Woman's Suffrage

By Herbert F. Janick

In August 1920 the Nineteenth Amendment was approved by the required number of states, and American women had thus achieved the right to vote. Connecticut's male leadership was stubborn on this issue until the end. Both Connecticut's United States Senators, Frank Brandegee (1864-1924) and George McLean (1857-1932), voted against the Amendment. Connecticut delegates to the 1920 Republican Convention were instrumental in crippling the suffrage plank in the party platform. Governor Marcus Holcomb shrugged off a petition with the signature of 103,000 women and refused to call a special session of the General Assembly to consider ratification.

The official resistance of Connecticut to extending the vote to women obscures the existence of an organized suffrage movement in the state. In 1869 the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association was born. Under the direction of Isabella Beecher Hooker (1822-1907) for thirty-six years, the CWSA achieved some success. In 1903 and 1909 women were allowed to vote on school and library matters. The combination of aging leadership in the CWSA and the resistance of the conservative, rural-dominated General Assembly, however, made more significant advances impossible.

In 1910 a group of young, middle-class women led by Katherine Houghton Hepburn (1878-1951), Katherine Ludington (1869-1953), Emily Pierson (1881-1971), Caroline Ruutz-Rees (1865-1954), Valeria Parker (1879-1959), and Grace Seton (1872- 1959) took control of the CWSA. College-educated and often with careers outside the home in education, medicine, and literature, they advanced arguments of both idealism and expediency to promote their cause. Working closely with the Connecticut National Womans Party, organized in 1916 by Alice Paul (1885-1977) and other militants, they concentrated on a new strategy of building support for the Federal Amendment. Between 1917 and 1920 a network of women, by means of petitions, letters, meetings, publications, and political threats, sought in vain to convince the Connecticut General Assembly to act favorably on the Nineteenth Amendment.

Following the national passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, few Connecticut females were elected to office in the next decade. By 1931 only forty-seven women had served in the General Assembly, and none had gained positions of influence. The Republican-dominated state government ignored issues of interest to women such as child care. During the 1920s women were forced to operate outside the power structure through such organizations as the Connecticut Association of Collegiate Women, the League of Nations Association, and especially, the League of Women Voters, to perpetuate the unity and reform zeal that was the strength of the woman suffrage movement.

For Further Reading

There is a vast literature on woman suffrage in the United States. Two key books are Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle (New York, 1973) and Aileen Kraditor, The Ideas of Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890-1920 (Garden City, New York, 1965). Carole Nichols, "A New Force in Politics: The Suffragists' Experience in Connecticut" (Master's Thesis, Sarah Lawrence University, 1979), is an excellent detailed study of the state scene.

* Entry under revision.