Women and voting

Yesterday was the 105th anniversary of the adoption of the 19th amendment, as a commenter reminded me in a post about something else. One of the charms of the internet age is that it constantly reminds the 3.23% of the population that isn’t scrolling TikTok and the Gram at any particular moment that there are vast subjects of great importance that one doesn’t know anything about. In the case of women’s suffrage in the US and elsewhere, that one is me, as it’s a subject that I only have the Five Minute University understanding of, despite its great importance as a historical matter, and, increasingly, as a contemporary issue, given the furious comeback of the most reactionary forms of patriarchy, aka fascism.

Here’s a map of the US on the eve of the adoption of the 19th amendment:

The dark blue states were places where women were fully enfranchised. The red are places where they couldn’t vote at all. The other colors represent a bricolage of laws, allowing women in some places to vote in presidential elections but not otherwise, or in primaries, or on municipal bond issues and the like.

The geographic pattern here is of course very striking, with the west being vastly more progressive on this issue than the rest of the nation. Women actually got the right to vote in Wyoming in 1869, and in Utah and Colorado not long after. Most of the other western states came around in the decade immediately prior to the passage of the 19th amendment, which illustrates how the suffrage movement followed both a state by state and a national strategy.

There’s a complex history here about the inter-relation of race and gender in regard to voting rights. I just learned that an earlier draft of the 15th amendment included constitutional protection for women voting, but that was removed prior to the final version being submitted to the states for adoption. (The radical Republicans really were radical, given the times). Elizabeth Cady Stanton actually opposed the amendment, on the basis of the belief that giving black men the right to vote before white women would just emphasize the subordination of women all the more — a quite reasonable belief, needless to say, although Stanton was apparently a virulent racist even by the abysmal standards of her time.

In any event there’s an extremely complicated and interesting history here, which I’m sure many of you know far more about than I do.