At the turn of the twentieth century, three women from disparate parts of the United States were each engaged in their own battles over woman suffrage. In Wyoming, educator Estelle Reel had worked her way up the career ladder to become the first woman confirmed by the Senate as national superintendent of Indian schools in 1898. Hailing from a territory where women could legally vote since 1869, she complained to a friend that it seemed like “every crank in the country writes to get my opinion on Woman Suffrage.”Footnote 1 Despite the novelty of her appointment, Reel seemed disappointed that there was more public interest in her political career as an unmarried woman than there was in her work of bringing “the young Indian … into contact with our civilization.”Footnote 2 In Georgia, Rebecca Latimer Felton, a Congressman’s wife with considerable political wherewithal, was still coming to terms with the loss of her status as a plantation mistress. Channeling her frustration into political activism on behalf of woman suffrage and white supremacy, she argued that white women had demonstrated “true charity and self-sacrificing devotion … based upon enlightened civilization and the blessings of Christianity” in their social work, and therefore deserved the franchise.Footnote 3 In her view, “the elevation of women” was not only key to progressing the “vitality and strength [of] mankind,” but also fundamental to ensuring white political rule in the South for generations to come.Footnote 4 In New Jersey, meanwhile, Bishop Alma White had established her own denomination – the Pillar of Fire – as an offshoot of the Methodist Church, and used her religious platform to argue that women should be “at the front of battle with our votes.”Footnote 5 If America gave women a chance to cast their ballots, she argued, “a mighty stroke will have been made on behalf of Christian civilization.”Footnote 6
Even though these three women hailed from different corners of the United States and were engaged in divergent political projects, ranging from reform to politics to religion, they each embraced a remarkably similar vision. Estelle Reel, Rebecca Latimer Felton and Alma White all relied on the notion of “civilization” – a multifaceted concept in turn-of-the-century America – to advocate for women’s right to vote at the state and national level. In their advocacy, they put forth the notion that civilization and woman suffrage were mutually dependent: while American civilization relied on woman suffrage, they argued, the agitation for woman suffrage relied on civilizational arguments.
Where did this focus on civilization come from? At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States was engaged in a variety of imperial projects, including the Spanish–American War and the annexation of Hawai’i, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Amidst this expansionist drive, the concept of civilization was revitalized and permeated a wide range of political and cultural discourses. Originally coined during the Enlightenment to draw a fundamental distinction between white Europeans and the Indigenous people they encountered through expansion and colonization – the so-called opposition between “civilization” and “savagery” – the term carried, from the outset, assumptions about gender, economics, and religion, and evolved over time to suit the imperial moment.Footnote 7 By the turn of the twentieth century, “civilization” had come to signify not only white supremacy, but also particular ideas of gender (military masculinity, patriarchy, and monogamy), economics (private property and capitalism), science (technological progress, evolution, and social Darwinism), and religion (Protestant moral order).Footnote 8 Civilizational discourse became a mainstay of American society during this era, shaping how elites understood themselves and others within both the domestic and the world order. Government agents such as Reel sought to assimilate Indigenous peoples into American civilization through the promotion of individualism, “self-support,” private property, Protestantism, and the monogamous nuclear family.Footnote 9 Social scientists and social Darwinists employed similar rhetoric to justify hierarchies of race, gender, and sexuality, framing inequality as natural and inevitable.Footnote 10 Imperialists invoked the language of civilization to defend US colonization of the Philippines and other territories – ventures that brought millions of colonial subjects under American rule and demanded their simultaneous uplift and control.Footnote 11 Events such as the World’s Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893 showcased this civilizational vision through displays of scientific progress alongside exhibits portraying nonwhite cultures as “primitive.”Footnote 12 Meanwhile, many upper-middle-class white women, including suffragists such as Reel, Felton, and White, saw in this rhetoric an opportunity to reinforce their own social standing and to expand women’s power.Footnote 13
In the past decades, scholars have delved into the question of how this discursive environment influenced the movement for woman suffrage at the turn of the century. In her study on the connection between ideas of civilization, gender and race, Gail Bederman first explored how white feminists used the notion of civilization by studying writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman. According to Bederman, Gilman’s feminism was “inextricably rooted in the white supremacism of ‘civilization,’” as Gilman argued for white women’s rights on the basis of their racialized status as civilized women.Footnote 14 Louise Michele Newman and Allison Sneider have expanded upon this point in their own work on the origins of American feminism. Looking at the feminist movement through the lens of American empire, each has argued that many white feminists maintained that they were more civilized than – and therefore superior to – “degraded” nonwhite and foreign peoples. Ironically, it was white women’s claim to racial superiority, manifested in their imperialist “civilizing work” (e.g., their attempts to civilize nonwhite populations), that underlay their claim to equality in the early twentieth century.Footnote 15
Building on this scholarship, which has shown that suffragists invoked the language of civilization to connect ideas of race, gender, and sexuality to the franchise, this article shifts attention to how they mobilized civilizational discourse to integrate diverse concerns into a coherent case for suffrage. In doing so, it revisits earlier work on the movement’s intellectual history, such as Aileen Kraditor’s The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, by emphasizing the centrality of civilizational ideas while highlighting how these operated in practice. It argues that “civilization” functioned not merely as a descriptor of status, but as a political tool whose power lay in its protean nature. Because it encompassed a wide range of concerns, suffragists were able to use civilizational discourse to strategically connect arguments about racial hierarchy, moral authority, and gender order to their advocacy for the franchise, all within a single and flexible vision of social progress. By analyzing the civilizational politics of a number of white suffragists, this article also broadens scholarly interpretations of “civilization,” a concept that has often been primarily understood as a tool of white supremacy. After all, the notion that the world was shaped by a racial hierarchy in which white people were considered superior to Black and Indigenous people within the US and abroad was a defining feature of civilization. As Steven Hahn has argued, however, white supremacy can sometimes function as an explanation in itself, thereby obfuscating historical specificity as well as change over time.Footnote 16 Reel, Felton, White, and many other white suffragists of their time embraced white supremacy as a critical part of their suffrage activism and general worldview, but they did so by drawing upon the broader discourse of civilization to appeal to an expansive set of concerns, including race, morality, gender, religion, and capitalism. These women seemingly conceptualized civilization as a matryoshka nesting doll: it encapsulated white supremacy, which in turn encapsulated a conservative gender–sexual order. In their view, civilization consisted of white supremacy, but also required more than white supremacy alone. To use it as the only lens through which to study the politics of suffragists, therefore, would be to oversimplify their ideology as well as their place in history at a time of significant social change.Footnote 17
Since civilization encapsulated many different ideas – from white supremacy to social order and gender differentiation – white suffragists often used it to bring together multiple arguments to obtain the vote. Operating within this broad discursive environment, they built their advocacy around three principles that they deemed central to the civilized order: maintaining racial hierarchy, establishing the societal and political need for women’s moral superiority, and countering fears that woman suffrage would upend civilization by affirming the gender binary, such as by promoting the “feminine” approach of gradualism. Rather than viewing these as separate strategies to obtain the vote, this article argues that each of these approaches was informed by the shared discourse of civilization. Suffragists such as Reel, Felton, and White relied on civilizational ideas to advance the cause of woman suffrage, and in the process actively shaped the meaning of civilization to include woman suffrage. By exploring the suffragist argument that civilization could not exist without suffrage for women, this article demonstrates that many white suffragists leveraged the politics of civilization to advocate for their right to vote in a climate that was largely hostile to women’s involvement in politics.
