American Woman Suffrage Association

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Lucy Stone, the co-founder of AWSA and the Woman's Journal

The American Woman Suffrage Association ( AWSA ) was a single-purpose organization founded in the United States in 1869. She wanted to lobby state governments to enact laws that would introduce or expand women's suffrage. Its most prominent leader, Lucy Stone , began publishing a weekly magazine in 1870 called Woman's Journal . Drafted as the voice of the AWSA, it gradually became the leading paper for the entire women's movement.

In 1890 the AWSA merged with the competing organization, the National Woman Suffrage Association . The new association was called the National American Woman Suffrage Association and was initially headed by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton , who had previously been the leaders of the NWSA.

Prehistory and double founding

Henry Blackwell, Lucy's young husband, co-editor of Woman's Journal

After the Civil War , leaders of the abolitionism movement and the women's suffrage movement founded the American Equal Rights Association (AERA) in 1866 in order to enforce the right to vote regardless of race or gender. Differences of opinion among the group members, which had existed from the beginning, were revealed during the struggle to ratify two constitutional amendments (so-called "amendments" to the United States Constitution). The proposed 14th Amendment , which guaranteed equal legal protection for all citizens regardless of race, color, creed or previous employment status, added the word “male” to the constitution for the first time. The proposed 15th Amendment extended the right to vote to African American men, but not to women in general. By following its controversial agreement of 1869, the AERA association dissolved. This led to the formation of two new women's rights organizations to campaign for women's suffrage, the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) and the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA).

The AWSA was founded in November 1869 during a convention in Cleveland organized by the boards of the New England Woman Suffrage Association (NEWSA). This emerged in November 1868 as part of a developing split in the women's movement. The AWSA and the NEWSA worked separately, but with a partially overlapping board. In 1870, Lucy Stone , the leader of the AWSA, began publishing an eight-page weekly newspaper that called herself the voice of the AWSA Woman's Journal . Gradually it became the authoritative journal for the entire women's movement. The more radical NWSA, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, condemned the 15th Amendment as an injustice to women. The AWSA was the more conservative of the two groups. Its founders, including Lucy Stone , Henry Browne Blackwell , Julia Ward Howe, and Josephine Ruffin , were very supportive of the Republican Party and the 15th Amendment , which they said could not be enforced if it included women's suffrage . Another member was the well-known abolitionist and women's rights lawyer Sojourner Truth .

Compared to NWSA

The AWSA differed from the NWSA in several ways:

  • The AWSA admitted both men and women as members, the NWSA only women.
  • The AWSA did not want to fight for other problems of gender equality, it focused its efforts only on the right to vote. The NWSA also commented on other women's rights issues, such as easier divorce laws and an end to discrimination against women in professional life and in pay.
  • The AWSA believed that success could be more easily achieved through state-by-state campaigns. As part of this strategy, the association adopted a state structure and established state and local sub-clubs scattered across the United States, particularly in the east and midwest. The early NWSA insisted on securing women's suffrage through an amendment to the constitution, although efforts were expanded to include the states during the 1880s.
  • The AWSA supported traditional social institutions such as marriage and religion. The NWSA criticized certain aspects of these institutions because they felt they were unfair to women.
  • The AWSA used less militant influencing tactics such as petition drives, speeches in parliaments and public speeches.

The AWSA also started its own paper, the Woman's Journal . Edited by Lucy Stone, it featured articles by Union members and cartoons by Blanche Ames, Lou Rogers, Mary Sigsbee, Fredrikke Palmer and Rollin Kirby. Several state and local organizations affiliated with the AWSA also published magazines, most notably the Women Voter ( New York City ), the Maryland Suffrage News ( Baltimore ), and the Western Woman Voter ( Seattle ). The NWSA used lawsuits and other confrontational tactics to get attention to their cause.

Political successes

There have been some modest but significant achievements in women's suffrage over the twenty-year period of AWSA's activities. Women in two western states, Wyoming and Utah , won the right to vote. Every year, several states discuss women's suffrage, but none enforced it. Eight other states considered holding referenda on the issue, but none were later successful.

Foundation of the "National American Woman Suffrage Association"

The AWSA was originally larger than the NWSA, but it lost strength during the 1880s. Stanton and Anthony, the leading figures in the NWSA, were more widely known as leaders of the women's suffrage movement during this period and proved more influential in setting the movement's goals. But it became increasingly clear in the 1880s that the group rivalries were counterproductive to achieving the goal of women's suffrage. Discussions regarding a merger of AWSA and NWSA began in 1886. After several years of negotiation, the organizations officially merged in 1890 under the new name National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). The board of directors of this new association included: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Carrie Chapman Catt , Frances Willard , Mary Church Terrell , Matilda Joslyn Gage and Anna Howard Shaw . Stanton served as the first woman president of NAWSA in a largely symbolic way, while in reality Anthony was the leading force. This association of the women's suffrage movement distinguished itself from groups of women workers and aimed primarily at the upper classes of society.

The first three volumes of the six-volume History of Woman Suffrage had been written by the two leaders of the NWSA before the merger. They contained a 107 page chapter on the history of the AWSA, the bitter rival of the NWSA, but provided much more information about the NWSA itself, written from its own subjective perspective. This unbalanced representation of movement influenced the scientific investigation in the field for many years. It wasn't until about the middle of the 20th century that the AWSA received equal scientific attention.

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) , History of Woman Suffrage , Volume 2, Chapter XXVI, p. 756
  2. ^ Lee Ann Banaszak: Why Movements Succeed and Fail. Princeton University Press 1996. pp. 6-8. - "The exclusion of women from voting was so unchallenged in the nineteenth century that it was not necessary to have a law prohibiting this participation."
  3. ↑ Ellen DuBois: The Radicalism of the Women Suffrage Movement . JSTOR 1975, p. 2
  4. ^ Ellen Carol DuBois: Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848-1869 . Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press 1978. pp. 164, 195-196. ISBN 0-8014-8641-6
  5. ^ Sally Gregory McMillen: Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women's Rights Movement . New York Oxford University Press 2008. pp. 208, 224. ISBN 0-19-518265-0
  6. ^ Nell Irvin Painter: 2: Voices of Suffrage: Sojourner Truth, Francis Watkins Harper, and the Struggle for Woman Suffrage . In: Jean Baker (Ed.): Votes for Women . Oxford University Press, New York 2002, ISBN 0-19-513017-0 , pp. 51-53.
  7. ↑ Jennifer McBain-Stephens. New York, Rosen Publication Group 2006. pp. 16-19.
  8. ^ Eleanor Flexner: Century of Struggle: The Woman's Rights Movement in the United States . Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press 1996
  9. ^ Kathryn Cullen-DuPont: Encyclopedia of Women's History in America. Infobase Publishing. ISBN 9781438110332
  10. ^ The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony: Place Inside the Body-Politic, 1887 to 1895. Ed. Ann D. Gordon. Rutgers University Press 2009, Vol. 5, pp. Xxv, 55. ISBN 978-0-8135-2321-7
  11. ↑ Faye E. Dudden: Fighting Chance: The Struggle over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America, New York. Oxford University Press 2011. p. 12. ISBN 978-0-19-977263-6
  12. ↑ Ida Husted Harper, Susan B. Anthony: History of Woman Suffrage. Indianapolis, IN, The Hollenbeck Press 1902
  13. ↑ Ellen Carol DuBois: Woman Suffrage and Women's Rights . New York, New York University Press 1998. pp. 216, 234. ISBN 0-8147-1901-5

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