Women's History Month 2020: Suffrage and World War I

Life, 1 July 1915

In the decade right before the passing of the 19th amendment something happened that would have a profound affect on the fight for suffrage. World War I broke out.

Wars require a country's population to work together, especially on the home front, as changes to life occur and people are required to make sacrifices to their every day lives. World War I was no exception.

World War I required suffragists to basically put away their ongoing protest of the Wilson administration and help with the war effort. And that's what those suffrage groups did. Though many suffrage leaders were pacifists they enlisted the help of members and went to work on the home front.

"In Cleveland the Suffrage party converted its club room into a Red Cross center; and their leading member, Belle Sherwin, served as chairman of the local Council of National Defense." Most of the county chairmen of the Council of National Defense in Minnesota were suffragists, and others devoted time to Red Cross work and knitting." Suffrage leaders started reporting that they didn't have time for suffrage work because they were too busy helping organizations like the Red Cross. [1]

Even though suffragists were helping the war effort in the US and abroad, anti-suffragists still criticized them as being "conditional patriots" and likened suffrage to  socialism and feminism as three branches of the same tree of Social Revolution."[2]

President "Woodrow Wilson, after years of opposition, finally supported the suffrage amendment in January 1918, endorsing it as a war measure." "..He wrote that the war could not have been prosecuted without the women, and the nation's debt of gratitude could be paid by granting suffrage. " [3]

Resources

Interested in filling in the genealogy and social history of your female ancestors that lived during World War I? I explored 30 days of records for that period during  Women's History Month 2017. You can read those posts here.

The National World War I Museum - Women's Suffrage 
World War One Centennial Comission - Alice Paul and the Suffrage Movement during World War I
Library of Congress - Suffrage and World War I





[1] Lemons, J S. The Woman Citizen: Social Feminism in the 1920s. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990. pr. 7
[2] Ibid, pg. 10
[3] Ibid, pg. 13.