Never mind asking why this country isn’t ready for a woman to be president, when it’s rare someone will ask why it was so difficult for women to achieve the right to vote in the U.S., a self-described land of the free, and how they managed to overcome that resistance.
One theory that started to burble in my brain while conducting research in 2006 for a reference book, Global Issue: Women’s Rights, was that women, overall, were perceived as conservatives. The women’s suffrage movement, which quickened in the late 1840s in the U.S., was largely made up of advocates left over from the 19th/early 20th century temperance movement. Men did not want to see their lifestyles—namely centered around work, family, sports, and pubs—dictated to. Many women didn’t either, but they were, of course, the discrete minority on that one.
What I just read in the May issue of the Smithsonian magazine presents yet another set of angles on this.
The mover and shaker behind the Anti-Saloon League, whose cause evolved into what became legislated and known as the Prohibition amendment to the U.S. Constitution, was, in fact, a man—Wayne B. Wheeler. (Read the article for more information about him.) One of the ways he gained momentum for this unpopular gesture for change was to recruit women.
Here we encounter a series of ironies. Renown suffragette Susan B. Anthony was originally rooted in the temperance movement. Being denied the right to speak at a temperance convention in Albany, New York in 1852, because of her gender, launched Anthony on the long road of the suffrage movement. By 1899, she leveraged the two causes for one another, while speaking with an ASL official: “The only hope of the Anti-Saloon Leagues’ success lies in putting the ballot into the hands of women.” The few women who could vote in any of the 16 U.S. states in 1917, helped to push through the 18th Amendment, which banned the right to manufacture and sell alcohol in the United States, through both houses of Congress. Another irony: Senate hearings, which began on September 27, 1918, after fulfilling the three-quarter requirement of state ratification, were heavily influenced by anti-German sentiment—ultimately silencing consumers of Pabst, Schlitz, Blatz and Miller beer (and we can imagine who they were).
Prohibition went into effect January 17, 1920. The women’s vote became possible on August 26, 1920 when the 19th Amendment was ratified. Two wins, two causes, after very, very long hauls. That’s not a bad record. Anthony can come back to be my president any day, even if I don’t agree with her.
One, final irony: Utah—now a territory for non-drinking Mormons— became the 36th state to ratify the 21st Amendment, which ended Prohibition on December 5, 1933.
