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WOMEN GET THE VOTE

"Hurrah! And Vote for Suffrage."

So shouted Harry Burn, at twenty-four the youngest member of the U.S. House of Representatives, on 18 August 1920, when he heeded his mother's admonition and cast the final vote for the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the right to vote. Twenty-six million women were enfranchised, and a battle for women's suffrage that began at the Seneca Falls Woman's Rights Convention in 1848 finally was won.

No Panacea

Initially elated, activist women quickly discovered that the vote was not the panacea for women they hoped. First, women did not vote in blocs or uniformly support women's issues; they voted according to race, social class, religious background, and geographic location. Furthermore, women's groups did not agree on the best strategy for further reform, and some women did not believe additional reform was necessary at all. As suffrage leader Anna Howard Shaw lamented in 1920, "I am sorry for you young women who have to carry on the work for the next ten years, for suffrage was a symbol, and now you have lost your symbol."

Factionalism

After 1920 the suffrage movement fragmented into factions: social feminists who sought reform of society in general; feminists who focused on expanded roles for women; women who were dedicated to pacifism; and women who campaigned for labor and professional reform. The moderate League of Women Voters attracted many women who sought social reform, education for women, and the elimination of laws discriminating against women. The more radical National Women's Party, led by Alice Paul, believed in the necessity of an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and single-mindedly struggled for it during the 1920s. The issue served to divide women, since many thought protective legislation preferable to a constitutional amendment and viewed the ERA as too extreme.

Black Women Activists

Black suffragists felt abandoned by white activists after suffrage passed. They thus turned from feminist politics to issues of racial justice, to the Back to Africa Movement led by Marcus Garvey, and to the anti-lynching movement. In 1922 black leader Mary B. Talbert founded the Anti-Lynching Crusade, and by 1923 seven hundred black and white women had joined the effort to stop these murders. Black and white southern feminists, who addressed specific issues facing southern black women, formed the Committee on Negro Problems in 1924 and the Southern Council on Women and Children in Industry in 1931. In a 1927 issue of Current History devoted to the "new woman," suffragists and other activist women noted with satisfaction feminist accomplishments since the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.