Six Reasons for Suffrage: A Suffrage Flier, and What Its Second Reason Reveals

By 1916, the fight for women's votes had split over strategy for decades. A National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) flier from those years made its case for a federal amendment in six numbered reasons — persuasive, bold-printed, and in one place revealing whom its authors thought less deserving of the vote.

Two roads to the vote

After the Fifteenth Amendment left women out in 1870, and the Supreme Court ruled in 1874 that the Fourteenth Amendment did not guarantee them the vote, Susan B. Anthony concluded that only a new constitutional amendment would do. She and Elizabeth Cady Stanton of the National Woman Suffrage Association got one introduced in Congress in 1878; it came to a vote only once, in 1887, and failed. Lucy Stone and the American Woman Suffrage Association instead sought the vote state by state. In 1890 the two groups merged as NAWSA, which backed a federal amendment but concentrated on the states — with a few victories and more defeats. In 1916 it adopted Carrie Chapman Catt's "Winning Plan": win full suffrage in key states such as New York while lobbying for the federal amendment.

The six reasons

The flier, printed by NAWSA's publishing company, argued:

1. Keeping up with other countries — elsewhere, votes for men and women had nearly always come by act of parliament, not by referendum.
2. Equal rights — American men had never had to win their vote from an electorate that included "unnaturalized foreigners, Negroes, Indians, and illiterates," and women should not be denied the vote by a government that "freely gives the vote to foreigners."
3. Unjust state constitutions — many were so hard to amend that women there could be enfranchised only by federal action.
4. Inadequate election laws — safeguards for votes on constitutional amendments were weak, and twenty-four states had no laws at all for redress of fraudulent elections.
5. Equal status — men's vote was protected by the federal Constitution; a woman enfranchised by her state lost her vote by moving to a state without woman suffrage.
6. National significance — if women in some states helped elect the president while others could not vote, the government was "unrepublican, un-democratic, and unfair."

The lesson in Reason 2

The second reason calls itself "equal rights" but is not a call for equal rights for everyone. It argues for women's votes by ranking other groups beneath them. The National Park Service's middle-school activity built on this flier (grades 6–8, created with the Hard History Project) asks students to notice which words the suffragists bolded or repeated, to restate one reason in plain words, to decide which argument is most effective — and, reading Reason 2 again, to ask which groups the authors implied were less deserving.

Its guiding question: What actions should you take when you recognize the need for change? Students finish by making a flier of their own for a cause they care about.

Sources

Based on "Teaching Suffrage: Six Reasons for Suffrage" from the National Park Service (Belmont-Paul Women's Equality National Monument), created with the Hard History Project; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The flier, "Woman Suffrage by Federal Amendment. Why? Six Reasons," was published by the National American Woman Suffrage Association.