Wilson’s Stand for Suffrage, Part III of III
Monday, September 30, 1918, dawned with news from the war front. “American guns pound foe’s last defenses,” headlined The New York Times. Troops from New York, Tennessee, and the Carolinas had attacked the Hindenburg Line “with great dash,” pressing forward through its defenses.
In Washington, a complicated Woodrow Wilson prepared to address the United States Senate, urging them—after years of refusal—to finally pass the Susan B. Anthony amendment.
“His appearance was bitterly resented by all those opposed to the amendment,” Treasury Secretary William G. McAdoo recalled. But “an air of hostility, a frigid atmosphere, always heightened President Wilson’s powers. It did on this occasion.”
For fifteen minutes Wilson pressed his case for extending the vote to American women. As ever, the Great War colored his thinking.
“I regard the concurrence of the Senate in the constitutional amendment proposing the extension of the suffrage to women as vitally essential to the successful prosecution of the war of humanity,” Wilson declared. “It is my duty to win the war and to ask you to remove every obstacle that stands in the way.”
The amendment, he argued, was “clearly necessary” to the war effort and to “the successful realization of the objects for which the war is being fought.”
This was “a people’s war,” he said—one whose lifeblood was the thinking and morale of the people themselves. And if America wished to lead the world to democracy, it must demonstrate that democracy at home.
“Our professions will not suffice,” Wilson warned. “Verification must be forthcoming when verification is asked for.”
The world’s rising democracies, he believed, were looking to America for proof that it meant what it proclaimed. To them, “democracy means that women shall play their part in affairs alongside men and upon an equal footing.”
If America rejected measures demanded by a new age—measures other nations, including monarchical Britain, had already embraced—then, Wilson cautioned, “they will not follow us.”
He insisted the nation needed the insight of its women. “We shall need their moral sense to preserve what is right… and to discover what ought to be purified and reformed. Without their counselings we shall be only half wise.”
The speech, McAdoo thought, “carried a fighting edge” and made “a profound impression on the country.” Carrie Chapman Catt praised Wilson for taking “a stand for human liberty which no man can gainsay,” while Anna Howard Shaw said that recognition of women’s political rights would “hearten and encourage them in patriotic service.”
Although Wilson was cheered steadily as he entered the Senate chamber, the Washington Post reported that some of the “senators opposing the resolution did not join in the final demonstration of applause.”
“I love the president,” Mississippi’s John Sharp Williams said the following day, October 1, just before the vote, “but I can not for the life of me see what Ludendorff and Hindenburg and the Bulgarians and the Turks in Macedonia and Palestine can have to do with the right of negro women to vote.”
Williams had long sought a different suffrage amendment—one limited to “white citizens.” He now resubmitted it, seeking to keep Black Americans, as he said, “helpless and powerless to threaten white domination and white supremacy.”
“Adopt my amendment and enfranchise the white women,” he urged. “Then you will save the South from any sort of domination except the white man’s and woman’s domination now and hereafter.”
This was the very dilemma Wilson himself wrestled with. A believer in white egalitarianism, he had told women in 1916 that “the negro question… keeps my party from doing as you wish.” His party’s southern wing feared the federal amendment because it opened the door to Black women voting.
The Senate tabled Williams’s whites-only amendment once more. And Wilson’s plea, as expected, was not enough. By a vote of 53–31—just two short of the required two-thirds—the suffrage amendment failed. Twelve senators abstained. Republicans overwhelmingly supported it; Democrats were bitterly divided, with opposition concentrated almost entirely among Southern and border-state senators, many of whom Wilson privately lobbied to vote yes.
“This defeat is only temporary,” Alice Paul told reporters. “The votes of the Senate, we are convinced, will be reversed.”
She was right. The defeat helped spark a political earthquake in the 1918 midterms. Anti-suffrage Democrats were routed, and Republicans—more unified in their support—took control of Congress.
“Woman suffrage is coming because of its inherent justice,” Washington Senator Wesley Jones had predicted on September 30. “Even if we defeat it now, it will be adopted before long.”
And so it was. On Wednesday, June 4, 1919, the Senate at last passed the Susan B. Anthony amendment. A little more than a year later, on Wednesday, August 18, 1920, it was ratified by the states.
Wilson called it “one of the greatest honors of my life that this great event… should have occurred during my administration,” telling Catt that “nothing has given me more pleasure” than aiding its cause.
But Wilson’s support remained a complicated affair. After the 1918 defeat, he supported altering the amendment’s language in a way that, as one newspaper put it, would “give the vote to the white women of the South and deny it to the colored women.” The proposal was backed by the Democratic National Committee and even the National American Woman Suffrage Association—proof that steps forward can be just as incomplete as no steps at all.
Although an explicit white-only amendment was avoided, the Nineteenth Amendment was, in practical effect, a white woman’s triumph; Jim Crowism would bar most Black women in the South from the franchise well into the 1960s.
Wilson, for all his lofty rhetoric, remained tied to the heritage of segregation. Yet in September 1918 he helped bring the nation closer to realizing its highest ideals. The fuller realization of those ideals would be left, as ever, to the American people.