Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Spring 1997
Document Type
Article
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 2, Spring 1997, pp. 131-42.
Abstract
Suffrage activism began in Nebraska in 1856 when Amelia Bloomer addressed the territorial house of representatives and argued that women should not be denied the right to vote.1 The house passed the bill, but the forty-day session ended before the council could vote on it. As Ann Wilhite states, "Had [the bill] passed, Nebraskans would have been the first in America-in the world-to enfranchise women."2 Elizabeth Cady Stanton (Fig. 1), Susan B. Anthony (Fig. 2), and George Francis Train toured Nebraska promoting suffrage in 1867, the year Nebraska became a state. In 1871, Nebraska voters defeated the suffrage amendment by a four to one margin, but pro-suffrage activism continued. On 15 April 1879, eleven women organized the Thayer County Suffrage Association, the first permanent woman suffrage organization in Nebraska. According to the contemporary History of Woman Suffrage, "The Thayer County Association, as the elder sister of the numerous family now springing up, maintained its prominence as a center of activity and intelligence" in the state of Nebraska.3
Even though all of the officers of the Thayer County Suffrage Association were women, Erasmus Correll was one of the most prominent figures behind the group. Correll owned and published the Hebron Journal, one of Thayer County's weekly newspapers, and also the monthly Western Woman's Journal, a prosuffrage newspaper published in Lincoln from April 1881 to September 1882, leading up to another unsuccessful Nebraska suffrage vote in November 1882. The American Woman Suffrage Association elected Correll their President in 1881. Nebraskans elected Correll to the state house of representatives in 1880, where he introduced a woman suffrage amendment that would allow the already enfranchised-men-to vote on whether to extend woman suffrage. The house passed the amendment, 51 to 22, as did the Senate. As the History of Woman Suffrage claims, "The Thayer County Woman Suffrage Association won a deserved triumph in being primarily connected with the origin and successful passage of the joint resolution of 1881."4
In this essay I examine the paradoxical connotations of the concept "woman voter" in Nebraska newspapers during the months preceding the 1882 state vote on woman suffrage. Very little is known about suffrage reform in locations outside the northeast.5 As Steven Buechler points out, "the period from 1870 through 1890 is a 'black hole' in our knowledge of the suffrage movement." Coverage of the period tends to be "broad and general (e.g., O'Neill, 1969 or Flexner, 1975) and fail[s] to provide a detailed and specific analysis of the suffrage movement."6 Nebraska newspapers from 1882, however, indicate that suffragists actively pursued their cause during this time.
The newspapers used in this study are the Omaha Daily Bee, the Daily Nebraska State Journal, the Omaha Daily Republican, and the Omaha Daily Herald. The Omaha Daily Bee and the Omaha Daily Herald opposed woman suffrage, the Omaha Daily Republican supported it, and the Daily Nebraska State Journal held a neutral position. In 1882 the American Woman Suffrage Association (A WSA) held their annual convention in Omaha 12-14 September and the rival National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) held theirs in Omaha 26-28 September. The newspapers printed the majority of their suffrage articles in September and October, before, during, and after these two conventions and prior to the vote on woman suffrage in November.Thus the majority of the articles cited were printed during those three months.
This analysis focuses on the rhetoric of the newspapers in fashioning the concept of the woman voter. Who or what counted as a woman voter? What were the gender subtexts embedded in the ways language was used to construct the woman voter? Did the constructions of "women voters" perpetuate oppositions between men and women, masculinity and femininity? Did the constructions complicate such dichotomies? And what are the implications? Because I am concerned with public constructions of the idea of the woman voter, I have used letters, addresses, and editorial material published for the public rather than private correspondence. The first section of this essay explores in more detail those who supported and opposed the woman suffrage amendment in Nebraska; the second analyzes the newspaper's conceptions of the woman voter in relation to the ideology of separate spheres; and the final section concludes the analysis and offers implications.
Comments
Copyright 1997 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln