The People's Experience: Women
Women's political participation skyrocketed during the 1912 presidential election due to the split of the Bull Moose from the Republican Parties. The Progressive Party platform included a plank espousing universal woman suffrage through a national amendment to the Constitution. More than ten women served as delegates to the 1912 Progressive Party convention (there were two each at the 1912 Republican and Democratic conventions). Reformer Jane Addams seconded Theodore Roosevelt's nomination, and Alice Carpenter sat on the Progressive platform resolutions committee.
With the dissolution of the Progressive party in 1916, women turned to the two mainstream political parties and were in many ways discouraged. Woman suffrage became the bitterest debate on the Democratic convention floor, with many activists demanding a national amendment plank in the platform and many Southern Democrats resisting with all their strength. Suffragists regularly protested at the White House and in other D.C. locations (photo of demonstration at White House at top right). Wilson finally offered a compromise which was begrudgingly accepted: inclusion of a suffrage plank without endorsement of the federal amendment, leaving it as an issue to be taken up by the individual states. Radical feminists deserted Wilson because of this decision.
Alice Paul and the Congressional Union, a radical Congressional lobbyist group with the aim to pass a federal amendment, formed a National Women's Party and gave their loyalties to Hughes. Paul persuaded Hughes to personally endorse a federal amendment, insisting that he would lose nothing, as the Old Guard would not vote for Wilson under any circumstances. Paul and the National Women's Party used various means to campaign for Hughes, distributing literature, making speeches, and even organizing a campaign train staffed only by women that traveled throughout the West and was met with considerable cultural criticism.
Although the radical feminists and suffragists were strongly anti-Wilson, most women in the western suffrage states were not. Favored by Progressive reformers (such as Jane Addams of Hull House) and schoolteachers for his liberal legislative record and by western women in general for his maintenance of peace, Wilson won ten out of the twelve suffrage states.
Click here to read about The People's Experience: Farming and Labor.