In a previous incarnation as a reporter on this newspaper’s metropolitan staff, I was given, during more than one election season, the assignment of casting light on why so few people bother to cast ballots.
This involved approaching folks on sidewalks and asking them a deeply personal question: Had they visited the polling place this time around and why or why not?
Thinking back on the experience now-in light of seeing the program “One Woman, One Vote,” airing Wednesday-it strikes me that, while many African-Americans who had voted said they viewed doing so as an obligation to those who had struggled to secure the right, I can’t recall a woman voter saying something similar.
Part of the reason, I’m sure, is that winning universal voting rights for blacks is a more recent occurrence. Part of it is likely the unscientific nature of my surveys.
But part of it, too, is that woman’s suffrage in the U.S. is sepia-tinted and ill understood: Susan B. Anthony is perhaps better known as the profile on a failed coin than as a civil rights pioneer.
And most of us have been taught American history as a pageant of wars and presidents, with barely a mention of the rather significant fact that women were, by law, second-class citizens through most of the 19th Century, lacking rights to property, to their children, to something so basic as a formal voice-the ballot-in the democracy. It’s an oversight this PBS “American Experience” documentary (9 p.m., WTTW-Ch. 11) should help to correct.
Produced and written by Ruth Pollak with Felicia Widmann for WGBH-Boston, “One Woman, One Vote,” starts in 1848, where it traces the beginnings of women’s suffrage to a meeting of abolitionists and other progressives in Seneca Falls, N.Y.
The rebellious Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 32-year-old wife of an abolitionist, shocked those on hand by calling for the vote as the right “that will secure all others.” Even for those who agreed with the women’s rights cause, this was a stretch of the imagination: Voting was, in the words of a historian interviewed, “a quintessentially male act.”
In the 1850s, Stanton met a Quaker teacher, Susan B. Anthony, and the two would become the movement’s dominant figures. One of the strong points of “One Woman, One Vote,” narrated by Susan Sarandon, is watching the ebbs and flows of their 50-year friendship.
After the Civil War, when black men were given the vote by constitutional amendment, Anthony and Stanton insisted to no avail that women be included too. In the early 1870s (the show is not as precise with dates as it should be), the Supreme Court ruled that while women are citizens under the Constitution, individual states must determine whether they should vote.
By 1896, even as women were winning many of the other rights denied them, voting remained a male privilege in all but four places, all of them frontier outposts: Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho and Utah.
The film is generally good on the infighting among suffragists and on calling them to task for their internal inconsistencies. Many mainstream suffragists, for instance, proved willing to turn away the avid support of African American women in hopes of winning over Southern white women.
But the program suffers early because it fails to set the stage properly. The backdrop of systematic injustice against women is tossed off in a mere couple of sentences, and thus the viewer is robbed of some of the struggle’s emotional force.
But the second and final hour is fascinating. It took the infusion of new and radical blood during the 1910s-constant picketing outside the White House; hunger strikes in prison; and fierce lobbying in Congress-to finally turn the tide toward the eventual passage, in 1920, of the 19th Amendment.
Tennessee was the state where ratification made the amendment law, and “One Woman, One Vote” doesn’t fail to note the irony that the pivotal change of heart came when a young legislator received a letter from his elderly mother admonishing him to “be a good boy” and vote for the 19th Amendment.
