THE VOTE | PBS, American Experience, July 6 and 7, 9 pm

Inez Milholland Boissevain's last words before collapsing in Los Angeles in 1916:
"Mr. President: How long must women wait for liberty?"

July 6, 2020—American Experience on PBS will be showing "The Vote," a two-part series on Channel 13, tonight, July 6th and tomorrow, July 7th, at 9pm. The 19th Amendment, which extended the vote to women, was ratified by the last required state (Tennessee) in August 1920. This year marks the Centennial. Through hundreds of photographs, antique video footage, and illuminating commentary, "The Vote" tells the frustrating but exciting story of the 72-year struggle by American women for political equality.

WILSON | Oct. 2 – Felled by Stroke

Woodrow Wilson

October 2, 2017 – This day in 1919, President Woodrow Wilson suffered a stroke.

It happened after he curtailed an 8,000-mile  national tour to promote U.S. membership in the League of Nations. The trip cost Wilson his health.

Wilson's tour had its parallel in the tour that Inez Milholland Boissevain undertook in 1916 to campaign against Wilson for not supporting the Anthony Amendment.

Both Inez and the President suffered constant headaches during their tours. Both finally collapsed – Inez in October 1916 in Los Angeles, Wilson in September 1919 in Pueblo, Colorado.

Both failed in their mission, but contributed to it, and had their health not given out might have seen their goals achieved. Inez failed to defeat Wilson, although the California vote was so close the results were weeks in becoming final – but her death was the inciting incident in the picketing of the White House, and the Anthony Amendment was passed with Wilson's support in 1919, with ratification as the 19th Amendment the following year.

Similarly, Wilson's campaign for membership in a world body was ended by his collapse, but was achieved after his death in 1945, with U.S. membership in the United Nations.

After his collapse, Wilson returned to Washington, but suffered a massive stroke on October 2. Wilson’s wife Edith blamed it on Wilson's Republican Congressional opponents, because they attacked Wilson personally on issues relating to the League of Nations.

Edith kept quiet the extent of Wilson’s incapacitation. While Wilson lay in bed motionless, Edith is reported to have screened his messages, and sometimes signed her husband's name without consulting him.

In her memoirs she said she acted as her husband's steward. Her husband continued to serve as President and partly regained his health, but remained paralyzed on one side. He did not return to his campaign for U.S. membership in the League, and the United States never joined, since Republican Warren Harding was opposed and he was elected President in 1920. Wilson died in 1924.

VOTES FOR WOMEN | Wilson Supports Anthony Amendment (Sept. 30)

Woodrow Wilson walks past "Silent Sentinels" from
the National Woman's Party.

September 30 – On this day in 1918, President Woodrow supports the "Anthony Amendment", which guarantees women the right to vote.

The House had approved the amendment, but the Senate had not.

The 15th Amendment had already prohibited denial of the vote for reasons of race, color or servitude:

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. 

It does not mention gender; in fact neither women nor gender are mentioned in the U.S. Constitution until the 19th amendment. The Constitution (Article I, section 2) provides that members of the House of Representatives are elected in each state by those qualified to vote for their state legislature’s lower (or “most numerous”) house. This standard was changed by the 15th, 17th, 19th (the Anthony Amendment), 24th and 27th Amendments.

Wilson had refused to support the proposed Anthony Amendment at a meeting in January 1917 with a delegation of several hundred women from the National Woman's Party. They went to see him at the White House in the name of the late Inez Milholland, for whom a huge memorial service had been held on Christmas Day 1916.

Immediately after that January meeting, at which Wilson patronized the delegation and refused to support the Anthony Amendment, the White House was picketed by activists from the National Woman's Party. Many suffragists who supported the National Woman's Party, including the leader of the National Woman's Party, Alice Paul, were opposed to U.S. participation in the war in Europe and were not deterred from their picketing by the U.S. entry into the war in April 1917.

The protests grew in defiance until several van loads of women were arrested, jailed and eventually taken to the Occaquan workhouse in Lorton, Virginia. There the Pankhurst-trained suffragettes went on a hunger strike.

Wilson said he was shocked to hear about the force-feeding. He agreed to support passage of the amendment in the Senate. He attributed his change in sentiment to the women from the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) who helped with the war effort:

[W]e have made partners of the women in this war… Shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right?

The bill failed to pass in the Senate despite Wilson's support. But the following year, in 1919,  Congress passed the 19th Amendment.  The last state to achieve the two-thirds ratification was Tennessee in August 1920.

INEZ | 5A. Sept. 30–Wilson Supports Anthony Amendment

Wilson opposed the Anthony
Amendment until Sept. 30, 1917.

