Male Suffrage in the United States

There was a great thread posted here recently on male suffrage in the UK.

http://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/316qb3/why_has_everyone_forgotten_about_male_suffrage/

I thought it might be a good idea to have a similar discussion on male suffrage in the US.

The general belief, encouraged by feminists, is that white men had the right to vote at the time of the country's founding. Black men were given the right to vote following the Civil War, but disenfranchised in the South due to Jim Crow laws. Women were given the right to vote in 1920 following a century of struggle against the patriarchy.

The reality is much, much more complex.

Wiki has a not terrible entry on the subject of voting rights in the US:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_rights_in_the_United_States

It notes that "At the time of ratification of the Constitution in the late 18th century, most states had property qualifications which restricted the franchise; the exact amount varied by state, but by some estimates, more than half of white men were disenfranchised.[22] "

Additionally, "non-white Americans could also vote in these jurisdictions, provided they could meet the property requirement."

So right away we see that the voting issue is not only linked to sex and race but class.

Lest this devolve into a debate about illegal immigration I won't get into Mexican migrant workers, but suffice it to say that brown men living in California were not exactly lining up at voting booths during the 19th/20th Centuries.

Native American males (and females) were not given the right to vote until 1924. Most probably considered it a waste of time anyway.

Discrimination against poor males and immigrants continued throughout the 19th Century. Sometimes this led to revolts. The Dorr Rebellion of 1841 was a "failed attempt to force broader democracy in the US state of Rhode Island."

"The state used its constitution of the 1663 colonial charter that required a man to own $134 in property to vote."

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorr_Rebellion

By 1850 most property restrictions had been lifted. They were often replaced by literacy tests and poll taxes.

The first literacy test for voting occurred in 1855 Connecticut, and was used to exclude Irish-Catholic immigrants.

I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on Jim Crow laws against blacks because they are well known. Suffice to to say that blacks in the South were sometimes lynched just for trying to vote. Less well known is that laws designed to disenfranchise blacks were also used to disenfranchise poor whites. When Mississippi passed a new poll tax law, the number of qualified white voters fell from 130,000 to 68,000. [From Zinn's A People's History of the United States] An editorial in the Charlotte Observer lauded poll taxes in North Carolina as "the struggle of the white people to rid themselves of the dangers of the rule of negroes and the lower class of whites."

Various Constitutional amendments would eventually mitigate these laws.

Citizenship in both the United States and U.S. States by birth or naturalization, 1868 — see: Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution

Non-white men, 1870 — see: Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution

Women's suffrage

I was surprised to learn that women in New Jersey were allowed to vote from the time of the country's founding. In 1776, the New Jersey Constitution ruled, "all inhabitants of this colony, of full age, who are worth fifty pounds…shall be entitled to vote." This means that, in Jersey at least, propertied women had the right to vote before non-propertied men.

Wyoming allowed women to vote in 1869, and California in 1911.

Universal female suffrage was achieved in 1920.

According to some scholars, the majority of women opposed female suffrage until the early 20th Century. Why?

Karen Straughan has suggested that it is related to conscription, but I haven't been able to find any references to this prior to WWI. Here's a passage by Christina Hoff Sommers on the subject:

"Approved feminist founders like Stanton and Anthony promoted women’s suffrage through appeals to universal rights. Their inspirations were John Locke, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson. Stanton greatly admired Hannah More, whom she called “one of the great minds of her day,” but Stanton’s style of feminism was in the egalitarian tradition of Mary Wollstonecraft. Stanton wrote affectingly on “the individuality of each human soul” and on a woman’s need to be the “arbiter of her own destiny.” She and her sister suffragists brought a feminist Enlightenment to women, but to their abiding disappointment, American women greeted the offer with a mixture of indifference and hostility. Stanton’s words were effective with a relatively small coterie of educated women, mostly on the East Coast. When a suffrage amendment failed dismally in the state of Colorado in 1877, one newspaper editorial called the suffragists “carpetbaggers” promoting an elitist “eastern issue.” The headline read: “Good-bye to the Female Tramps of Boston.”

For many decades, the average American woman simply ignored the cause of suffrage. In a 1902 history of women’s suffrage, Anthony and her coauthor wrote, “The indifference and inertia, the apathy of women lies the greatest obstacle to their enfranchisement.” Throughout the 1880s and 1890s many women actively organized against it. Stanford historian Carl Degler, in his classic 1980 social history, At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present, notes that in 1890, more than twenty thousand women had joined an anti-suffrage group in New York State alone. To prove once and for all that the majority of women wanted the vote, suffragists organized a referendum in Massachusetts in 1895.

Both men and women were allowed to take part. The initiative lost, with 187,000 voting against the franchise and only 110,000 in favor—and of those who voted yes, only 23,000 were women! According to Anthony, “The average man would not vote against granting women the suffrage if all those of his own family brought a strong pressure to bear upon him in its favor.” It is the conventional wisdom that men denied women the ballot. But even a cursory look at the historical record suggests that men were not the only problem.

Degler and other historians believe that, because the vote was associated with individualism and personal assertiveness, many women saw it as both selfish and an attack on their unique and valued place in the family. Some feminist historians denigrate what they call the “cult of domesticity” that proved so beguiling to nineteenth-century women. But they forget that this “cult” freed many rural women from manual labor, improved the material conditions of women’s lives, and coincided with an increase in female life expectancy.

Furthermore, as Degler shows, in nineteenth-century America, both the public and private spheres were prized and valued. The companionate marriages described by Jane Austen were the American domestic ideal. Alexis de Tocqueville commented on the essential equality of the male and female spheres in Democracy in America (1840). Americans, he said, did not think that men and women should perform the same tasks, “but they show an equal regard for both their respective parts; and though their lot is different, they consider both of them as being of equal value.”

Hence, as long as women saw the vote as a threat to their sphere, suffrage was a lost cause. Impassioned feminist rhetoric about freedom, dignity, autonomy, and individual rights fell on deaf ears. If the American women’s movement was going to move forward, the suffrage movement needed new arguments and new ways of thinking that were more respectful and protective of women’s role. Frances Willard showed the way.

Willard served as president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union from 1879 until her death in 1898. Under her leadership, it grew to be the largest and most influential women’s organization in the nation. Today, we associate temperance with Puritanism. But in the late nineteenth century, most feminists, including Stanton and Anthony, supported it. Temperance advocates believed that a ban on the sale of alcohol would greatly diminish wife abuse, desertion, destitution, and crime. In other words, temperance was a movement in defense of the home—the female sphere.

Willard was proud of women’s role as the “angel in the house.” But why, she asked, limit these angels to the home? With the vote, Willard said, women could greatly increase their civilizing and humane influence on society. With the vote, they could protect the homes they so dearly loved. Indeed, Willard referred to the vote as “the home protection ballot.” Women were moved by this, and men were disarmed."

Most of the suffragettes appear to have been just as racist as their male counterparts.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote: "What will we and our daughters suffer if these degraded black men are allowed to have the rights that would make them even worse than our Saxon fathers?"

Carrie Chapman Catt, the Founder of the League of Women Voters: "White supremacy will be strengthened, not weakened, by women's suffrage."

In conclusion: it appears that class has been the main engine of disenfranchisement in US history, followed by race and ethnicity/religious beliefs/country of origin. Sex was an important factor, but women were not excluded primarily due to "patriarchy" but because the majority of women did not want the right to vote due to fear that they would be burdened with additional responsibilities and that their own "sphere of influence" would be lessened. When they were convinced otherwise, they were allowed to vote -- minus the obligation to die in wars.