Written by Isabelle Shaw
The popular representation of women in the 1920s U.S. has been traditionally portrayed through a misleading rose-tinted lens. It suggests women entered a Golden Age after suffrage was achieved, giving them full liberties and massively changing their status. The depiction of flappers and sexual liberation leads astray the reality of the struggles of working mothers and the continuing political restrictions on women’s rights. Further, the persistent rejection by many men to accept women’s influence in politics proves that the historical narrative of the suffrage enabling women to fully change their position and become New Women is limited. The ideal of the New Woman ignores the stagnant position of the immigrant women and racial minorities who did not benefit from the 19th Amendment.
While the myth of the 19th Amendment’s causing a New Woman phenomenon is greatly exaggerated, it is undeniable that the hardship of suffragists did create some progressive political changes to help advance women’s position in American politics. Contemporary views of women’s participation in voting elections are misguided, in the case of Rice and Wiley in 1924, reflecting the general male consensus in the 1920s that women’s voting mirrored their husbands’. Frank R. Kent agrees with this view in 1927 by adding to the debate that women’s votes were based on the choices of “their husbands” and “male relatives” to reduce the impact of the suffrage of women in U.S. politics. The sexist myth was reinforced through contemporary reports and periodicals, therefore downplaying the success of women’s voting in creating change to progress women’s position in the U.S. The misogyny of these authors caused them to create an inaccurate representation of women’s voting as disparate to male voting patterns.
Sara Alpern, on the other hand, makes a convincing argument to challenge contemporary depictions of the infectivity of women’s suffrage by emphasising that many women voted, and the lack of women’s participation in voting was misleading. Scott suggests that the suffrage enabled women to be in vanguard of those fighting to end injustice, poverty and immorality, such as women’s voting leading to passage of the 1921 Sheppard Towner Bill hygiene for maternity and infant care. The numerous examples of women’s voting creating change to support women’s welfare disproves the traditional historical debate that women’s voting did nothing but reinforce the male voting aims. Therefore, the 19th Amendment did somewhat change women’s position in the U.S. by enfranchising them to better their welfare, but the contemporary opinions toward women’s voting hindered them from becoming New Women.
Similarly, the 19th Amendment caused some progress for women in the U.S. by enabling some women to hold positions of political power and increasing political education for women. Some women’s groups failed to utilise the 19th Amendment to focus on electing feminists to positions of political power, such as the League of Women’s Voters that limited the extent of political power women could achieve granted by suffrage. As exemplified by Emily Newell Blair’s article “Are women a Failure in Politics?”, there was a contemporary understanding of the 19th Amendment’s lack of impact: Blair’s article provides evidence to support the argument that women’s groups failed to band together to vote in a bloc to successfully pass legislation; thus, the progress of women’s position was limited. That being said, the 19th Amendment opened up the possibility for female senators and members of Congress, marking a shift from the previous period. For example, in the 1921 Nevada elections, Anne Martin ran for senate. Also, suffrage led to an increased desire for women’s political education, leading women to become more visible participants in American political life. Contemporary magazines such as Ladies’ Home Journal and Literary Digest pushed for women’s political education representing the 19th Amendment, consequently causing a more positive attitude toward women’s greater political influence. Therefore, the 19th Amendment did have some success in enabling women to become more politically influential despite their failure to create a women’s voting bloc in the 1920s.
The lack of a women’s voting bloc hampered the emergence of a New Woman in the post-suffrage U.S. Sarvarsy’s view that women failed to reconcile different variations of feminism from liberal to conservative rendered the impact of the 19th Amendment limited. Evidence of Carrie Chapman Catt from contemporary records maintains they did not aim to create a women’s bloc with other feminist groups. Also, the rejection of the National Women’s Party’s proposed Equal Rights Amendment engendered a split in women’s groups such as Florence Kelley, Grace Abbot, Edith Abbot, Sophonisba Breckinridge, Lillian Wald and Alice Hamilton. The divide in women’s decisions to create a welfare state through legislature and state reform, such as criticism for an ERA to fully gain equal rights for women by Harriot Stanton Blatch, Crystal Eastman, Lavinia Dock, Edithh Houghton Hooker, Maud Younger and Mary Winsor, hindered the creation of a New Woman. Hence, the New Woman was a myth, since women’s divides after the 19th Amendment failed to create a fully liberated position of all women in 1920s America.
