National American Woman Suffrage Association
The National American Woman Suffrage Association was an organization formed on February 18, 1890, to advocate in favor of women's suffrage in the United States. It was created by the merger of two existing organizations, the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association. Its membership, which was about seven thousand at the time it was formed, eventually increased to two million, making it the largest voluntary organization in the nation. It played a pivotal role in the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which in 1920 guaranteed women's right to vote.
Susan B. Anthony, a long-time leader in the suffrage movement, was the dominant figure in the newly formed NAWSA. Carrie Chapman Catt, who became president after Anthony retired in 1900, implemented a strategy of recruiting wealthy members of the rapidly growing women's club movement, whose time, money and experience could help build the suffrage movement. Anna Howard Shaw's term in office, which began in 1904, saw strong growth in the organization's membership and public approval.
After the Senate decisively rejected the proposed women's suffrage amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1887, the suffrage movement had concentrated most of its efforts on state suffrage campaigns. In 1910 Alice Paul joined the NAWSA and played a major role in reviving interest in the national amendment. After continuing conflicts with the NAWSA leadership over tactics, Paul created a rival organization, the National Woman's Party.
When Catt again became president in 1915, the NAWSA adopted her plan to centralize the organization, and work toward the suffrage amendment as its primary goal. This was done despite opposition from Southern members who believed that a federal amendment would erode states' rights. With its large membership and the increasing number of women voters in states where suffrage had already been achieved, the NAWSA began to operate more as a political pressure group than an educational group. It won additional sympathy for the suffrage cause by actively cooperating with the war effort during World War I. On February 14, 1920, several months prior to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, the NAWSA transformed itself into the League of Women Voters, which is still active.
Background
The demand for women's suffrage in the United States was controversial even among women's rights activists in the early days of the movement. In 1848, a resolution in favor of women's right to vote was approved only after vigorous debate at the Seneca Falls Convention, the first women's rights convention. By the time of the National Women's Rights Conventions in the 1850s, the situation had changed, and women's suffrage had become a preeminent goal of the movement.Three leaders of the women's movement during this period, Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony, played prominent roles in the creation of the NAWSA many years later.
In 1866, just after the American Civil War, the Eleventh National Women's Rights Convention transformed itself into the American Equal Rights Association, which worked for equal rights for both African Americans and white women, especially suffrage.
The AERA essentially collapsed in 1869, partly because of disagreement over the proposed Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which would enfranchise African American men. Leaders of the women's movement were dismayed that it would not also enfranchise women. Stanton and Anthony opposed its ratification unless it was accompanied by another amendment that would enfranchise women.
Stone supported the amendment. She believed that its ratification would spur politicians to support a similar amendment for women. She said that even though the right to vote was more important for women than for black men, "I will be thankful in my soul if any body can get out of the terrible pit."
In May 1869, two days after the acrimonious debates at what turned out to be the final AERA annual meeting, Anthony, Stanton and their allies formed the National Woman Suffrage Association. In November 1869, the American Woman Suffrage Association was formed by Lucy Stone, her husband Henry Blackwell, Julia Ward Howe and their allies, many of whom had helped to create the New England Woman Suffrage Association a year earlier as part of the developing split.
The bitter rivalry between the two organizations created a partisan atmosphere that endured for decades.
Even after the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified in 1870, differences between the two organizations remained. The AWSA worked almost exclusively for women's suffrage while the NWSA initially worked on a wide range of issues, including divorce reform and equal pay for women. The AWSA included both men and women among its leadership while the NWSA was led by women.
The AWSA worked for suffrage mostly at the state level while the NWSA worked more at the national level.
The AWSA cultivated an image of respectability while the NWSA sometimes used confrontational tactics. Anthony, for example, interrupted the official ceremonies at the 100th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence to present NWSA's Declaration of Rights for Women.
Anthony was arrested in 1872 for voting, which was still illegal for women, and was found guilty in a highly publicized trial.
Progress toward women's suffrage was slow in the period after the split, but advancement in other areas strengthened the underpinnings of the movement. By 1890, tens of thousands of women were attending colleges and universities, up from zero a few decades earlier.
There was a decline in public support for the idea of "woman's sphere", the belief that a woman's place was in the home and that she should not be involved in politics. Laws that had allowed husbands to control their wives' activities had been significantly revised. There was a dramatic growth in all-female social reform organizations, such as the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, the largest women's organization in the country. In a major boost for the suffrage movement, the WCTU endorsed women's suffrage in the late 1870s on the grounds that women needed the vote to protect their families from alcohol and other vices.
Anthony increasingly began to emphasize suffrage over other women's rights issues. Her aim was to unite the growing number of women's organizations in the demand for suffrage even if they did not support other women's rights issues. She and the NWSA also began placing less emphasis on confrontational actions and more on respectability. The NWSA was no longer seen as an organization that challenged traditional family arrangements by supporting, for example, what its opponents called "easy divorce". All this had the effect of moving it into closer alignment with the AWSA.
