Women and Public Life

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Women and Public Life

• American History
• Unit II Becoming a World Power
• Chapter 6 Section 2- Women and Public Life

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Women and Public Life

• The Main Idea
• Women during the Progressive Era actively
  campaigned for reforms in education, childrens
  welfare, temperance, and suffrage.
• Reading Focus
• What opportunities did women have for education
  and work outside the home during the late 1800s?
• How did women gain political experience through
  participation in reform movements?
• How did the womens suffrage movement campaign
  for the vote?

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Opportunities for Women

• By the late 1800s, more educational opportunities
  arose as colleges, such as Oberlin College in
  Ohio, started enrolling women.
• By 1870 about 20 percent of all college students
  were women, and by 1900 that number increased by
  a third.
• Most of the women who attended college at this
  time were from the upper or middle classes and
  wanted to use their skills after graduation.
• A few African American women, such as Alberta
  Virginia Scott and Otelia Cromwell, also attended
  colleges, but this was more rare.
• However, many employment opportunities were still
  denied to women, as organizations such as the
  American Medical Association didnt admit women
  until many years later.
• Denied access to their professions, many women
  poured their knowledge and skills into the reform
  movement, gaining valuable political experience
  as they fought for change.

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Employment Opportunities
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Gaining Political Experience

• As in earlier reform periods, women became the
  backbone of many of the Progressive Era reform
  movements.
• Women learned how to organize, how to persuade
  people, and how to publicize their causes.
• Reform also taught women that they had the power
  to improve life for themselves, their families,
  and their communities.
• Some women campaigned for childrens rights,
  seeking to end child labor, improve childrens
  health, and promote education.
• Lillian Wald, founder of the Henry Street
  Settlement in New York City, believed the federal
  government had a responsibility to tend to the
  well-being of children.
• She campaigned tirelessly for the creation of a
  federal agency to meet that goal.
• She was successful when the Federal Childrens
  Bureau opened in 1912.

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Prohibition

• Progressive women also fought in the Prohibition
  movement, which called for a ban on making,
  selling, and distributing alcoholic beverages.
• Reformers thought alcohol was responsible for
  crime, poverty, and violence.
• Two major national organizations led the crusade
  against alcohol.
• The Anti-Saloon League
• The Womens Christian Temperance Union (WCTU),
  headed by Frances Willard, which was a powerful
  force for both temperance and womens rights
• Evangelists like Billy Sunday and Carry Nation
  preached against alcohol, and Nation smashed up
  saloons with a hatchet while holding a Bible.

Congress eventually proposed the Eighteenth
Amendment in 1917, prohibiting the manufacture,
sale, and distribution of alcohol. It was
ratified in 1919, but was so unpopular that it
was repealed in 1933.
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Womens Christian Temperance Union WCTU

• founded in Cleveland, Ohio in 1874.
• Temperance may be defined asmoderation in all
  things healthfultotal abstinence from all
  things harmful
• The main objective of the WCTU was to persuade
  all states to prohibit the sale of alcoholic
  beverages.
• It supported temperance education in schools, as
  well as, prison reform, womens suffrage and the
  abolition of prostitution.
• The WCTU's programs also promote good
  citizenship, child welfare, world peace, child
  abuse and equal justice for women and minority
  groups.

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Carrie Nation

• Standing at nearly 6 feet tall and weighing 180
  pounds, Carry Amelia Moore Nation, Carrie Nation,
  as she came to be known, cut an imposing figure.
• Wielding a hatchet, she was downright frightful.
  In 1900, the target of Nation's wrath was
  alcoholic drink.
• Nation, who described herself as "a bulldog
  running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at
  what he doesn't like," felt divinely ordained to
  forcefully promote temperance.
• A brief marriage to an alcoholic in the late
  1800's fueled Nation's disdain for alcohol.
  Kiowa, Kansas was the setting of Nation's first
  outburst of destruction in the name of temperance
  in 1900.
• Between 1900 and 1910 she was arrested some 30
  times after leading her followers in the
  destruction of one water hole after another with
  cries of "Smash, ladies, smash!"

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Civil Rights

• African American women fought for many reforms,
  but with the added burden of discrimination, as
  many werent even welcome in certain reform
  groups.
• African American women formed their own reform
  group, the National Association of Colored Women
  (NACW), in 1896.
• Some of the most prominent African American women
  of the time joined, including
• By 1914 the organization had more than 100,000
  members campaigning against poverty, segregation,
  lynching, the Jim Crow laws, and eventually for
  temperance and womens suffrage.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Margaret Murray
Washington, of the Tuskegee Institute
Harriet Tubman, the famous Underground Railroad
conductor
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Ida B. Wells-Barnett

• Born in Holly Springs, Mississippi in 1862.
• Died in Chicago, Illinois 1931 at the age of
  sixty-nine.
• She had been a slave and after the death of her
  parents to Yellow Fever she was left to raise her
  brothers and sisters. She turned to teaching.
• Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a fearless anti-lynching
  crusader, suffragist, women's rights advocate,
  journalist, and speaker. She stands as one of our
  nation's most uncompromising leaders and most
  ardent defenders of democracy.
• When a respected black store owner and friend of
  Barnett was lynched in 1892, Wells used her paper
  to attack the evils of lynching and encouraged
  the black townsmen of Memphis to go west.