To explore how this discourse operated in practice, this article examines the lives and writings of Estelle Reel, Rebecca Felton, and Alma White – each of whom integrated their suffrage advocacy into their broader activism on reform, religion, and politics. They are not portrayed as representative of the movement as a whole (in fact, suffragists of color often contested their exclusionary approach, even as they occasionally used it for their own purposes), but as illustrative of a broader pattern among certain white suffragists working in distinct regional contexts. Their activism – spanning Indian education in the West, post-Reconstruction politics in the South, and religious reform in the Northeast – demonstrates how civilizational ideas could be adapted to different local conditions while retaining a shared underlying logic. There is no primary-source evidence that these women were members of national suffrage organizations, yet they were each engaged in local suffrage advocacy, thereby demonstrating that the movement frequently extended beyond official organizational boundaries.Footnote 18 Additionally, a study of these three women underlines the significance of regional context in our understanding of suffrage – a field of study that has gained more traction in recent decades. Many of these scholars have related region to the temporal progression of the suffrage movement: starting with the territory of Wyoming in 1869, the West first enfranchised its women, followed by the Northeast in the 1910s, and finally the South in 1920, after it was essentially forced to adopt the federal Nineteenth Amendment. Scholars have thus delved into the question of how the western and southern regional contexts informed the respectively early and late embrace of woman suffrage.Footnote 19 More recent works have shifted away from temporal frameworks to explore other dimensions, such as the importance of grassroots campaigns in the Midwest, the broader influence of the western suffrage movement, and its wider transnational connections.Footnote 20 By tracing how these women mobilized the politics of civilization across different settings, this article demonstrates that civilizational discourse was a flexible framework that helped suffragists navigate the political challenges of their time. In doing so, it offers a more precise account of how concepts like civilization functioned in practice: not merely as an expression of hierarchy, but as a multifaceted political instrument that could be used to support claims for inclusion within an unequal social order.
The different paths to suffrage
According to the common narrative, the struggle for women’s rights began at the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, after which successive generations of activists campaigned for women’s right to own property and cast a vote.Footnote 21 For much of the nineteenth century, suffragism was intimately linked with abolitionism: activists such as Lucy Stone and Sojourner Truth advocated for both causes, and the two emancipatory movements shared significant overlap in their goal to expand the franchise. During Reconstruction, many reformers briefly hoped to achieve “universal suffrage” – the extension of the vote as a fundamental right of citizenship regardless of race or sex. Yet political momentum ultimately favored the enfranchisement of African American men, not women. When the Fourteenth Amendment introduced the word “male” into the Constitution and the Fifteenth Amendment excluded sex as a protected category, suffragists were deeply disheartened.Footnote 22 These developments resulted not only in a split between the Black and woman suffrage movements, but also a schism within the suffrage movement itself.Footnote 23 Embittered in their activism, certain suffragists began to pit white women against newly enfranchised Black and immigrant men – a strategy that would intensify at the turn of the twentieth century.Footnote 24 Despite their opposition to the Reconstruction amendments, Susan B. Anthony and others briefly pursued the “New Departure” strategy, contending that women already possessed the right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause. The Supreme Court rejected this argument in Minor v. Happersett (1875), ruling that citizenship did not automatically confer the right to vote.Footnote 25
By 1890, many Americans had grown weary of social upheaval and constitutional change. Operating in this increasingly conservative climate, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) advanced a new argument for suffrage. According to its leader, Frances Willard, the right to vote was not an individual right, but rather a gendered instrument for promoting community welfare and moral reform.Footnote 26 In 1890, the two major national suffrage organizations united to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Recognizing the need for a comprehensive approach, the organization adopted a dual strategy: pass both a constitutional amendment and amend state legislations.Footnote 27 By the early twentieth century, the national strategy grew in popularity, and the movement increasingly received public support. While a small group of suffrage activists turned towards more radical public protests such as pickets in the 1910s, the silent majority within the suffrage movement – which included Reel, Felton, and White – consisted of women who chose to pursue a more moderate strategy of making political appeals to men in power. After Congress first passed a suffrage amendment, which required ratification by three quarters of the states, many of these suffragists focussed on the public and political battle over ratification at the state level. When Tennessee became the thirty-sixth state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment on 18 August 1920, states across the nation could no longer legally bar women from voting on the basis of their sex. Recent scholarship on suffragists of color, however, has demonstrated that women of all backgrounds could still be barred from voting on the basis of voter registration laws, poll taxes, literacy tests, immigration laws, and naturalization laws, meaning that many women of color could not exercise their voting rights until well after 1920.Footnote 28
