Suffrage at the School House Door: The 1880 New York State School Suffrage Campaign

One hundred years ago, in 1917, New York suffragists successfully convinced voters to enfranchise women through an amendment to the state constitution. The history of this suffrage victory consists of both well-known and relatively obscure events. In the hegemonic historical narrative, the 1848 Seneca Falls convention has become the standard marker for the beginning of the movement for women's rights and women's enfranchisement in New York State and in the United States. Susan B. Anthony was not present at this first women's rights convention, but her 1872 arrest for illegal voting in Rochester plays another significant part in the popular telling of New York suffrage history. These events' popularity stems, in part, from New York suffrage leaders' successful presentation of their own history. The Seneca Falls convention and the arrest are two important components of the suffrage movement narrative that Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Matilda Joslyn Gage tell in their three volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage.

Historians challenge the History of Woman Suffrage timeline that prioritizes the Seneca Falls convention, and suffragists' conflation of the woman suffrage movement as the women's rights movement. In Untidy Origins, for example, Lori Ginzberg uses the 1846 suffrage petition from six Jefferson County women to show that public conversations about women's enfranchisement took place in northern New York two years before the Seneca Falls convention.¹ Lisa Tetrault and Nancy Hewitt both emphasize the diverse origins, goals, and strategies of nineteenth-century women's rights activists. Tetrault, in the Myth of Seneca Falls, argues that the emphasis on the 1848 convention as the beginning of, and the franchise as the linchpin for, the women's rights movement stemmed in part from Anthony's attempt to direct and control the "chaotic" suffrage movement that after the Civil War produced "massive outpourings of diverse support."² In "From Seneca Falls to Suffrage?" Nancy Hewitt covers an impressive range of activists who defined rights in a variety of ways and challenged the "master" narrative of the women's rights movement. She argues that the convention and winning of the national suffrage amendment were an important, but only a very small part, of a much larger multifaceted history.³

School suffrage laws and campaigns also constitute part of a multifaceted history that lacks a significant place within the History of Woman Suffrage and in the writing of scholars since. Constitutions in five and legislatures in twenty states granted school suffrage to women by 1890. Many other state legislatures considered extending school suffrage to women.⁴ Thus, during the nineteenth century, more women could vote for school officers and school-related matters than for any other issue. The relationship between school suffrage laws and state and national suffrage leaders helps explain the obscure place of the educational franchise in the hegemonic narrative of the suffrage movement. In New York, suffragists' responses to school suffrage in 1880 shows that the law significantly influenced state and local suffrage activism, but did not change National Woman Suffrage Association strategies.

The push for the educational franchise absolutely did not come from the top down. Most national suffrage leaders, and many state leaders, did not advocate school suffrage campaigns. Neither the New York-based National Woman Suffrage Association, nor the New England-based American Woman Suffrage Association, advocated for school suffrage. The New York State Woman Suffrage Association also had not made school suffrage a primary goal. Leaders of the National Woman Suffrage Association, especially Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, focused on winning full enfranchisement for women at the national level. In the 1870s, the National sought this enfranchisement through the courts and through a sixteenth amendment campaign. Leaders of the rival American Woman Suffrage Association, including Lucy Stone and her husband Henry Blackwell, sought partial suffrage in a state-by-state strategy. In their home state of Massachusetts, Stone and Blackwell, and other state association leaders, sought to avoid a state amendment campaign by promoting municipal suffrage, but they did not seek school suffrage.⁵ There were...