Not all women’s positions changed in the 1920s U.S. after the 19th Amendment, since immigrant women and racial minorities’ positions remained unchanged by suffrage. By 1920, Black voting rights were still not legalised, causing Black women to feel left behind by the NWP. For example, Walter Whiter, director of the NAACP, criticised women’s groups that fought for suffrage but ignored the enfranchisement of Black women. Black women’s voting rights were repeatedly ignored, including their refusal to raise their lack of enfranchisement at the February 1921 Ovington convention. Also, the 19th Amendment did not help immigrant women overcome the struggles of naturalisation tests imposed by the 1922 Cable Act. Therefore, the 19th Amendment did not create New Women, as many women’s positions remained unchanged after suffrage.
In conclusion, while the 19th Amendment was hugely successful in acting as a starting point toward stirring change for women’s position in the 1920s and served as a symbol of a desire for change of women’s disenfranchisement and inferiority in the U.S, it did not create New Women.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Beckinridge, Sophonisba, and Mrs Harvey W. Wiley. “Could ‘Mothers’ Pensions’ Operate under Equal Rights Amendment?” Congressional Digest (March 1924) in Who Won the Debate over the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1920s?, ed. Kathryn Kish Sklar. (Binghamton: State University of New York at Binghamton, 2000), 202.
Laughlin, Gail. “Why an Equal Rights Amendment?” Equal Rights 11 (April 1924) in Who Won the Debate over the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1920s?, ed. Kathryn Kish Sklar. (Binghamton: State University of New York at Binghamton, 2000), 61.
Paul, Alice, and Mary Van Kleeck. “Is Blanket Amendment Best Method in Equal Rights Campaign?” Congressional Digest (March 1924), in Who Won the Debate over the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1920s?, ed. Kathryn Kish Sklar. (Binghamton: State University of New York at Binghamton, 2000), 204.
Secondary Sources
Alpern, Sarah, and Dale Baum. “Female Ballots: The Impact of the Nineteenth Amendment.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 16, no. 1 (1985): 48.
Butler, Amy E. Two Paths to Equality: Alice Paul and Ethel M. Smith in the ERA Debate, 1921-1929. Albany: State University of New York, 2002.
Cott, Nancy F. “Feminist Politics in the 1920s: The National Women’s Party.” Journal of American History 71, no. 1 (June 1984): 47–63.
Freedman, Estelle B. “The New Woman: Changing Views of Women in the 1920s.” The Journal of American History 61, no. 2 (September 1974): 375.
Greenwald, Maurine Weiner. “Working-Class Feminism and the Family Wage Ideal: The Seattle Debate on Married Women’s Right to Work, 1914-1920.” The Journal of American History 76, no. 1 (June 1989): 135.
Sarvasy, Wendy. “Beyond the Difference versus Equality Policy Debate: Postsuffrage Feminism, Citizenship, and the Quest for a Feminist Welfare State.” Signs 17, no. 2 (January 1992): 332–53.
Ware, Susan. “The Book I Couldn’t Write: Alice Paul and the Challenge of Feminist Biography.” Journal of Women’s History 24, no. 2 (2012): 21–28.
Featured Image Credit: Nannie Helen Burroughs, an African American Educator, Orator, Religious Leader, and Business Women Holding a Woman’s National Baptist Convention Banner. circa 1910 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nannie_Burroughs,_Woman%27s_National_Baptist_Convention.jpg.
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