When the Obama reelection staff began developing its general
strategy for duping a majority of the electorate into once again
supporting the President, they knew they needed to drive a lot of
disenchanted female voters back into the Democrat herd. Thus, they
concocted the fictional Republican “war on women.” And, knowing
that our government education system has long since given up
teaching history, Obama’s minions had little fear that the public
would realize that the GOP’s support of women’s rights goes back to
its founding in 1854. Nor were the President’s men worried that
Democrat front groups like the National Organization for Women,
much less the “news” media, would remind female voters that their
very ability to cast a ballot was won for them by the Republicans
over the vehement objections of the Democrats.
Most educated Americans vaguely remember that the amendment
granting women the right to vote was passed by Congress in 1919 and
ratified by the states in 1920. But the number of people who know
anything about the forty-year legislative war that preceded that
victory is smaller than the audience of MSNBC. That war began in
1878, when a California Republican named A.A. Sargent introduced
the 19th Amendment only to see it voted down by a
Democrat-controlled Congress. It finally ended four decades later,
when the Republicans won landslide victories in the House and the
Senate, giving them the power to pass the amendment despite
continued opposition from most elected Democrats — including
President Woodrow Wilson, to whom the suffragettes frequently
referred as “Kaiser Wilson.”
One of the most interesting battles in the long congressional
war over women’s suffrage involved the Mormons of Utah. In 1870,
nearly fifty years before Congress passed the 19th Amendment, the
territory of Utah granted women the right to vote. This was
encouraged by congressional opponents of polygamy, which was
practiced by some wealthy Mormons. Their hope was that given the
vote, Utah’s women would quickly put an end to “the abomination of
bigamy.” And the women of Utah did indeed prove to have strong
opinions regarding this issue. They voted overwhelmingly in favor
of it. Congress responded by passing the Edmunds-Tucker Act of
1882, which disfranchised Utah’s women while also violating the
First Amendment by outlawing the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints and seizing much of its property.
Meanwhile, the Republicans continued to introduce the 19th
Amendment in Congress every year, but the Democrats were able to
keep it bottled up in various committees for another decade before
allowing either chamber to vote on it. In 1887 it finally reached
the floor of the Senate. Once again, however, it was
defeated by a vote of 34 to 16. After this setback, advocates
of women’s suffrage opted to put pressure on Congress by convincing
various state legislatures to pass bills giving women the vote.
This met with some success. By the turn of the century a variety of
Republican-controlled states, including Wyoming, Colorado, and
Idaho, had granted women suffrage. During the first ten years of
the new century, several other states gave women the vote,
including Washington and California.
Congress, however, didn’t deign to vote on the issue again until
1914, when it was once again defeated by Senate Democrats. It was
subsequently brought up for a vote in January of 1915 in the House,
where it went down by a vote of 204 to 174. Nonetheless, the
Republicans continued to push even after it was defeated yet again
in early 1918. The big break for 19th Amendment came when President
Wilson, a true Democrat, violated his most solemn campaign promise.
Having pledged to keep the United States out of the European
conflict that had been raging since 1914, he decided to enter the
war anyway. This set the stage for the 1918 midterm elections in
which voter outrage swept the Republicans into power in both the
House and the Senate. This finally placed the GOP in a position to
pass the amendment despite Democrat opposition.
During the following spring Rep. James R. Mann, a Republican
from Illinois, reintroduced the 19th Amendment in the House and it
finally passed by an overwhelming majority. Shortly thereafter a
now Republican-controlled Senate also passed
it, clearing the way for ratification by the states. By this
point, President Wilson had also faced the reality that women would
inevitably get the vote and abandoned his opposition. But the
Democrats’ resistance was by no means dead. They did their level
best to prevent the amendment from being ratified:
“When the Amendment was submitted to the states, 26 of the 36
states that ratified it had Republican legislatures. Of the nine
states that voted against ratification, eight were Democratic.”
Many of these Democrat-controlled states refused to ratify the
amendment until the 1970s.
Obviously, the Obama reelection staff is desperately hoping that
most women voters don’t know this story and are counting on the
“news” media and the unions that control our government education
system to keep it from being told. They know that, if the voters
hear the truth about the roles the two parties have truly
played in women’s rights, all but a few Obamazombies will see the
“war on women” as the red herring that it is. If that happens, they
might be faced with the deadly prospect of discussing Obama’s
abysmal record. And they know that almost certainly means they will
lose on November 6.
