How women got the vote in Oklahoma

In a recent post, I noted that Oklahoma voters passed an amendment in November 1918 granting women the right to vote in this state. You might well wonder, how did women in a conservative state like Oklahoma win the suffrage before passage of the federal amendment?

Oklahoma's history is more complicated than you might imagine, but that's a story for another time. For the moment, suffice it to say, an account of the Oklahoma suffrage campaign can be found in Eleanor Flexner's Century of Struggle:The Woman's Rights Movement in the United States. This campaign took place in the context of the difficult final campaign to win the vote for US women, which finally gained victory on August 26, 1920.

According to Flexner, after suffering through "the doldrums" during the years 1896-1910, the movement to gain the vote for US women gained new life in the second decade of the 20th century. The old National American Woman Suffrage Association had stagnated, limited, in part by the refusal of the (white) members of its southern affiliates to support a federal amendment because that would interfere with "states rights."

The upstart Congressional Union, led by Alice Paul, began a militant campaign of demonstrating and lobbying for a federal suffrage amendment. This spurred NAWSA, now under the leadership of Carrie Chapman Catt, into new effectiveness. Catt developed a "winning plan" that involved working for both the federal amendment and state amendments.

In the November 1918 elections, NAWSA targeted four anti-suffrage US Senators for defeat, and managed to remove Republican Weeks of Massachusetts and Democrat Saulsbury of Delaware. Flexner writes that  this election also "saw four state suffrage referenda come up, of which threee were victorious, South Dakota, Michigan, and Oklahoma, while the fourth, Louisiana, lost by only a few thousand votes, a showing of some consequence in a southern state."

Flexner describes what happened in Oklahoma on pages 305-306 of Century of Struggle.

The difficulties encountered by the suffragists in Oklahoma referendum probably represented the worst in unprincipled opposition in any suffrage campaign. There were innumerable special local problems, not the least of  which was a complete breakdown of the state suffrage organization after the campaign was underway. This was particularly serious because the Oklahoma state constitution required that the number of votes in favor of an amendment must exceed the total, not only of the negative votes, but also of  those ballots not marked either for  or against. The Governor, Attorney General and Secretary of the State Elections Board left no stone unturned to defeat the suffrage amendment. They even went to such lengths as printing only half as many ballots on the amendment as regular ballots and withholding them altogether from soldiers voting in the army camps in the state. The National kept two of its best  organizers,  the Shuler mother-and-daughter  team, in Oklahoma for months and spent more money on the campaign--nearly $20,000--than in any other state. Flagrant efforts were made after election day to count out what was clearly a suffrage victory, and the last National organizer did not leave Oklahoma until December 3, one month later, when the Governor finally surrendered to the facts of life and proclaimed the measure passed.

As her source for this information, Flexner cites  pages 529-535 of the History of Woman Suffrage.

I've quoted from the "enlarged edition" of Century of Struggle published in 1996 by Harvard University's Belknap Press. Ellen Fitzpatrick is listed as co-author of this edition. Having read an earlier edition of the work, it appears to me that Fitzpatrick's contribution to this volume consisted mostly of writing a foreward and afterword, which do provide interesting information about Eleanor Flexner, the creation of the book, and the relationship of the first wave of US women's rights activism to the contemporary feminist movement.