Constitutional Orphan

This book explores the role of former suffragists in the constitutional development of the Nineteenth Amendment, during the decade following its ratification in 1920. It examines the pivot to new missions, immediately after ratification, by two national suffrage organizations, the National Woman’s Party (NWP) and the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). The NWP turned from suffrage to a federal equal rights amendment. NAWSA became the National League of Women Voters (NLWV), and turned to voter education and social welfare legislation. The book connects that pivot by both groups, to the emergence of a “thin” conception of the Nineteenth Amendment, as a matter of constitutional interpretation. It surfaces the history around the congressional failure to enact enforcement legislation, pursuant to the Nineteenth Amendment, and connects that with the NWP’s perceived need for southern congressional votes for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). It also explores the choice to turn away from African American women suffragists asking for help to combat voter suppression efforts, after the November 1920 presidential election. And it evaluates the deep divisions among NWP members, some of whom were social feminists who opposed the ERA; and the NLWV, which supported the social feminists in that opposition. The book also analyzes how state courts, left without federal enforcement legislation to constrain or guide them, used strict construction to cabin the emergence of a more robust interpretation of the Nineteenth Amendment. It concludes with an examination of new legal scholarship, which suggests broader ways in which the Nineteenth Amendment could be used today to expand gender equality.

Ratification

Chapter 1 describes two national suffrage organizations’ efforts, in the final years prior to ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. It highlights the split between members of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), over whether a state-by-state approach to suffrage, or a federal suffrage amendment, was the best strategy to achieve the vote for women. That split caused Alice Paul to form a separate organization, the National Woman’s Party (NWP). The chapter foreshadows how that deep division had an impact on the constitutional development of the federal suffrage amendment, after its eventual ratification in 1920.

Enforcement Legislation

Chapter 3 raises the issue of how race intersected with the constitutional development of the Nineteenth Amendment. It argues that the immediate pivot of the National Woman’s Party (NWP), to a federal equal rights amendment, played a significant role in the failure of enforcement legislation to be enacted by Congress. The chapter explores the fear of a “Second Reconstruction,” by white southern congressmen, as an element in that story. And it suggests that the NWP’s failure to support African American women suffragists, and white NWP members who were co-founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was both a moral and a strategic failing. That choice, animated by concerns around white southern political support for the proposed equal rights amendment, contributed to the failure of enforcement legislation. The chapter links the lack of such legislation to the absence of a federal judicial forum, in which to more fully develop the meaning and scope of the Nineteenth Amendment.

Validity

Chapter 2 surfaces the history around the decision, by both the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and the National Woman’s Party (NWP), to immediately pivot to other goals after ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. While each monitored the litigation around the validity of the Nineteenth Amendment, NAWSA and the NWP both had conventions that resulted in adoption of a new mission. The chapter looks closely at the debates among each group’s members as to what its new mission should be. It concludes that the immediate pivot of each group played a role in the Nineteenth Amendment’s less-than-robust constitutional meaning.

“To Ask Freedom for Women”: The Night of Terror and Public Memory

On the night of November 14, 1917, 31 suffragists and members of the National Woman’s Party (“NWP”) were taken to Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia and tortured and beaten. This so-called “Night of Terror” captured national headlines at the time and has been memorialized through digital sites today. This article examines versions of the Night of Terror from the NWP’s official newspaper, The Suffragist, national newspapers of the day gathered from the Chronicling America database, and modern digital memorials of the event to understand the ways that the mediated telling of events create the fractured popular memories that are retold as the authoritative version of events. In the case of the Night of Terror, the NWP’s media strategies appealed strongly to pathos and captured public imagination then and now, making these retellings the narrative embedded in history as the authoritative version.

Introduction

Crystal Eastman drafted America’s first serious workers’ compensation law. She helped found the National Woman’s Party and is credited as coauthor of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). She helped found the Woman’s Peace Party—today, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF)—and the American Union against Militarism. She copublished the Liberator magazine. And she engineered the founding the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Yet today, her legacy is ambiguous. She is commemorated, paradoxically, as one of the most neglected feminist leaders in American history. Why? Eastman was an intersectional thinker and activist, who bridged social movements, linking shared experiences of inequality under one emancipatory rubric. Yet politics and interpersonal alliances kept asking her to choose: one issue, one organization, one primary identification. Expansive, straddling, disquieting to dominant perspectives and institutional rank, Eastman fell through the main planks of historical memory.

Passages: Feminism, Journalism, and the Transatlantic Twenties

After the vote was won, Crystal Eastman hoped to transform successful but single-issue suffragism into a class- and race-conscious, transnationally minded feminism. She ran afoul of Alice Paul, unquestioned leader of the National Woman’s Party, who wanted another targeted single-issue campaign. By 1923, Eastman, Paul, and the organization agreed on the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) as their new “great demand.” In its all-encompassing simplicity, the ERA solved the problem of how a single-issue campaign could seek redress for the huge and complicated problem of gender inequality. Unfortunately, the idea splintered coalitions in the wider women’s movement, alienating the party from a whole network of once-compatible Progressive groups. Eastman, now living in her husband’s native London with their children, worked as a journalist, covering this debate. By 1926, little progress had been made, and she welcomed a fresh tack. She began working with Paul to campaign for equal rights provisions in international treaties.