On this day in 1918 President Woodrow Wilson endorsed the Anthony Amendment, having opposed it during his re-election year of 1916.

The House of Representatives approved the amendment to give women the right to vote in Federal elections, the Senate had yet to vote for it. Until the amendment was passed and ratified (as it was in August 1920), it was up to each state to decide who would vote in Federal elections.

Wilson opposed the Anthony Amendment in his first term and in his re-election campaign in 1916. Inez Milholland went on a whistle-stop speaking tour with her sister Vida to get women to vote against Wilson in the western territories, where women had the right to vote in Federal elections.

She noted that Wilson had opposed suffrage for women. He may have kept us out of the war, she said, but he also "kept us out of suffrage".

Inez Milholland Boissevain died in Los Angeles in November 1916 after having collapsed on stage - exhausted by her campaign and ignoring serious illness - and a delegation of women called on Wilson in early 1917 to ask him to reconsider supporting woman suffrage because of the death of Inez Milholland. (Wilson in the White House video.)

Inez Milholland and her sister Vida conducted a whistle-
stop tour in 1916 to campaign against Wilson for not
supporting the Anthony Amendment.

Wilson scornfully dismissed the women from the National Woman's Party as being politically naive and they reacted by instituting a nonstop picket of the White House. The protests reached a crescendo when several women were arrested, jailed and went on a hunger strike. Wilson was appalled to learn that the jailed suffragists were being force-fed and he finally stepped in to champion their cause.

Rather than give any credit to the picketers, Wilson attributed his change of heart to the debt that America owed to the country’s women. In his September 30 speech to Congress, Wilson said:

We have made partners of the women in this war… Shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right?

However, the bill died in the Senate and it would be another year before Congress finally passed the 19th amendment giving women the right to vote.

INEZ | 5B. Aug. 18 - Women Get the Vote [4]

Picketing Wilson's White House in 1917

On this date in 1920, 95 years ago, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, making it the law of the land.

The 19th Amendment extended the franchise to all women. Previously, some states allowed women to vote, but it was a state option.

Credit for being the state that put the Amendment over the top - 36 out of the 48 states were required - goes to Tennessee, although Connecticut was ready to vote in favor if Tennessee failed.

The so-called "Anthony Amendment", named after suffragist Susan B. Anthony, was first proposed in Congress in 1878, and in every subsequent Congress.

After Susan B. Anthony died in Rochester in 1906, young women feared that the Anthony Amendment might languish. New suffragist leaders emerged in women's colleges and some of them - including Alice Paul and Inez Milholland - trained with the suffragettes led by Mrs. Pankhurst in Britain.

Milholland energized Vassar students before her graduation in 1909. When she graduated, the harassed President, James Monroe Taylor, said to her father, John E. Milholland: "Wonderful girl. I'm glad she's gone."

In 1912 Milholland led on horseback a suffrage parade down Fifth Avenue in New York. In 1913 she led on horseback a parade from the Capitol to the White House. Three years later she campaigned against Woodrow Wilson on a single issue - his not supporting the Anthony Amendment.

Milholland died during her campaign of "pernicious anemia" - what we would diagnose today as a Vitamin B12 deficiency. She collapsed while giving a speech against Wilson in Los Angeles. She died six weeks later.

A delegation of women visited Wilson in January 1917, and he ridiculed their appeal to him in the name of Milholland's death, saying they were ignorant of politics. The women from the National Woman's Party immediately started a non-stop picket of the White House. Eventually, the District of Columbia police arrested the picketers and they were taken to a Lorton, Md. workhouse for women. There they began a hunger strike. The news reports gradually changed public opinion in favor of suffrage.

Worn down by the pickets and World War I, Wilson finally got behind the Anthony Amendment and in 1919 it narrowly passed both houses of Congress. Most Southern states opposed the amendment, and on August 18, 1920, the Tennessee legislature was in line to be the last needed state to ratify the Amendment.

The suffragists wore yellow roses in their lapels, and the anti-suffragists wore red American Beauty roses. The state legislature was tied 48 to 48. Only one legislator was undecided, 24-year-old Harry Burn, the youngest. He had been expected to vote against it, but he had in his pocket a note from his mother, which read:

Dear Son: Hurrah, and vote for suffrage! Don't keep them in doubt. I noticed some of the speeches against. They were bitter. I have been watching to see how you stood, but have not noticed anything yet. Don't forget to be a good boy and help Mrs. Catt put the 'rat' in ratification. Your Mother.

He voted in favor and the 19th Amendment to the Constitution became law.