it took several generations of work to put an end to male-only elections, 44 months after that victory, women are already a substantial and well-informed portion of the electorate, with voter registration and voter education programs by the League of Women Voters certainly deserving a large share of the credit for that advance. 

Women cannot as yet claim credit for electing a President, because Harding won a majority of both men’s and women’s votes in the 1920 election. But it’s still too soon to know whether similar voting patterns will be the exception or the rule. Should women begin to vote differently from men, politics could still become as radically changed as suffragists hoped and anti-suffragists feared. So, a society in which men and women have equal rights, responsibilities and opportunities may yet be established.

About

David Dismore is the archivist for the Feminist Majority Foundation. His journey from would-be weather forecaster to full-time feminist began with the powerful impression made by a photo and a few paragraphs about the suffragists in his high school history textbook; years later, he had his first encounter with NOW—in which he carefully peeked in a window before opening the door to be sure men were allowed. He was eventually active in the ERA extension campaign of 1978, embarked on a cross-country bikeathon for it in 1982 and even worked for pioneers Toni Carabillo and Judith Meuli.