While the story of woman suffrage is often told through this national, institutional narrative, the movement was composed of individual women across every region of the country who worked within the contexts of their own lives to secure voting rights for women. Reel, Felton, and White were among these women, each embracing suffrage in their own way and drawing upon the shared ideal of civilization in ways that reflected their regional identities. Born in Pittsfield, Illinois in 1862, Estelle Reel built her political, educational, and suffrage career in her adoptive home state of Wyoming. Following her brother out west after the death of their parents, she settled in Cheyenne as one of the many young and unmarried women who migrated westward in the 1880s.Footnote 29 Upon her arrival in the territory as a twenty-five-year-old, she suddenly found herself enfranchised. Wyoming legislators had passed a suffrage amendment in 1869 – whether out of a sense of humor, a personal commitment to their wives, a desire to promote the territory and encourage migration, or an effort to offset the number of nonwhite voters.Footnote 30 In any case, the small number of women in the territory ensured that existing hierarchies remained intact, limiting the perceived threat of woman suffrage. Initially, Reel took little note of the fact that she was now an enfranchised woman, setting out to build her own life as a primary-school teacher in the local county. It did mean that women could run for office, however, and after discovering a talent for politicking, Reel ran for county superintendent of schools in 1890 and statewide office in 1894.Footnote 31 While these elections undoubtedly pried open a position for women that had previously been reserved for men, Reel’s campaign benefited from the fact that it was advocating for electing a woman to an educational position – a realm long regarded as a female province. She repeatedly won the elections she ran in, and quickly built an extensive political network, even drawing the attention of President William McKinley. He appointed her to the position of superintendent of Indian schools in 1898, after which she spent the next decade traveling the country to oversee the forced assimilation taking place in Indian boarding schools.Footnote 32 As an elected official with political experience, Reel came to the suffrage cause from a practical angle: suffrage had served her in Wyoming and could serve other women around the country as well.
Rebecca Felton, on the other hand, would spend nearly a lifetime trying to achieve the right to vote. Born in 1835 on a plantation in Decatur, Georgia, she enjoyed a traditional upbringing as part of the southern planter elite and married Dr. William Felton, a prominent slaveholder, doctor, and politician who was fifteen years her elder, at the age of eighteen.Footnote 33 During this early period of her life, in which she had children and oversaw their plantation (including the lives and labor of fifty enslaved people), she strictly adhered to the patriarchal roles that were central to the antebellum South and eyed the broadening of suffrage as a dangerous northern idea.Footnote 34 Forced to rebuild her life after the devastation of the Civil War, however, Felton became an important figure in Georgia politics in the late nineteenth century. Making use of her role as a politician’s wife (Dr. Felton was elected to the US House of Representatives as an independent Democrat in 1874), she built her own political network and advocated for causes such as temperance, prison reform, and white supremacy.Footnote 35 As a “lady manager” of the 1893 Exposition in Chicago, Felton sought to display examples of white women’s contribution to civilization, arguing that they played a critical role in its advancement.Footnote 36 The death of her husband in 1909 left Felton with newfound political freedom and marked her turn to public suffrage activism. Embracing the stance that white women needed the vote to protect themselves, she sought to convince skeptical southerners that suffrage for women would not upend the region’s cherished hierarchies.Footnote 37 This campaign proved unsuccessful throughout the 1910s, as local Senators repeatedly voted down woman suffrage measures, much to her chagrin.Footnote 38 It was not until 1920, when the federal Nineteenth Amendment was adopted, that white women like Felton, now eighty-five years of age, achieved the right to vote – at least in theory. In reality, large numbers of white women were barred from voting in Georgia until 1922 due to the state’s restrictive voter registration laws.
Rather than coming to the suffrage cause through organized politics, Alma White embraced it as part of her religious activism. Born in Kentucky in 1862 into a large family impoverished by the war, White described her Methodist faith as a refuge from the hardships of her youth.Footnote 39 Swept up in the fervor of the so-called Third Great Awakening, a period of religious revival in the late nineteenth century, she initially set out to become a foreign missionary, one of the few roles available to Methodist women at the time.Footnote 40 Her minister convinced her to marry a preacher instead to fulfill her calling, and in 1887 she married Kent White while working as a schoolteacher in Montana. The couple settled in Denver and quickly ran into marital difficulties: in addition to personal issues (two difficult childbirths and a strained relationship with her mother-in-law), White also defied the religious and patriarchal authority of her husband and other male clergy by speaking at several revival meetings across the 1890s.Footnote 41 Agitating against the church that made “no provision for women to speak,” White gave up on Methodism in the early twentieth century, and established her own denomination (the Pillar of Fire, the “true” version of Methodism) in 1902.Footnote 42 As her church grew and her marriage crumbled, White and her followers moved to New Jersey in 1906 to establish a religious community under her leadership. Here, they dedicated themselves not only to fundamentalist theology, but also to political causes, including nativism, anti-Catholicism, and women’s right to vote. White believed that “true Christianity gives to woman an equality with man and accords to her every right and privilege.”Footnote 43 In her two periodicals (The Good Citizen and Woman’s Chains), she published articles laying out her view that woman suffrage was biblically mandated and essential to American civilization.
White women as civilized voters: maintaining racial hierarchy
In many ways, the racial views of Reel, Felton, and White reflected those of the broader American suffrage movement between 1890 and 1920. As Jim Crow laws codified segregation in the South and white supremacy became entrenched in society and government, the Women’s Building of the 1893 Exposition – intended to celebrate women’s achievements in the arts and sciences – purposefully excluded the contributions of Black women, despite their organized efforts to secure representation on the all-white Board of Lady Managers.Footnote 44 Ultimately, this slight was symptomatic of the suffrage movement’s broader turn towards racist strategies at the turn of the century. Realizing that a constitutional victory would be unlikely without the support of southern politicians, NAWSA adopted a “Southern Strategy” that promoted an all-white suffrage movement in the region.Footnote 45 At the 1903 NAWSA conference in New Orleans, Black women were barred from attending and white suffragists such as Laura Clay and Belle Kearney argued that suffrage would “insure immediate and durable white supremacy, honestly attained.”Footnote 46 Women with roots in the Northeast, the West, and the Midwest, too, embraced this kind of racial thinking as part of their activism. Carrie Chapman Catt, the chairwoman of NAWSA, believed that “in the North and the West, it is the problem of the illiterate immigrant; in the South it is the problem of the illiterate negro” that was holding back women’s progress.Footnote 47 The rise in immigration and social Darwinist ideas increasingly led to nativist concerns about the makeup of the electorate, making restrictionist arguments for woman suffrage more persuasive than “universal rights” arguments. Across the country, white suffragists turned to eugenic ideas, arguing that racial decline could only be prevented if women were granted the vote and awarded greater social influence.Footnote 48
Against the backdrop of these developments, suffragists such as Reel, Felton, and White actively tied the franchise to the concept of civilization. Abandoning the “universal suffrage” approach of their antebellum counterparts – which held that all people, including women and people of color, deserved equal voting rights based on their inalienable rights as humans – these women instead viewed the act of voting as an act of civilization. Drawing on imperial rhetoric that sought to make a distinction between the supposedly civilized status of white Americans and the uncivilized status of (colonized) nonwhite and foreign peoples, they argued that only those who were civilized could lay claim to the franchise.Footnote 49 In their view, the right to vote was a right of civilization rather than a right of citizenship – not a universal human right, but a privilege to be exercised by the qualified. According to many white suffragists, including Reel, Felton, and White, people of color, specifically men, did not possess the right racial credentials to claim civilization, and could thus not legitimately claim the franchise. By contrast, they believed that white women did possess the racial credentials required for civilization and were thus unfairly excluded from the franchise.
Across the country, white suffragists independently penned their belief that it was unjust that uncivilized men of color – be they African Americans or recent immigrants – had received the ballot before civilized native-born white women.Footnote 50 In Rebecca Felton’s view, this upending of the natural order marked a significant failure on the part of white men. Chastising the politicians who passed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, she wrote that
time will come that the decent men of this country will blush to remember that the wives, mothers and sisters of this Georgia land had to come on bended knees to ask you to allow them the ballot privilege that you gave to the illiterate, drunken, dissolute, and depraved men of this country.Footnote 51
Alma White shared these sentiments. Not only did she criticize white men for leaving “half of the white race in political bondage” while “the colored man has had a voice in making the laws of the land,” but she also juxtaposed the political “bondage” of white women with the enfranchisement of immigrant men. In her pamphlets, she lamented that “our American women have been refused the franchise, but the privileges withheld from them have been given to the Asiatic and European hordes.”Footnote 52 According to White, mass immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe threatened the country’s white Protestant identity, since many of these new immigrants were members of the Catholic and Jewish faiths. Not only did her denomination financially and spiritually support the KKK, but she also published a book in which she exalted Klansmen as the “protectors” of America and embraced anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.Footnote 53 White argued on multiple occasions, for example, that the Pope was the “Antichrist” who purposefully sent immigrants to the United States to plan a takeover. In short, she considered it a serious threat to national security to extend the vote to “hyphenates, most of whom have sworn allegiance to another crown,” when white women were denied the ballot.Footnote 54
While they disqualified African American and immigrant votes on racist and nativist grounds, these suffragists argued that white native-born women were uniquely qualified as voters due to their civilized status and assumed racial superiority. They “belong[ed] to a womanhood” that “[came] of a race, who shirked no dangers, nor cowered in fear,” according to Felton, and deserved the vote to reflect their status as true inheritors of America.Footnote 55 Additionally, white women had “suffered enough” to understand the true value of the ballot privilege and would be “intelligent voters,” these women argued, unlike the men who had supposedly used it for nefarious purposes.Footnote 56 They believed men of color were especially prone to manipulation by corrupt politicians, and even sold their votes to the highest bidder.Footnote 57 According to these women, only the expansion of the white and native-born electorate through the enfranchisement of white women would “save our beloved America” from “race war” and the Catholic plot to “make the country subject to a foreign potentate.”Footnote 58 Suffrage leaders such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, too, argued that Anglo-Saxon women had a duty to “work for evolutionary advancement and the perfection of civilization” – a mission that necessitated their enfranchisement.Footnote 59
Mirroring the rhetoric of southern suffrage leaders such as Belle Kearney and Kate Gordon, Felton and White argued that enfranchising white women would ensure white supremacist rule for years to come. Not only would it generally expand the native-born white electorate, but white women also knew “no business … that is superior to protecting and preserving the line of demarcation between the black and white races” and would vote accordingly.Footnote 60 According to Felton, who was a well-known figure in southern suffrage circles, white southerners had no choice but to expand the white electorate in order to safeguard white political rule. “Nothing but the ballot” in the hands of women of white men’s “own blood and color,” she argued, would “stave off race troubles and preserve white supremacy.”Footnote 61 Applying a similar logic to the issue of immigration, White maintained that only women’s votes could save the country from “Rome’s malicious designs to make it Catholic” through immigration.Footnote 62 Even in the western US, where many women had already obtained the right to vote and racial arguments were not as prominent, there was an interest in expanding the white electorate.Footnote 63 While Reel was not as explicit in her racial rhetoric, she seemed to embrace the view that the electorate needed white, native-born women to keep racial and religious minorities in check. In her writings, Reel laid out her view that woman suffrage was a critical element of civilization, and that a lack of woman suffrage would mean a devolution into savagery.Footnote 64 She and her audience would both have understood the racialized narratives embedded in these statements – namely that the votes of white women were needed to preserve the whiteness of civilization, acting as a bulwark against the assumed blackness of savagery.
Racialized notions of savagery were often invoked to advocate for suffrage for white women. According to Reel, Felton, and White alike, women in nonwhite “savage” societies were often mistreated and lacked basic human dignity. White, for example, argued that women in Asia and the Middle East had “no social standing” and were practically “in bondage.”Footnote 65 Similarly, NAWSA leader Carrie Chapman Catt laid out the “ignorant tyranny” that victimized women in the Middle East, Greece, and China, where they were considered “impure” property.Footnote 66 Native Americans, too, were accused of extensive cruelty towards women. While White contended that they left older women “in the wintry blasts to die,” Felton argued that “savage tribes say that women have no rights” and enforced their will on Indigenous women “by the club and the lash.”Footnote 67 Reel accused Indigenous communities of obstructing women’s progress, for example by preventing their girls from attending assimilatory boarding schools.Footnote 68 By making the supposed absence of women’s rights in these communities part of the racialized conception of savagery, these women put forth the notion that civilization could not exist without suffrage for women. Ultimately, “the condition of women in a community is the measure of its civilization,” and if nonwhite savagery was characterized by the absence of women’s rights, then white civilization was, or should be, characterized by suffrage for women.Footnote 69
While white suffragists claimed to be concerned about the well-being of women of color in “savage” communities, they were ultimately more interested in using them as political symbols than in forming cross-racial alliances.Footnote 70 Suffragists of color were aware of this fact, but nevertheless had to reckon with the national movement’s racist approach to suffrage as a civilizational privilege. While most of their white counterparts abandoned the philosophy of “universal rights” at the turn of the century, Black suffragists often remained true to the abolitionist roots of the women’s movement. Working both inside and outside of the major suffrage institutions, women like Anna Julia Cooper asserted that women of all races were entitled to equality and dignity before the law, thereby presenting an entirely different vision of women’s politics.Footnote 71 At the same time, however, they, too, had to reckon with the dominant framework of their time. Certain activists of color therefore chose to embrace the discourse of civilization, demonstrating through their actions, rhetoric, and presentation that they were civilized women who deserved political autonomy. Ida B. Wells, for example, highlighted the savagery of lynchings and “other cruelties that have disgraced American Christianity and civilization” in her overseas speaking tours, thereby reframing her struggle for racial justice as the genuinely civilized cause against the failures of American society.Footnote 72 Similarly, the anti-imperial activist Clemencia López strategically wielded her beauty and refinement as embodied evidence of Filipino women’s civilized status, thereby challenging imperial narratives and advancing the cause of Philippine independence.Footnote 73
Women vote to safeguard civilization: establishing moral superiority
In the eyes of turn-of-the-century white suffragists, women’s right to vote relied on more than a racial claim to civilization alone, however. They also considered suffrage and civilization innately linked through moral politics. Women were morally superior to men, according to popular belief, and enfranchising women would enable them to use this moral superiority to improve society and conserve its most vital institutions, thereby safeguarding American civilization. According to Carrie Chapman Catt, women had been “given in greater perfection the gentler traits of tenderness and mercy,” and the issues of the day demanded their enfranchisement.Footnote 74 Reel, Felton, and White each argued that men had brought a moral corrosion onto the United States because they lacked the kind of moral compass that only women, and women voters specifically, could provide. As the natural foe of “tyranny and the forces that would destroy civilization” (such as liquor and vice), women would use the vote to eliminate immoral enterprises and defend traditional values and institutions, thereby securing civilization for all.Footnote 75
Men had made a mess out of politics, suffragists across the country agreed. By failing to govern adequately, they had neglected the needs of women and children, and they had tainted democracy through their descent into political savagery. Felton had little patience for the argument that the political arena was “too dirty for nice clean women to touch”: men themselves had made it that way by reneging on their political duties and engaging in immoral activities.Footnote 76 According to White, the immorality of politicians was merely the tip of the iceberg. Men across the country, within the church and other forms of leadership, had shown their moral failings and responsibility for the “decay of morals.” Not only had they allowed the sale of alcohol in saloons, but also they facilitated dance halls, gambling houses, prostitution, and smoking – all while “forbidding that wives and mothers should even protest against such injustice.”Footnote 77
This moral failing by men left women no choice but to enter the political arena. If men were incapable of using their exclusive political right responsibly, many suffragists argued, then women needed to step in and “purify” the “polluted stream of politics.”Footnote 78 “Something must be done for women and their children; and since men have failed – the women determine to enter the field,” Felton wrote. Women did not necessarily want to enter the political arena, in her view, but men had left them no choice. “We left it to you for more than a century and you here about concluded that you have done all you could.”Footnote 79 More delays could not be permitted this time: women needed to defend themselves and their community with the vote, and do some serious public “house cleaning.”Footnote 80 Other suffragists, too, used the language of domesticity to claim a political voice, thereby advancing the ideal of municipal housekeeping.Footnote 81 Settlement activist Jane Addams, for example, maintained that “it is necessary that woman shall extend her sense of responsibility to many things outside of her own home,”Footnote 82 and Charlotte Perkins Gilman believed that “civilized womanhood” cared “for the public good as well as the private.”Footnote 83 According to Felton, it was women’s task to work as “house cleaners in the Government” and defend their homes, families, and society at large against immorality – a task that would be impossible without the vote.Footnote 84 With the ballot, she maintained, women could finally stand up to the “Liquor Lobby” that opposed temperance legislation, vote out political candidates “who pose as temperance men [but] vote as liquor men,” and overhaul “vice conditions” such as saloons and dance halls through much-needed reform.Footnote 85
In their quest to safeguard American civilization by improving its morals, suffragists such as Felton and White considered temperance and woman suffrage mutually dependent. A society could not be morally “clean” if it was not “dry,” in their view, and it could not be “dry” without a political voice for women. As a devoted member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), Felton had long viewed these two issues as being interrelated. By the 1910s she had come to believe that merely spreading awareness about the dangers of alcohol was not enough. Women themselves needed to achieve temperance in the political realm, preferably with the vote. The reason women agitated for suffrage in the first place, she argued, was because of their opposition to the “Liquor Demon.”Footnote 86 “If you are a wise father, you will permit your daughter to vote out anything in legislation that menaces her home or her children.”Footnote 87 White, too, stated that there was “absolutely no hope for the elevation of woman any place where the drink curse is in full force.” She believed that brewers and distillers were well aware of this fact and had organized to “hold back the wheels of human progress.”Footnote 88 Like many white Protestants of her era, she expressed disdain for the drinking culture prevalent among Catholic immigrant communities. The opposition to woman suffrage mainly came from the “liquor powers” and the “Roman Catholic Church,” she maintained, since both of these sought to keep people “in bondage” in order to “control them more easily.”Footnote 89 Interestingly, suffragists from the western US, including Reel, did not embrace the cause of temperance and they rarely discussed alcohol. This was a calculated political strategy in a region where temperance was decidedly unpopular. Garnering support from men for woman suffrage, one of Reel’s key tactics, would become difficult if suffragists alienated men by opposing alcohol. Other western suffragists, such as Abigail Scott Duniway from Oregon, similarly distanced themselves from the WCTU and its prohibition efforts – especially if they were on the same ballot – and considered it a liability to the movement.Footnote 90
Western suffragists like Reel did agree, however, that there was hardly any “great Evil” in society that would persist if women were given the franchise.Footnote 91 This included the foundation of the political system itself. In Wyoming, where women had already obtained the vote, the female presence had “purified politics,” for example. With women present at the polls, the conduct of men on election day had improved, Reel contended, resulting in elections that were “as orderly as a Church meeting,” without any “rowdyism or drunkenness at the polls.”Footnote 92 In addition to moderating male conduct on election day, women’s moral authority had also influenced campaign strategies and the overall functioning of politics, according to Reel. In order to win elections and persuade female voters, “all political parties are extremely careful of the character of their candidates.” Consequently, “no notoriously bad man could be elected to office,” as women simply would not permit it.Footnote 93 White shared this assessment of women’s moral superiority and moderating influence, arguing that “women probably will show a more discriminating interest” than men in the “personality of candidates” when they obtained the ballot.Footnote 94 Not only would women weed out political corruption and break entrenched party lines, but they would also “get the right kind of people into office.”Footnote 95 If women were enfranchised, they would work together with men to accomplish reform and pass laws for the “betterment of both sexes.”Footnote 96 Suffrage would therefore not “degrade” men, but instead raise them “to a higher moral and spiritual level” by enabling women and men to cooperate on building the home as well as the “state and nation.”Footnote 97 In short, these suffragists argued that women would use the vote to protect their own families and communities, in addition to improving the entirety of the political sphere. By using their moral superiority to lift society to a higher plane, such as by eradicating vice and moderating male conduct, enfranchised women would thus effectively safeguard and advance American civilization.
Woman suffrage not a threat to civilization: affirming the gender binary
How could suffragists convince others, particularly men with the power to pass the suffrage amendments, that giving women the vote would lead to civilizational progress rather than decline, however? By the turn of the century, many Americans were deeply concerned about the ways in which modernity was changing society. The Victorian separate spheres, where women operated exclusively in the domestic realm and men in the public realm, were in decline, with an increasing number of women entering public life, either in the workforce or in education.Footnote 98 Simultaneously, the rise of the wage labor system meant that fewer men were self-sufficient (a Victorian marker of masculinity), and more were employed in industrial urban centers. White men perceived the realm of politics to be under attack too: immigrant men began claiming their power, and women were agitating for a political voice in a sphere that was one of the defining features of white male identity.Footnote 99 As a result, the men who had the power to pass suffrage amendments were often skeptical about expanding the franchise. Suffragists like Reel, Felton, and White sought to remove their hesitations by relying on a shared discourse that linked gender to civilization in their defense of woman suffrage.
As several historians have demonstrated, the decline of the separate spheres at the turn of the century led to a widespread crisis of masculinity in society, as well as an upheaval of conceptions of masculine and feminine identity.Footnote 100 The societal impacts of this redefinition of manhood were broad, evident in a renewed interest in ritual and brotherhood, in attempts to “remasculinize” the church, and even in jingoistic agitation to go to war.Footnote 101 One of the consequences of this new obsession with masculinity was a hardening of the gender binary throughout society. In a world where men and women increasingly came in contact with each other, gender boundaries needed to be more rigorously policed. This policing took not only place in physical environments, but also in the ideological realm: if men and women were to inhabit the same spaces, a clear distinction between men and women, and between what was feminine and what was masculine, had to be reinforced.Footnote 102 The importance of the gender binary was also affirmed by new scientific thinking focussed on taxonomy and categorization. The Darwinian idea that sex differentiation was a sign of evolutionary progress proved especially powerful.Footnote 103 According to Carrie Chapman Catt, for example, men and women had evolved to possess distinct “differences” in both their gender presentation and their innate capacities.Footnote 104 Social Darwinists used this idea to argue that sexual differentiation was the “basis for white racial progress,” and thereby of civilization as a whole.Footnote 105 According this view, the greater the sex differentiation (the more that supposed biological difference between men and women manifested itself), “the more advanced the civilization.”Footnote 106 As a result, the notion of a strong gender binary – women as extremely feminine and men as extremely masculine – became a defining feature of civilization at the turn of the century. Because sexuality was commonly understood as an extension of gender expression, heteronormativity likewise came to be seen as essential to civilization, and, by extension, to the suffrage movement.Footnote 107 Most elites, including many suffragists, believed that if gender boundaries were blurred, as they were among “savages,” civilization would be upended.Footnote 108