The Senate's rejection in 1887 of the proposed women's suffrage amendment to the U.S. Constitution also brought the two organizations closer together. The NWSA had worked for years to convince Congress to bring the proposed amendment to a vote. After it was voted on and decisively rejected, the NWSA began to put less energy into campaigning at the federal level and more at the state level, as the AWSA was already doing.
Stanton continued to promote all aspects of women's rights. She advocated a coalition of radical social reform groups, including Populists and Socialists, who would support women's suffrage as part of a joint list of demands.
In a letter to a friend, Stanton said the NWSA "has been growing politic and conservative for some time. Lucy and Susan alike see suffrage only. They do not see woman's religious and social bondage, neither do the young women in either association, hence they may as well combine".
Stanton, however, had largely withdrawn from the day-to-day activity of the suffrage movement.
She spent much of her time with her daughter in England during this period. Despite their different approaches, Stanton and Anthony remained friends and co-workers, continuing a collaboration that had begun in the early 1850s.
Stone devoted most of her life after the split to the Woman's Journal, a weekly newspaper she launched in 1870 to serve as voice of the AWSA. By the 1880s, the Woman's Journal had broadened its coverage and was seen by many as the newspaper of the entire movement.
The suffrage movement was attracting younger members who were impatient with the continuing division, seeing the obstacle more as a matter of personalities than principles. Alice Stone Blackwell, daughter of Lucy Stone, said, "When I began to work for a union, the elders were not keen for it, on either side, but the younger women on both sides were. Nothing really stood in the way except the unpleasant feelings engendered during the long separation".
Merger of rival organizations
Several attempts had been made to bring the two sides together, but without success.The situation changed in 1887 when Stone, who was approaching her 70th birthday and in declining health, began to seek ways of overcoming the split. In a letter to suffragist Antoinette Brown Blackwell, she suggested the creation of an umbrella organization of which the AWSA and the NWSA would become auxiliaries, but that idea did not gain supporters.
In November 1887, the AWSA annual meeting passed a resolution authorizing Stone to confer with Anthony about the possibility of a merger. The resolution said the differences between the two associations had "been largely removed by the adoption of common principles and methods."
Stone forwarded the resolution to Anthony along with an invitation to meet with her.
Anthony and Rachel Foster, a young leader of the NWSA, traveled to Boston in December 1887, to meet with Stone. Accompanying Stone at this meeting was her daughter Alice Stone Blackwell, who also was an officer of the AWSA. Stanton, who was in England at the time, did not attend. The meeting explored several aspects of a possible merger, including the name of the new organization and its structure. Stone had second thoughts soon afterwards, telling a friend she wished they had never offered to unite, but the merger process slowly continued.
An early public sign of improving relations between the two organizations occurred three months later at the founding congress of the International Council of Women, which the NWSA organized and hosted in Washington in conjunction with the fortieth anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention. It received favorable publicity, and its delegates, who came from fifty-three women's organizations in nine countries, were invited to a reception at the White House. Representatives from the AWSA were invited to sit on the platform during the meetings along with representatives from the NWSA, signaling a new atmosphere of cooperation.
The proposed merger did not generate significant controversy within the AWSA. The call to its annual meeting in 1887, the one that authorized Stone to explore the possibility of merger, did not even mention that this issue would be on the agenda. This proposal was treated in a routine manner during the meeting and was approved unanimously without debate.
The situation was different within the NWSA, where there was strong opposition from Matilda Joslyn Gage, Olympia Brown and others.
Ida Husted Harper, Anthony's co-worker and biographer, said the NWSA meetings that dealt with this issue "were the most stormy in the history of the association."
Charging that Anthony had used underhanded tactics to thwart opposition to the merger, Gage formed a competing organization in 1890 called the Woman's National Liberal Union, but it did not develop a significant following.
The AWSA and NWSA committees that negotiated the terms of merger signed a basis for agreement in January, 1889. In February, Stone, Stanton, Anthony and other leaders of both organizations issued an "Open Letter to the Women of America" declaring their intention to work together. When Anthony and Stone first discussed the possibility of merger in 1887, Stone had proposed that she, Stanton and Anthony should all decline the presidency of the united organization. Anthony initially agreed, but other NWSA members objected strongly. The basis for agreement did not include that stipulation.
The AWSA initially was the larger of the two organizations,
but it had declined in strength during the 1880s.
The NWSA was perceived as the main representative of the suffrage movement, partly because of Anthony's ability to find dramatic ways of bringing suffrage to the nation's attention.
Anthony and Stanton had also published their massive History of Woman Suffrage, which placed them at the center of the movement's history and marginalized the role of Stone and the AWSA.
Stone's public visibility had declined significantly, contrasting sharply with the attention she had attracted in her younger days as a speaker on the national lecture circuit.
Anthony was increasingly recognized as a person of political importance. In 1890, prominent members of the House and Senate were among the two hundred people who attended her seventieth birthday celebration, a national event that took place in Washington three days before the convention that united the two suffrage organizations. Anthony and Stanton pointedly reaffirmed their friendship at this event, frustrating opponents of merger who had hoped to set them against one another.