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Cited by 0Historical Gender and Feminism StudiesGender Politics and RepresentationGender and Feminist Studies

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‘My how I have walked and worked to get those names’: Petitioning and the Women's Suffrage Movement in the United States, 1908–1920.

Open access
Verhoeven, Timothy·2024·Women's History Review
DOI 10.1080/09612025.2023.2270361
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Abstract

This article analyses the evolution of mass petitioning within the woman suffrage movement in the United States, with a focus on the decade leading up to the ratification of the 19th Amendment (1920). Its central argument is that suffrage activists skilfully and imaginatively refashioned what was a venerable form of mobilization. In their hands, the petition served a range of purposes beyond enacting legislative change. It was a fulcrum for public parades and pilgrimages that grabbed public and press attention. In the form of the initiative petition, it was a tool to put the question of woman suffrage directly before voters. When aimed at individual lawmakers, and even in the face of a deadly pandemic, petition campaigns served to swing crucial votes. Focussing on the petition helps us to rethink certain aspects of the suffrage movement. It draws our attention to the role of rank-and-file activists on the ground. Furthermore, while reinforcing the importance of racial division, it challenges the notion of a movement split into radical and conservative wings. Whatever their differences, both sides understood the value of petitioning in an era of mass democracy.

Overview

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TL;DR

This article analyzes how US woman suffrage activists between 1908 and 1920 refashioned mass petitioning into a versatile tool for publicity, direct democracy, and legislative pressure. It argues that petitioning reveals grassroots activism and cross-faction cooperation between NAWSA and the NWP, while also reinforcing the movement’s racial exclusions.

Key findings

  • Carrie Chapman Catt’s 1908 “Big Petition” aimed for a million signatures but gathered just over 400,000; it culminated in an 18 April 1910 procession of seventy-five automobiles to Congress. In 1917, New York suffragists amassed over a million signatures for a state referendum petition, staged the half-mile “Procession of the Petitions,” and the referendum passed by more than 100,000 votes.
  • Alice Paul and the NWP used petition pilgrimages: about 500 pilgrims met at Hyattsville, Maryland, on 30 July 1913 and set out in eighty cars; in 1915 Sara Bard Field’s cross-country drive delivered over half a million signatures and won a presidential interview; in 1916 Leda Richberg-Hornsby attempted to bombard the presidential yacht with suffrage petitions by plane.
  • Initiative petitions put suffrage directly before voters: from 1898 to 1918 the initiative was added to constitutions of 20 states, with roughly 350 ballot initiatives; suffrage appeared on ballots in Oregon (1906, 1908, 1910, 1912), Oklahoma (1910), Arizona (1912), Missouri, Nebraska, and Ohio (1914). Voters approved suffrage amendments in Arizona and Oregon in 1912 but rejected them in Oklahoma (1910), Ohio, Missouri, and Nebraska (1914); Nebraska courts struck out 12,404 names.
  • Race shaped petitioning: Black women petitioned through the NACW and the Women’s Convention of the National Baptist Convention, and in 1913 Ida B. Wells-Barnett joined William Monroe Trotter to present Wilson a protest signed by 20,000. Mainstream leaders pursued a “Southern strategy,” and Alice Paul sought to exclude Black women from the 1913 parade and the petition pilgrimage’s banquet and automobile procession; in 1916 the Franklin County Suffrage Association in Columbus, Ohio, tabled a Black women’s petition seeking desegregation support.

Methods

  • Qualitative historical analysis of US suffrage petitioning from 1908 to the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, centered on national, state, and local petition campaigns.
  • Draws on archival correspondence and organizational records, including NAWSA and National Woman’s Party papers, Laura Clay and Carrie Chapman Catt papers, newspapers, suffrage periodicals, and an oral history interview with Sara Bard Field.
  • Traces petition uses across three arenas: mass publicity parades/pilgrimages, Progressive-era initiative petitions, and targeted pressure on state legislators and US Senators during the federal amendment fight.

