American Insights: Wilson’s Stand for Suffrage, Part II of III
Even before he took the oath of office, Woodrow Wilson had been confronted with the question of women’s voting rights. His arrival and reception in Washington in March 1913 had been a lackluster affair, as Alice Paul led thousands of women on an unprecedented parade through the streets of the nation’s capital.
“We march today to give evidence to the world of our determination that this simple act of justice be done,” the official program declared.
The women hoped to illustrate that Wilson, save in six states, had been elected by only half the taxed population. “We march in a spirit of protest against the present political organization of society, from which women are excluded.”
By holding the parade the day before the inauguration, the suffragists resolved, “What politicians had not been able to get through their minds, we would give them through their eyes—often a powerful substitute.”
The morning of his inauguration, Wilson was greeted with newspaper headlines and articles less about him and more about what the women had achieved in drawing the nation’s eyes to the cause of equal suffrage.
“Woman’s Beauty, Grace, and Art Bewilder the Capital,” headlined the Washington Post.
“Woman exalted her plea for enfranchisement yesterday in the national capital with a splendor of pageantry whose power of beauty could not be overcome,” the Washington Herald praised, adding, “It was a day of tremendous significance, and the suffragists achieved, beyond the realm of doubt, their purpose in putting the cause of woman suffrage so closely before the federal government that the government’s chief men must try it upon its merits.”
Beneath an overcast sky, Wilson delivered an inaugural address that “sounded a high moral note,” as the Woman’s Journal commented.
“The firm basis of government is justice,” the president declared. “There can be no equality of opportunity, the first essential of justice in the body politic, if men and women and children be not shielded in their lives, their very vitality, from the consequences of giant industrial and social processes which they cannot alter, control, or singly cope with.”
But he did not mention women’s voting rights.
His own suffrage journey to September 1918 was one of deflection and recalcitrance. The year before, in 1917, “silent sentinels” held banners in front of the White House labeling the president “Kaiser Wilson.”
During the summer of 1917, more than 200 women were arrested for demonstrations in front of the People’s House, dozens of whom were jailed. In November that year, Alice Paul was among thirty-three picketers sent to Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia, where women were beaten, choked, slammed, pinched, twisted, dragged, grabbed, and handcuffed to cell bars by guards.
Months earlier, on Flag Day—Thursday, June 14, 1917—Wilson had spoken of the American flag as “the emblem of our unity, our power, our thought and purpose as a nation. It has no other character than that which we give it from generation to generation. The choices are ours.”
By late 1917, it seemed that the national character was tarnished by its inability to overcome its worst instincts of injustice. To the women beaten and force-fed in prison, there was a Great War of contradictions at home, just as there was a Great War of principle, power, and territory raging abroad.
The “Night of Terror” was a great moral turning point in the suffrage struggle—an event that revealed a glaring inconsistency in a democracy that professed freedom abroad yet jailed women at home for demanding that the country live by its founding creed: that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
Wilson was beginning to come around, even before the events of the Night of Terror. A man long lukewarm and cautious, he issued a statement in late October endorsing a referendum in New York affirming equal suffrage.
“The whole world is now witnessing a struggle between two ideals of government,” he told women of the New York suffrage party at the White House on Thursday, October 25, 1917—and women’s suffrage was at its center.
“It is a struggle which goes deeper and touches more than any struggle that has ever taken place before, and no settlement of the questions that lie on the surface can satisfy a situation which requires that the questions underneath and at the foundation should also be settled, and settled right,” he added. “I am free to say that I think the question of woman suffrage is one of these questions which lie at the foundation.”
The war offered a time for soul-searching. “All our principles, all our hearts, all our purposes, are being searched,” Wilson said—“searched not only by our own consciences but searched by the world; and it is time for the people of the States of this country to show the world in what practical sense they have learned the lessons of democracy—that they are fighting for democracy because they believe in it, and that there is no application of democracy which they do not believe in.”
On the pace of progress, he said, “it is wholesome that it should be slow, because then it is solid and sure.”
His support proved worthwhile. On Tuesday, November 6, 1917, New Yorkers approved woman suffrage by a margin of more than 100,000 votes—driven largely by sweeping support from New York City.
It was a decisive turning point in the national struggle, a moment when the balance finally and unmistakably shifted toward progress. With New York’s forty-seven representatives in a House of 435, the elusive two-thirds majority needed for a federal amendment at last came into view, if only partly.
A year later, with his own mixed history in the backdrop, Wilson made his greatest choice on the national suffrage question on that Sunday afternoon in September 1918. At five o’clock that evening, Wilson informed McAdoo that he would address the Senate in person on Monday.
The finish line was in sight, and Wilson would help carry the nation one step closer.