While America commemorates the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage tomorrow — the anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, when the State of Tennessee became the 36th and last state to approve the amendment — New York women won their battle for the right to vote three years earlier, in a statewide referendum conducted on Nov. 6, 1917.
The Town of Riverhead was one of two towns in Suffolk County that rejected women’s suffrage in 1917 — Shelter Island was the other.
The men of Riverhead voted down the women’s suffrage proposition by a vote of 310 in favor to 376 against, according to the Nov. 9, 1917 editions of both the County Review and the Riverhead News (two papers published in Riverhead at the time that would merge in July 1950 to become the News-Review.) This result was despite support from Riverhead women, according to a local historian. A local Women’s Suffrage Club had 800 Riverhead women among the ranks of its members, Thomas Stark wrote in “Riverhead: The Halcyon Years, 1861-1919.
In Shelter Island, the proposition failed by 11 votes: 60 votes in favor and 71 against.
Suffolk voters approved the referendum in an election the County Review described as having a “light turnout” of less than 75%.
“There was not much excitement to the campaign in Suffolk,” according to the article in the County Review. “It was generally conceded that the Republicans would lector’s their county ticket easily and the Democrats made little or no effort for their candidates,” according to the article.
Contrast that with turnout in the most recent local election in Suffolk County, in November 2019, when less than 29% of registered voters cast ballots in the election of the county executive, the top county office decided in the election.
Statewide, New Yorkers approved women’s suffrage 54% to 46%, with New York City voters carrying the day for the suffragists, providing the measure its largest margin of victory in the state — 92,692 out of the statewide plurality of 94,292 votes in favor.
The November 1917 vote on women’s suffrage was not New York’s first. New Yorkers rejected a women’s suffrage proposition in 1915 by a wide margin.
The New York suffrage movement’s second attempt was a bitterly fought contest, with opponents casting the suffragists as pacifists, radicals and socialists. At that moment in history, the world was at war — World War I had begun in July 1914 — and the year 1917 saw the rise of socialism around the globe. In fact, the Nov. 6 election coincided with a coup d’état by leftist revolutionaries led by Bolshevik Party leader Vladimir Lenin against the provisional Russian government that had been installed after the Russian czar was forced to abdicate his throne that spring.
Many suffragist leaders had spoken out against the war and that galvanized the opposition.
“Judging the feminine suffragists by their leaders, they have been as a class, pacifists and enemies of preparedness,” opined the New York Times in an editorial against women’s suffrage published on the day of the election.
The Times called the suffrage movement “an impertinence, a distraction, and a division, when the country should be united on the cardinal and sole purpose of winning the war.”
“This year of all years these doubtful and not at all doubtful recruits to the electorate must be refused. Too many of the active workers in the cause are pacifists. Hillquitism and pacifism and pro-Germanism must not be doubled. The men are doing the fighting. They should do the voting,” the Times publishers said, urging voters, “Be sure to vote No.”
New York was on the front lines of the women’s suffrage movement in the U.S. since the July 1848 convention in Seneca Falls, where Elizabeth Cady Stanton read the Declaration of Sentiments, which proclaimed “all men and women are created equal.” By the 1870s, women pressured Congress into voting on a constitutional amendment that would become the 19th Amendment: “The right of the citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”
A two-thirds majority vote in both houses of Congress is required to propose an amendment to the Constitution. Congress finally passed the 19th Amendment in 1919 — in the House on May 21 and in the Senate on June 4.
A proposed constitutional amendment must be approved by the legislatures of three-fourths of the states for it to become the law of the land. For the 19th Amendment, the approvals of three-fourths of the states took more than 14 months.
The first three states whose legislatures approved the amendment were Wisconsin, Illinois and Michigan on June 10, 1919.
New York was among the next three states — with Kansas and Ohio— to ratify the amendment on June 16, 1919. Tennessee became the required 36th state on Aug. 18, 1920.
States that had not yet ratified as of the date of Tennessee’s approval on Aug. 18, 1917 (and the year when they approved the amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote) were: Connecticut (1920), Vermont (1921), Delaware (1923), Maryland (1941), Virginia (1952), Alabama (1953), Florida (1969), South Carolina (1969), Georgia (1970), Louisiana (1970), North Carolina (1971) and Mississippi (1984).
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