Within this discursive environment, it became essential for suffragists to communicate their shared commitment to the gender binary that underlay civilization, lest they alienate potential supporters. As Aileen Kraditor has argued, anti-suffragists ultimately “defined the context within which suffragist ideas developed, posed the problem the suffragists had to solve, and asked the questions they had to answer.”Footnote 109 Male and female anti-suffragists were extremely fearful that women would become “masculinized” or “unsexed” if they entered the male realm of politics. Suffrage was thought to compromise women’s natural reproductive role, thereby endangering the very essence of femininity. This fear of “unsexed” women was not just figurative: some anti-suffragists, even physicians, were convinced that women’s biological nature would actually be altered in the process, causing “aberrant … physiological changes” that altered “womanhood itself.” Suffrage would thus result in “freaky” women who were physically masculinized.Footnote 110 In an era where the gender binary was touted as the essence of civilization, this blurring of gender lines was considered unacceptable and dangerous.Footnote 111
As a result of the widespread belief that woman suffrage would endanger the gender differentiation that was central to civilization, it became essential for suffragists to demonstrate that suffrage would not in fact make women less feminine. Unlike early suffragists, who argued that there were fundamental similarities between men and women, these suffragists rested their claims on the assumption of inherent difference between men and women. In addition to grounding their suffrage activism in gendered claims of racial and moral superiority, they also understood that to be taken seriously as civilized women, they needed to portray themselves and their causes as extremely feminine. Suffragists of all kinds leaned heavily into the performance of femininity and used the politics of beauty to advance their aims. Whereas nineteenth-century suffragists had sometimes donned male dress or adopted “bloomers” (pants underneath a shortened dress), for example, they now purposefully avoided such clothing out of fear of appearing “mannish.”Footnote 112 By advancing and performing a “constructed model of white femininity,” activists were able to counter the anti-suffragist assertion that suffragists were masculinized (and thus would upend civilization).Footnote 113 Reel understood that perceptions of femininity were critical in the debate surrounding woman suffrage. While journalists sympathetic to her political accomplishments and the suffrage cause emphasized her beauty, stating that that her work had clearly not “spoiled her womanly qualities,” those who were skeptical of the cause often depicted her and other suffragists as masculinized shrews.Footnote 114 In order to successfully advance the cause of woman suffrage, therefore, it became important for suffragists to adhere to the era’s beauty standards – a task that sometimes weighed heavily on their private lives.Footnote 115 Activists across the country understood that being good at men’s work, most notably politics, had to come with the assurance that women remained attractive in a feminine way, lest civilization be upended.
While it was important for suffragists to show their femininity through their conduct and appearance, they also could not show too much femininity. If they did, they were accused of “flaunting their sex” – an unappealing and unfeminine trait.Footnote 116 Reel was upset when journalists circulated stories about how she had wielded her femininity to win over the hearts and minds of male voters in order to be elected Wyoming superintendent of public instruction. They accused her of sending out “hundreds of photographs” of herself to Wyoming cowboys alongside “dainty, pink announcements of her candidacy,” suggesting that she had only won her office by “campaigning through dance.”Footnote 117 According to Reel, this story of manipulative femininity was nothing more than “exaggerated statements of misinformed critics of equal suffrage.”Footnote 118 Reel’s reference to suffrage was notable: she, like many other suffragists, realized that the battle over suffrage was waged over notions of respectable femininity and its importance to civilization.Footnote 119 The rumor alleged that she had “flaunted her sex” to attract men, and thereby undermined not only her own achievement, but the broader suffrage cause as well. By suggesting that she had relied on her female charm instead of her wits to win office, the story not only questioned the legitimacy of women voting and running for office by suggesting they were not suited for the seriousness of political office, but also detracted from Reel’s own intelligence and political accomplishments. That was a grave insult to a woman who ran for office with the slogan “any intelligent woman can perform these duties.”Footnote 120 In her suffrage writings, Felton, too, seemed to be aware of the fine line between displaying and flaunting femininity. Female modesty was perhaps even more important in the South, where the image of the southern belle was widely embraced. There was nothing more beautiful, Felton argued, than “a nice, sweet, modest, home-loving young girl,” the “crown jewel of our human kingdom.” If women were to “lose any attribute” of this womanliness, or “sacrifice any measure of modesty” as a result of suffrage, she would never support it, Felton firmly stated.Footnote 121
As upper-middle-class suffragists, Felton, White, and Reel sometimes gave off mixed messages about domesticity and women’s employment. While NAWSA increasingly embraced the plight of working women and established a Committee on Industrial Work in 1903, these women publicly opposed the idea of female employment, arguing that women should remain the centers of domestic life as wives and mothers.Footnote 122 At the same time, however, they had privately abandoned the domestic realm for full-time de facto employment as government agent (Reel), activist and reformer (Felton), and church leader (White). Ignoring this contradiction between their discourse and private lives for the sake of political expediency, they each argued that women would not lose their feminine appearance nor proper domesticity if they were to obtain the vote. Despite their entry into the public realm, Felton maintained, women would remain modest and domestic, focussing on the home as the “center … of her efforts for civilization.”Footnote 123 According to Reel, the Wyoming women who had been enfranchised formed living proof that women did not “neglect any of [their] household duties” when they obtained suffrage.Footnote 124 In fact, she argued, suffrage made women better wives, as they were better able to understand and accommodate their husbands.Footnote 125 Not only was woman suffrage perfectly compatible with the gender binary that underlay civilization, according to this view, but it would even advance it.