Limitations

  • The paper states no formal limitations section. It notes that it has not discovered evidence of an ongoing trans-Atlantic dialogue over petition use and calls for a comprehensive trans-Atlantic study of suffrage petitioning.
  • The paper itself observes that, unlike initiative petitions, the tangible impact of the final petition campaigns on individual Senate votes was difficult to assess.
  • Evident from the text: the analysis is qualitative and archive-based, so rank-and-file canvassers and Black women’s campaigns appear mainly through surviving correspondence and organizational records, which may unevenly capture their perspectives and contributions.

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Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1080/09612025.2023.2270361

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Verification

Claims the paper makes

100 Sources not found · 74 No basis given · 70 Own interpretation · 5 Not checked yet · 5 Own result

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  • Probably not a substantial claim. 103
  • It may state two separate claims as one. 72
  • The quote only partly states this claim. 5
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  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The petition was a venerable form of mobilization in the United States woman suffrage movement.

    “suffrage activists skilfully and imaginatively refashioned what was a venerable form of mobilization.”
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Citations

Cites

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Research works printed but not linked: 40

  1. Linda J. Lumsden, Rampant Women: Suffragists and the Right of Assembly (Knoxville: Uni- versity of Tennessee Press, 1997), esp. Chapter
  2. For a brief overview, Susan Zaeske, Signa- tures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, and Women's Political Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 179-84.
  3. Daniel Carpenter, Zachary Popp, Tobias Resch, Benjamin Schneer and Nicole Topich, 'Suffrage Petitioning as Formative Practice: American Women Presage and Prepare for the Vote, 1840-1940', Studies in American Political Development 32, no.1 (2018): 24-48.
  4. Henry J. Miller, 'Introduction: The Transformation of Petitioning in the Long Nineteenth Century (1780-1914)', Social Science History 43, no. 3 (2019): 409-29;
  5. Daniel Carpenter, Democracy by Petition: Popular Politics in Transformation, 1790-1870 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021);
  6. Henry J. Miller, A Nation of Petitioners: Petitions and Peti- tioning in the United Kingdom, 1780-1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023).
  7. Daniel Carpenter, 'Recruitment by Petition: American Antislavery, French Protestantism, English Suppression', Perspectives on Politics 14, no. 3 (2016): 700-23.
  8. Henry J. Miller, 'The British Women's Suffrage Movement and the Practice of Petitioning, 1890-1914', Historical Journal 64, no. 2 (2021): 335.
  9. Patricia Greenwood Harrison, Connecting links: the British and American Woman Suffrage Movements, 1900-1914 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000);
  10. Christine A. Lunardini, From Equal Suffrage to Equal Rights: Alice Paul and the National Woman's Party, 1912- 1928 (New York: New York University Press, 1986);
  11. Katherine H. Adams and Michael Keene, Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008).
  12. Louise Newman, White Women's Rights the Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999);
  13. Allison L. Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age: U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question, 1870-1929 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
  14. Cathleen D. Cahill, Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2020).
  15. Susan Ware, Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019).
  16. Woodrow Wilson, Notes on Constitutional Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1909), 15.
  17. Woman's Journal, January 12, 1878.
  18. Woman's Journal, February 1, 1879.
  19. Woman's Journal, January 27, 1877. 19. Ibid.
  20. Woman's Journal, February 1, 1879.
  21. Harriot Stanton Blatch and Theodore Stanton, eds., Elizabeth Cady Stanton as Revealed in Her Letters, Diary and Reminiscences, vol. 2 (New York: Harper and Bros., 1922), 302.
  22. For opinions of this kind, Woman's Journal, November 17, 1877; January 5, 1884; Woman's Standard, August 1899.
