The Vote: Reactions from the West
I have been looking forward to watching PBS’s newest documentary, The Vote, this week. I was prepared for the Western states’ early suffrage victories to receive scant attention, but even with low expectations I was disappointed. The enfranchisement of women in Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and Idaho was given approximately 30 second and was credited to typical arguments around “frontier spirit”. In my new book, Pioneering the Vote,” I argue that the reason those four states first enfranchised their women is much more complicated, but much more uncomfortable, than just passing them off as the Wild West.
As tempting as it is to check off these first four suffrage wins before 1896 as aberrations, they were, in reality, the harbingers of and training grounds for all that came after. After the 15th Amendment failed to grant suffrage rights to women as well as black men, the national suffrage leaders shifted away from their efforts around a federal amendment and instead focused their energies on a state-by-state movement, building suffrage campaigns into the writing of new state constitutions or demanding public referenda on existing constitutions. This strategy dominated the suffrage movement for the next four decades. It was slow, tedious work, as suffragists went to the male voters or constitutional delegates in individual states and territories, currying favor and winning the men over one at a time.
The method preferred by Western leaders such as Emma De Voe was the “still hunt,” an approach that demanded a genteel and respectful attitude toward the male voting audience. For years, personal visits, letter writing, endless travel and petitions dominated the lobbying approach. Large conference and lectures were standard - such as the famous Indignation Meetings in Salt Lake City in 1869 when 15% of the territory’s population participated, and the Rocky Mountain Suffrage Conference which the book is about - but it wasn’t until 1913 with Alice Paul’s march in Washington D.C. that the ladies tipped into the realm of public display for demands.
The media riches of the Progressive Era that are available to those studying the 20th century suffrage movement are indeed illustrative and moving. The PBS documentary does a remarkable job of unearthing precious video and previously unheralded photography. Documentary is a visual medium and thrives off of footage like this. But to spend so little time on the movement’s first 40 years - the decades during which the western United States was making strides unimagined in the East, when the state by state approach dominated and the still hunt was considered the acceptable way to petition for what they wanted - doesn’t do justice to the early pioneers of the movement.
