The Divisions
The biggest distinction between NAWSA and the NWP developed
during the war, as the two organizations developed very different approaches to
securing enfranchisement for women. Though the strategies of the two suffrage
organizations often diverged, both organizations promoted a very feminine
vision of woman voters. On one hand, at the 1915 NAWSA convention a series of
women spoke on the topic “How to advance women suffrage by making friends
instead of enemies.”[1] NAWSA had
dedicated its efforts to being a friend to the United States government in the
years of World War I. The suffragists wanted to appeal to voters, senators, and
President Wilson as citizens of the United States. To argue that women deserved
equal participation at citizens, NAWSA first felt compelled to prove that women
would equally bear the burden of citizenship. On the other, suffragists camped
out on the President’s lawn.
Throughout World War I,
NAWSA developed a persona that framed women as “‘loyal citizen,’ thereby
granting them an
enfranchisement.”[2]
Particularly in the publication Woman
Citizen, woman suffragists were depicted as confident, beautiful, and
strong. The women are capable of being citizens, contributing to the war effort
in whatever way they can, but still adept mothers and wives as well.
NAWSA was able to
reconstruct the way that citizenship was defined because warfare was markedly
different than it had been before. The type of war waged in Europe was a total
war that drained the male population out of factories and farms and into
battlefields. As a result, women could serve their nation in a much more direct
way than they had in any war prior. Women in World War I had opportunities to
work in production – fueling munitions and farms, administration – taking over
for the missing male workforce, and directly in the war – the Red Cross,
ambulance corps, and Navy all offered positions to women, which allowed women
to take a prominent position in war activities.[3] NAWSA
capitalized on these new opportunities by encouraging members to aid in the
war. In cartoons published by NAWSA, they present women as strong, loyal, but
still very feminine. They wanted to perpetuate a belief that women could and
would do what was necessary for the war effort, but that they would be
essentially womanly. President Wilson sympathized with the suffragists of NAWSA
who devoted themselves to the war, even eventually speaking to Congress on
their behalf.
radical and militant as they waited for results. At the same time that NAWSA
encouraged women to aid in the war effort, the NWP famously began picketing the
White House. They held signs asking Wilson, “How long must women wait?” and
addressed the president as “Kaiser Wilson.”[4] The
controversial actions of the NWP landed a number of its members imprisoned at
the Occoquan Workhouse for sedition. The NWP capitalized on media attention by
going on hunger strikes. Even as the NWP began to move away from moderate
methods and into more extreme media ploys, the leaders of the organization were
careful to frame the suffragists as womanly. Women who were forced into the
workhouse wrote about their experiences, capitalizing on the fragility of women.
These women emphasized their mistreatment and presented themselves as martyrs.
The best way to understand the media campaign that
suffragists developed under the leadership of women like Carrie Chapman Catt
and Alice Paul is to look at the actual representations that NAWSA and the NWP
produced. Clearly these two organizations dramatically shifted the way that
they appeared to the general public in the 1910s. The revitalization of the
movement depended on a keen ability to present woman’s suffrage as
nonthreatening to the existing gender balance. Woman’s suffrage could not be an
issue of woman’s equality because it was a cause fundamentally rooted in the
distinct value of femininity. Twentieth century suffragists carefully tried to
undo the revolutionary rhetoric of Anthony and Stanton and replace it with the
assurance that men and women were not equal, but that women were morally
superior. Women were presented as heroic, sympathetic, beautiful, and brave in
the last years of the woman suffrage movement.
[1]
Ida Husted Harper, History of Woman
Suffrage V (New York: National Woman Suffrage Publishing Co., 1922), 450.
[2]
Michele Ramsey, “Inventing Citizens During World War I: Suffrage Cartoons in
the Woman Citizen,” Journal of Western Communication 64, no.
2 (2000), 115.
[3] Jean Ebbert and Marie-Beth Hall, The
First, The Few, The Forgotten: Navy and Marine Corps Women in World War I (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press,
2002).
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