Braving Scorn And Threats

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The women vehemently protested this betrayal to their former allies, but in vain. Votes for women were not "a practical thing," said Theodore Tilton. Said another former abolitionist: "It is the Negro's hour." Susan B. Anthony angrily retorted, "I would sooner cut off my right hand than ask for the ballot for the Black man and not for woman." She and Stanton founded the National Woman Suffrage Association.

While the suffragist meetings and protests continued, the first woman who personally challenged the political hierarchy was the electrifying Victoria Claflin Woodhull of Homer, Ohio. Beautiful, energetic and not entirely scrupulous, Victoria and her younger sister Tennessee practiced many of the popular quackeries of the day: seances, psychic remedies, a bottled "elixir of life." Inspired, she said, by a vision of Demosthenes, Woodhull and her sister went to New York and arranged to introduce themselves to the newly widowed Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, 84. With her "magnetic treatment" Tennessee soothed the railroad tycoon so successfully that he backed the young sisters in opening a lucrative stock brokerage. In 1870, at 31, Victoria announced she was running for President. To argue her cause, she started her own newspaper, Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly, which favored, among other things, free love, tax reform and world government.

As an orator, Woodhull bowed to no man. "We mean treason; we mean secession..." she declared. "We are plotting revolution; we will [overthrow] this bogus Republic and plant a government of righteousness in its stead." When someone dared to ask whether she practiced her preachings of free love, she defiantly answered, "Yes! I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may." Some suffragists were embarrassed by Woodhull's flamboyance, but Stanton said, "If Victoria Woodhull must be crucified, let men drive the spikes."

Woodhull, who eventually married a rich English banker, provided a meteoric symbol of change, but it was the regiments of suffragist foot soldiers who steadily kept applying the pressure, state by state. Their key opportunity came with the entry of various Western territories into the union. The new constitution of Wyoming (1890) was the first to include women's suffrage; then came Colorado (1893), Utah and Idaho (1896).

Hoping to shorten the process, California Senator Aaron Sargent had introduced in 1878 an amendment to the Constitution: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged ...on account of sex." After nine years of stalling, the Senate voted the measure down. Early in 1918, apparently because so many women had done so much war work, the amendment finally was passed by the House. In the galleries, a tearful crowd of suffragists started singing "Praise God from whom all blessings flow." The next year, the Senate added its grudging consent, 66 to 30. This time there was no singing by the women. "To their weary senses," said Suffragist Leader Carrie Chapman Catt, "the only meaning of the vote just taken was that the Senate had at last surrendered...given in to the people it represented."

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