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Before Rosa Parks

• In a famous incident , Ida defied the Plessy
  v. Ferguson (1896) supreme court case.
• It was in Memphis where she first began to
  fight (literally) for racial and gender justice.
  In 1884 she was asked by the conductor of the
  Chesapeake Ohio Railroad Company to give up her
  seat on the train to a white man and ordered her
  into the smoking or "Jim Crow" car, which was
  already crowded with other passengers.
• I refused, saying that the forward car
  closest to the locomotive was a smoker, and as
  I was in the ladies' car, I proposed to stay. . .
  The conductor tried to drag me out of the seat,
  but the moment he caught hold of my arm I
  fastened my teeth in the back of his hand. I had
  braced my feet against the seat in front and was
  holding to the back, and as he had already been
  badly bitten he didn't try it again by himself.
  He went forward and got the baggageman and
  another man to help him and of course they
  succeeded in dragging me out.
• Wells was forcefully removed from the train and
  the other passengers--all whites--applauded. When
  Wells returned to Memphis, she immediately hired
  an attorney to sue the railroad. She won her case
  in the local circuit courts, but the railroad
  company appealed to the Supreme Court of
  Tennessee, and it reversed the lower court's
  ruling.

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Rise of the Womens Suffrage Movement

• After the Civil War, suffragists, who had
  supported abolition, called for granting women
  the vote but were told that they should wait.
• Many were angered that the Fifteenth Amendment
  granted voting rights to African American men but
  not to women.
• Women organized into two major suffragist groups

• NWSA
• National Woman Suffrage Association, founded by
  Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.
• Campaigned for a constitutional amendment letting
  women vote
• Dealt with other womens issues like labor reform
  and supported Victoria Woodhull, the first woman
  presidential candidate

• AWSA
• American Woman Suffrage Association, with Henry
  Ward Beecher as President
• Focused solely on winning the vote state-by-state
  and aligned itself with the Republican Party

• Women began to see success in the West, as in
  1869 the Wyoming Territory granted women the
  vote, followed by the Utah Territory a year later
  and five more western states not long after.

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Anti-Suffrage Arguments

• Social
• Some believed women were too frail to handle the
  turmoil of polling places on Election Day.
• Some believed voting would interfere with a
  womans duties at home or destroy families.
• Some claimed that women did not have the
  education or experience to be competent voters.
• Others believed that most women did not want to
  vote, and that it was unfair for suffragists to
  force the vote on unwilling women.

• Economic
• The liquor industry feared that giving the women
  the vote would lead to Prohibition.
• As women became active in other reform movements,
  such as food and drug safety and child labor,
  business owners feared women would vote for
  regulations that would drive up costs.
• Religious
• Churches and clergy members preached that
  marriage was a sacred bond and the entire family
  was represented by the husbands vote.

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Susan B. Anthony Tests the Law

• Susan B. Anthony wrote pamphlets, made speeches,
  and testified before every Congress from 1869 to
  1906 in support of womens rights.
• In 1872 she and three of her sisters registered
  to vote, voted for a congressional representative
  in Rochester, New York, and were arrested two
  weeks later.
• Before her trial, Anthony spoke passionately
  about womens voting rights, but the judge
  refused to let her testify on her own behalf and
  fined her 100.
• Anthony didnt pay the fine, hoping to be
  arrested so she could be tried through the
  courts, but the judge did not imprison her.
• In 1873 the Supreme Court ruled that even though
  women were citizens, that did not automatically
  grant them voting rights, but that it was up to
  the states to grant or withhold that right.

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Womens Suffrage Movement 317 min.
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Two Suffrage Organizations Merge

• In 1890 the National Woman Suffrage Association
  and the American Woman Suffrage Association
  merged to form the National American Woman
  Suffrage Association (NAWSA).
• NAWSA operated under the leadership of Elizabeth
  Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony was its
  President from 18921900.
• Anthony died in 1906, and her final words were
  Failure is impossible.
• Like Susan B. Anthony, most of the early
  suffragists did not live long enough to cast
  their ballots.
• When women nationwide finally won the vote in
  1920, only one signer of the Seneca Falls
  Declarationthe document written at the first
  Womens Rights Convention in 1848was still
  alive.
• Her name was Charlotte Woodward, and she was a
  glove maker.

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Women 212 min.
18
Suffrage 249 min.
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WHY WOMEN SHOULD VOTE

• This is the story of our Grandmothers and
  Great-grandmothers they lived only 90 years ago.
  
• Remember, it was not until 1920 that women were
  granted the right to go to the polls and vote.

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The women were innocent and defenseless, but they
were jailed nonetheless for picketing the White
House, carrying signs asking for the vote.
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And by the end of the night, they were barely
alive. Forty prison guards wielding clubs and
their warden's blessing went on a rampage against
the 33 women wrongly convicted of 'obstructing
sidewalk traffic.' They beat Lucy Burns, chained
her hands to the cell bars above her head and
left her hanging for the night, bleeding and
gasping for air.
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They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed
her head against an iron bed and knocked her out
cold. Her cellmate, Alice Cosu, thought Lewis was
dead and suffered a heart attack. Additional
affidavits describe the guards grabbing,
dragging, beating, choking, slamming, pinching,
twisting and kicking the women.
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Thus unfolded the 'Night of Terror' on Nov. 15,
1917, when the warden at the Occoquan Workhouse
in Virginia ordered his guards to teach a lesson
to the suffragists imprisoned there because they
dared to picket Woodrow Wilson's White House for
the right to vote. For weeks, the women's only
water came from an open pail. Their food--all of
it colorless slop--was infested with worms.
When one of the leaders, Alice Paul, embarked
on a hunger strike, they tied her to a chair,
forced a tube down her throat and poured liquid
into her until she vomited She was tortured like
this for weeks until word was smuggled out to the
press.
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