Women's Suffrage in The United States - Civil War

Civil War

During the Civil War, and immediately thereafter, little was heard of the movement, but a strong drive for woman suffrage was mounted in Kansas in 1866–1867. After this effort failed, strategic differences among suffragists came to a head. Anthony and Stanton began publishing The Revolution in January 1868, writing harsh criticisms of the Republican party which was then pushing for African-American male suffrage. In November 1868, in Boston at the largest women's rights convention held to that date in the U.S., Stone, her husband Henry Browne Blackwell, Isabella Beecher Hooker, Julia Ward Howe and Thomas Wentworth Higginson formed a new organization, the New England Woman Suffrage Association (NEWSA); the first major political society established for the sole purpose of gaining suffrage for women. It was a pro-Republican group, with men in important leadership positions, designed to attract an alliance with that political party. However, the Republican connection pushed the group in the direction of advocating voting rights for the African-American male. At the first NEWSA convention, Douglass declared that "the cause of the negro was more pressing than that of woman's." In May 1869, the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) was formed by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton; an organization made up primarily of women. Their object was to secure an amendment to the Constitution in favor of women's suffrage, and they opposed passage of the Fifteenth Amendment ("The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude") unless it was changed to guarantee to women the right to vote. They continued work on The Revolution which included radical feminist challenges to traditional female roles.

Later the same year, Stone reorganized NEWSA into the much larger and more moderate American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) which also included both men and women in its membership. AWSA supported the proposed Fifteenth Amendment as written, and resolved to gain the incremental victory of black men's voting rights before moving forward to achieve women's voting rights. After the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, AWSA continued working at the state level to secure women's voting rights. NWSA proposed a Sixteenth Amendment, one which would give women the right to vote. Their efforts were unsuccessful; many could not forgive Anthony and Stanton for opposing the Fifteenth.

In 1887 after 20 years of working in parallel toward the same goals but with bitter resentment between the various leaders, Stone called for a merger of the splintered women's rights organizations, and plans were drawn up for approval. In 1890, the two groups united to form one national organization known as the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).

Drinking men typically opposed women's suffrage for fear that women would use their vote to enact prohibition of alcoholic beverages. Indeed the WCTU was a main force for suffrage as well as prohibition At the time, "temperance" was frequently seen as a women's issue, and the liquor-saloon financed the opposition.