One of the most effective ways to demonstrate femininity while advocating for women’s right to vote was to embrace the strategy of gradualism, or slow change over time. Not only was this considered a more feminine form of protest (compared to “masculine” pickets and radical demands), but suffragists also believed that it was critical to not alienating potential male supporters. Reel naturally gravitated towards this stance, as she came from the western territory where suffrage had been a fact of life rather than a cause that needed sweeping activism.Footnote 126 During her years in office at the turn of the century, she received many letters from suffrage activists who were keen to emulate Wyoming’s suffrage success. In her replies, Reel advised against any extreme action, and instead laid out her belief that women should gradually work themselves up to suffrage. “Do not attempt at first to secure universal suffrage,” Reel told one activist, but instead start out by getting “the privilege of voting” in school elections – a naturally and acceptably female realm. “If you secure this, the right of suffrage in County, State and national affairs will follow in due time.”Footnote 127 Women had only achieved suffrage in Wyoming, Reel argued, because they had been “extremely modest in their requests” and “essayed no radical reforms.” Wyoming women had never “asked too much at any time of the male voters,” and thus the “magnanimous nature of western men” had eventually secured the ballot for women, according to Reel. It was the embrace of gradualism and the appeal to men, in other words, that formed the key to success. In her private life, that certainly seemed to be the case: when Reel was first nominated for the role of superintendent of Indian schools in 1898, prominent men throughout the country sent letters of recommendation to President McKinley to support her nomination.Footnote 128 Scholars of western suffrage, however, have attributed the movement’s success to the region’s distinctive political and racial environment, activists’ capacity to build broad-based alliances, and their reliance on improvisational strategies rather than gradualist approaches.Footnote 129
Reel also embraced the gradualist stance in her private life, perhaps out of a keen eye for political reality. When a rumor circulated during her tenure as superintendent of public instruction in Wyoming that she might be running for state governor, she adamantly rejected any such ambition. In the press, she stated that “the idea of running a woman for Governor of the State of Wyoming is not worthy of serious consideration.”Footnote 130 According to Reel, the “office [of governor] should be filled by a man. Women must serve an apprenticeship in minor posts before advancing so high.”Footnote 131 In the positions she did hold, she supported woman suffrage, but never pushed the issue. In fact, during her tenure as the superintendent of Indian schools in Washington, DC between 1898 and 1910, she hardly spoke about woman suffrage at all. As the suffrage movement increasingly lost momentum in these years, Reel shied away from the topic, fearful of endangering her own political career as a female appointee. Her own embrace of gradualism likely solidified her political ascent and inspired her advice to fellow suffragists. Reel’s strategy also reflected the time in which she was politically active. At the turn of the century, the attainment of suffrage for women nationwide seemed unlikely, making suffrage activism a much riskier proposition than it would be in later decades, particularly for a political insider like Reel.
By the 1910s, suffrage activism had resurged, however. As states such as California (1911) and Illinois (1914) passed voting measures and momentum was building in New York, the national movement increasingly turned towards more radical tactics and demands. Young suffragists in California embraced “street speaking” (addressing strangers in public) to garner public attention, radical suffragist Alice Paul – who was jailed multiple times for her activism in Britain – argued that “determination” was more important than “dignity” in the fight for the vote, and suffragists allied to Paul openly attacked the Democratic Party and picketed the White House.Footnote 132 Not everyone appreciated this combative strategy. The NAWSA leadership was particularly concerned about Paul’s relationship with the British suffragettes, who did not shy away from illegal actions and the use of political violence.Footnote 133 Felton and White, meanwhile, held firm to their belief in respectability, and disavowed such strategies out of fear of being considered unfeminine and uncompromising. Although Felton frequently castigated men, politicians especially, for their refusal to give white women the ballot, she was simultaneously careful not to alienate any potential male supporters. Repudiating the notion that women would become masculinized once enfranchised, she actively asserted her own claims to traditional white southern femininity. This was especially important in her home region, which already eyed woman suffrage with suspicion due to its northern abolitionist history. By asserting her southern identity and emphasizing her loyalty to the region, Felton disavowed “northern radicalism.” If they obtained the ballot, Felton argued, southern white women would not pass any extreme reforms or upend the gender binary but would instead defend the traditional values of southern society.Footnote 134 White, too, adamantly denied being a “man-hater,” and argued that any progress in the suffrage struggle “has come, not through sensational clamor and disturbing agitation, but by the steadily growing conviction that the claims of the women are founded on reasonableness and justice.”Footnote 135 She was less worried than the other two women about seeming too outspoken about her support for women’s rights, however. In her speeches and pamphlets, she argued that suffrage alone would not safeguard women’s social and political standing. After the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, she remained dissatisfied and established the periodical Woman’s Chains in 1923 to publish articles on women’s equality.
No matter the strategy, suffragists went to great lengths to present both themselves and the cause as extremely feminine and respectable. In doing so, they sought to affirm the gender binary that was widely considered to be the foundation of civilization. By tapping into the widespread discourse of gender and civilization, suffragists sought to signal to opponents and potential supporters alike that they were not interested in upending cherished ideas about the role of women in society. In their view, suffrage for women would not upend civilization, as women would remain perfectly feminine and domestic even with the vote. If anything, they suggested, white women deserved the vote because of how feminine they were. If greater gender differentiation signaled greater civilization, then these women’s extreme femininity was proof of their exceptionally civilized status. In a public discourse that conceptualized the right to vote as a right of civilization, this was a firm argument for enfranchising women.
Conclusion
At the turn of the twentieth century, many suffragists across the entirety of the United States believed that suffrage for women was inherently linked to civilizational progress. In every region, certain suffragists conceptualized civilization and woman suffrage as mutually dependent – American civilization relied on woman suffrage, they maintained, while the agitation for woman suffrage relied on civilizational arguments. Drawing on the dominant discourse of their time, these activists built their advocacy for suffrage around three foundational civilizational principles: (1) maintaining white supremacy, (2) establishing the societal and political need for women’s moral superiority, and (3) assuaging fears that woman suffrage would upend civilization by affirming the gender binary. If enfranchised, they argued, women would use the vote to safeguard white political rule, moral Protestantism, and traditional ideas of gender – all foundational elements of American civilization. As bulwarks against savagery, women voters would therefore be critical defenders and advancers of American civilization. In making these arguments, suffragists such as Reel, Felton, and White actively shaped the meaning of civilization at the turn of the century. By putting forth the notion that America could not be fully civilized without suffrage for white women, these suffragists across the country leveraged the politics of civilization to advocate for their right to vote at a time when many were skeptical of women’s involvement in politics.
