August 1995 marked the 75th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which granted American women the right to vote.
The Library has marked this event by making some of the most valuable materials chronicling the woman suffrage movement available over the Internet's World Wide Web.
On March 6, the Library's American Memory team added digital selections from the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) Collection, 1860-1920, to its online offerings. The collection of 167 books, pamphlets and other printed artifacts consists of selections from the larger NAWSA collection of nearly 1,000 items, which was donated to the Rare Book and Special Collections Division in 1938 by Carrie Chapman Catt.
Catt was a key strategist for the suffrage movement. At the turn of the century, when its original leaders - Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott and others - were aging and its momentum was slowing, Catt picked up the baton and led the movement to victory. She served as president of NAWSA twice, from 1900 to 1904 and again from 1915 to 1920, and her "Winning Plan" of 1916 was the strategy that ultimately led to women's enfranchisement.
The full NAWSA collection was the association's working reference library. Many of the volumes had been owned by Anthony, Stanton, Alice Stone Blackwell, Julia Ward Howe, Elizabeth Smith Miller and Lucy Stone; some volumes include their handwritten annotations.
Some 50 years after Catt donated the NAWSA collection to the Library, Rosemary Fry Plakas, an American history specialist and curator of the NAWSA collection, recommended including it in the American Memory pilot project (1990-1994). The pilot's team digitized selected Americana from the Library's collections and published them on videodisk, CD-ROM and other electronic media. Today, many of these collections are available on the World Wide Web.
Ten thousand pages from the NAWSA collection were chosen for digitization. "The general approach to selection was to showcase NAWSA," said Susan Barber, associate professor of history at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland, who was responsible for selecting items for the digital collection, "and not to include materials for which reprint editions are widely available."
For scholars and graduate researchers, Ms. Barber noted, the online collection "will be a pointer to the physical collection. . . . For everyone else, it can be a very valuable resource by itself, especially for people who can't visit the Library."
The digital collection contains research features not available in the physical version. For example, keyword searching allows researchers to find links among items, links that would be impossible to discern with traditional cataloging, said Ms. Plakas. "There's a lot of information hidden in these sources that's not necessarily reflected in their titles."
Birth of NAWSA
NAWSA was the key American woman suffrage organization for more than 30 years. It was formed in 1890 when the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), led by radical leaders Stanton and Anthony, merged with the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), led by the more conservative Stone, her husband Henry Blackwell and Julia Ward Howe.
The merger ended a 20-year rift between the two groups, which differed on key issues such as whether the 15th Amendment, which enfranchised African American men, should be supplanted by an amendment simultaneously conferring the franchise on both African American men and all women.
The two groups also differed in their strategies. NWSA sought a constitutional amendment, while AWSA thought victory depended on state-by-state campaigns. The new organization, NAWSA, ultimately adopted both strategies.
Reaching the Mainstream
From 1890 to 1900, NAWSA was led alternately by Stanton and Anthony, both then in their 70s. Stanton looked like "the perfect image of a plump, genteel grandmother, always perfectly dressed in black silk with a ruffle at the neck, and with her hair neatly arranged and curled," according to Ms. Barber. In reality, she became more and more radical as she aged - a trend that eventually estranged her from both NAWSA and her lifelong friend Anthony.
Stanton's 1898 edition of The Woman's Bible included her interpretations of biblical verses relating to women - along with three essays "which harshly criticized the Christian Church and its effects on women's status," said Ms. Barber. These essays, very difficult to find in print, are included in the digital collection.
The Woman's Bible and accompanying essays led NAWSA's members to distance themselves from Stanton once and for all. "NAWSA was much more conservative in its membership and outlook than Stanton was ever willing to be," said Ms. Barber. "Stanton had always demanded women's enfranchisement on the basis of strict equality between men and women . . . NAWSA adopted an entirely different approach to suffrage, sometimes referred to as the 'argument based on expediency.'"
Expediency advocates held that women were entitled to vote "precisely because of their differences from men, especially their piety and purity. As the 'mothers of society,' women would use their vote to institute a series of social reforms," Ms. Barber explained.
This argument helped make the movement palatable to "mainstream" women, hundreds of thousands of whom joined as a result. Radicals like Stanton were marginalized, and conservatives like Frances E. Willard, head of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union - w hose "Address Before the Second Biennial Convention of the World's Woman's Christian Temperance Union" is included online - became forces within NAWSA.
The Final Phase
When Carrie Chapman Catt, a schoolteacher and newspaper editor, assumed the leadership in 1900, she piloted the suffrage movement into its final phase. Her "Winning Plan," unveiled in 1916, called for a campaign to secure woman suffrage in at least 36 states, enough to ratify a federal amendment. Women able to vote in those states would then pressure their elected representatives and senators to pass a Constitutional amendment.
Catt's plan succeeded, and - capping 80 years of effort by hundreds of thousands of American women - the 19th Amendment was passed on Aug. 26, 1920.
After its passage, Catt dissolved NAWSA and reorganized it as the League of Women Voters, intended to help educate the new voting force. She served as the league's honorary president until her death in 1947. Her organizational skills earned her the affectionate title, "The General."
Much of the online collection documents NAWSA under Catt's leadership. The Blue Book: Woman Suffrage, History, Arguments, and Results, edited by Frances Bjorkman and Annie G. Porritt (1917), and the essay Objections Answered, by Alice Stone Blackwell, were written during this period to provide concise histories of the movement and "arm suffragettes with arguments to combat their critics," said Ms. Barber.
A concerted effort was also made to represent the variety of opinions and political strategies within the suffrage movement, Ms. Barber added. Hence, the Report of the First Convention on the Civil and Political Rights of Women, 1848, from the landmark meeting in Seneca Falls, N.Y., is included, along with reports of NAWSA meetings up until its last convention in 1921.
A List of Society's Wrongs
The 1848 report includes the "Declaration of Sentiments," modeled by Elizabeth Cady Stanton on the U.S. Declaration of Independence - complete with a list of society's wrongs toward women, akin to the list of grievances against King George III found in the Declaration of Independence. The 1853 convention report includes famous speeches by William Lloyd Garrison, Sojourner Truth and Lucy Stone.
Anthony's 1874 Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony recounts her experiences at the hands of the judicial system after she illegally voted in the presidential election (for Ulysses S. Grant) in 1872, to test the legality of woman suffrage under the 14th Amendment. Anthony was found guilty and ordered to pay a $100 fine.
Anthony not only refused to pay this "unjust penalty," according to Ms. Plakas, but in a dramatic and sustained rebuttal she lectured the court on its denial of her civil rights. She urged all women to heed the revolutionary maxim, "Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God."
The online version of Anthony's book has an image of her ironic inscription: "With thanks from the Condemned."
The digital collection also contains whimsical material, such as a pamphlet entitled "How It Feels to be the Husband of a Suffragette," published by a sympathetic (anonymous) male in 1914.
The National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) Collection, 1860-1920, can be accessed from the Library's American Memory homepage at //memory.loc.gov.