  23. Woman's Journal, December 10, 1892.
  24. Woman's Journal, March 14, 1891; Woman's Tribune, March 14, 1891;
  25. Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper, eds., The History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4 1883-1900 (Indianapo- lis: Hollenbeck Press, 1902), 184.
  26. In an 1899 letter to Hedenberg's daughter, Susan B. Anthony described Clara Bewick Colby's shock at learning of their destruction. 'It revived with her all the struggle and hard work, and large amount of money expended, in gathering up those most important resolutions and signatures.' Anthony to Hedenberg-Wells, May 16, 1899, Susan B. Anthony letters 1881-1939, Chicago History Museum.
  27. Lee Ann Banaszak, Why Movements Succeed or Fail: Opportunity, Culture and the Struggle for Women Suffrage (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 133-36.
  28. Mary Chapman and Barbara Green, 'Suffrage and Spectacle', in 100 Years of Women's Suffrage, ed. Dawn Durante and Nancy A. Hewitt (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2019), 46.
  29. Katherine H. Adams and Michael L. Keene, Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008), xvi;
  30. Margaret Mary Finnegan, Selling Suffrage: Consumer Culture & Votes for Women. Popular Cultures, Everyday Lives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
  31. Laura Clay papers, University of Kentucky, Box 8, Folder 6. On Clay, Paul E. Fuller, Laura Clay and the Woman's Rights Movement (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1975).
  32. On the 1913 parade, Belinda A. Stillion Southard, Militant Citizenship: Rhetorical Strategies of the National Woman's Party, 1913-1920 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2011), chapter 2.
  33. This included sending 35,000 letters of support. The 1914 Wisconsin measure was, however, rejected. Handbook of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and proceedings of the Forty-sixth Annual Convention (New York: The Association, 1914), 182.
  34. NAWSA, Bulletin No. 17, 'Rewards for Petition Work,' June 21, 1918. NAWSA papers, LOC, Miscellany, 1890-1950, Box 83.
  35. NAWSA, Bulletin No. 20, 'How to Get the Most Value from Petitions', July 6, 1918. NAWSA papers, LOC, Miscellany, 1890-1950, Box 83.
  36. NAWSA, Bulletin No. 18, 'Washington Prospects', July 3, 1918. Papers of Madeline McDo- well Breckinridge, LOC, Manuscript Division, Box 703.
  37. NAWSA, Bulletin No. 20, 'How to Get the Most Value from Petitions.' July 6, 1918.
  38. The reward was provided by the Leslie Woman Suffrage Commission. NAWSA, Bulletin No. 17, 'Rewards for Petition Work'. June 21, 1918. NAWSA papers, LOC, Miscellany, 1890-1950, Box 83.
  39. Ann-Marie E. Szymanski, Pathways to Prohibition: Radicals, Moderates, and Social Move- ment Outcomes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 6. 111. Press accounts refer to marchers holding petitions. New York Times, December 11, 1913;
  40. Washington Herald, December 11, 1913. However, official accounts refer only to the pres- entation of joint resolutions calling for a prohibition amendment. Anti-Saloon League Year- book 1914 (Westerville, Ohio: Anti-Saloon League, 1914), 7. 112. Harrison, Connecting Links: the British and American Woman Suffrage Movements. 113. Woman's Journal, May 7, 1910. 114. Special forum, 'Interchange: Women's Suffrage, the Nineteenth Amendment, and the Right to Vote,' Journal of American History 106, no. 3 (2019): 694.

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Metadata

Authors
Verhoeven, T.
Affiliations
Monash University (AU)
Corresponding author
Verhoeven, Timothy
ORCID
Verhoeven, Timothy
Venue
Women's History Review
Publisher
Informa UK Limited
Published
2023-10-18
Volume
33
Issue
5
Pages
669-691
ISSN
  • 0961-2025 (ISSN-L)
  • 1747-583X
DOI
10.1080/09612025.2023.2270361
OpenAlex
W4387743298
Semantic Scholar
6dd78caa6b37f2d3cb75e9f5e2513f13a8f9900a
Cited by
0
References
0
FWCI
0.00
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
Women s History Review (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Historical Gender and Feminism Studies
  • Social Sciences › Gender Studies › Gender Politics and Representation
  • Social Sciences › Gender Studies › Gender and Feminist Studies
Keywords
women's suffrage movement, petitions, initiative petitions, Nineteenth Amendment, political mobilization, mass democracy, United States

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