Feminism as Life's Work: Four Modern American Women through Two World Wars

Chapter 2. Setting the Stage

41 Q Mary Beard, Inez Irwin, and Doris Stevens joined the American woman suffrage movement during its final two decades, and the experience was one of the richest of their lives. The movement exposed them to strong, inspiring women and gave them the opportunity to become activists and to develop their voices as public speakers, organizers, and authors. It moved Beard to canvass door to door, to involve working-class women, and to join a myriad of organizations, including the fledgling Congressional Union/National Woman’s Party. It inspired the dramatic Irwin to propose a suicide pact between women as a form of suffrage activism and civil disobedience and to brainstorm the idea of picketing the president of the United States. It sent Stevens to prison for picketing the White House and provided fodder for her first book, Jailed for Freedom. The movement also provided a forum for the application and refinement of their feminist ideas. Their suffrage engagement between 1900 and 1920 not only sheds light on the lives and philosophies of Beard, Irwin, and Stevens, but also provides insight into the movement during its final climactic, combative years, a movement that set the stage for the objectives and challenges of post-suffrage feminism. The American woman suffrage movement was born in the abolitionist, reform spirit of the 1830s, matured amid the surging women’s rights movements of the late nineteenth century, and was realized in 1920, marking a watershed in US women’s history.1 For seventy-two years US suffragists fought against an opposition that ridiculed them, trivialized their intent, and used legal and constitutional maneuvers to block them. By 1900, the movement had already charted a contentious history. Black males were made citizens after Reconstruction and enfranchised by the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, which split the woman suffrage movement into two factions. Boston’s Lucy Stone led the American Woman Suffrage Association, agreeing that in “the Negro’s hour” it was right that Black men be given the vote before women. The rival National c h a p t e r 2 Setting the Stage 42 Feminism as Life’s Work Woman Suffrage Association, led by New York–based Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, rejected the Fifteenth Amendment for its exclusion of women. In 1890, these two predominately white, middle-class organizations merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), and the movement gained momentum. Wyoming joined the union as a suffrage state in 1890, and three more extended the vote to women during that decade: Colorado in 1893, followed by Idaho and Utah in 1896. But then no new suffrage states were added until November 1910, when Washington raised the number to five. Throughout these years, African American, working-class, and immigrant women participated in increasing numbers. They joined a diverse assortment of women politicized by their civic engagement in women’s clubs, trade unions, churches, and settlement houses.2 By the 1910s, according to Christine Stansell, “women’s suffrage commanded a far-flung mass movement, one of the most socially heterogeneous in American history.”3 In 1913 the association’s tiny Congressional Committee broke away from the NAWSA and evolved into the radical, independent National Woman’s Party, an organization that played a critical role in the final years of the movement as well as in the lives of Irwin, Beard, and Stevens.4 The party became a controversial site of feminist experimentation in the post-suffrage years. The transformation that occurred within the ranks of the movement, including changes in leadership, was startling. Alice Paul, described by at least one historian as “perhaps the single truly charismatic figure in the twentieth-century suffrage movement,” took the reins of NAWSA’s Congressional Committee in 1913, and by 1916 founded the NWP. Launched with her Irish coworker Lucy Burns, the NWP became renowned for militant action and intransigent feminism, and during the 1910s attracted both elite and working-class women to its ranks. By the end of 1915, the movement’s focus shifted from the state to the national level, marking a distinct turning point.5 Partly a byproduct of the times, which witnessed the peaking of progressive reform and the outbreak of a world war, it was also a logical outcome of extending the model of British militancy to the United States. Irwin, Beard, and Stevens were members of the Congressional Union/NWP in the 1910s, and Alice Paul loomed large in each of their lives. Highly educated and never...