One Cause, Two Democracies: Why American Suffragists Shunned British Violence

In both the United States and the United Kingdom, public parades, theatrical tableaux and soapboxes speeches were a key component of the women’s suffrage movement. Tactically, one approach that distinguished the two campaigns was that militant British suffragettes smashed windows and planted bombs, while American radicals confined their zealotry to picketing the White House. This paper explores the question of why.

Though American suffragists were not above breaching gender protocol -- famously hissing when President William Howard Taft in 1910 disparaged the idea of women voting – most were convinced public appeals would be more successful than physical attacks.

This disdain for militant tactics owed something to the capitalist nature of American society, and something to its politics. By the 1910s, political culture in the United States was consumed with a stalwart belief in the science of advertising. This commitment to selling suffrage led movement leaders to fear disorder as disruptive to gender comity and to privilege femininity. Putting beautiful women at the head of parades, urging each soldier in the army of supporters to “be as neat and modishly gowned as her purse will permit,” welcoming an influx of society suffragists known for their couture-gilded celebrity, suffrage leaders packaged the cause as a commodity. The U.S. history in extending the vote to previously disenfranchised groups also influenced American tactics. White manhood suffrage had come to the United States not as an act of violence, as was the case with the Chartists, but as a function of party politics, a power play by Andrew Jackson to expand his Democratic electorate and brand the Whigs as aristocrats. African-American male suffrage, at least on paper, came after a wrenching Civil War. As a result, American suffragists may have had a view of the Constitution as amendable and the polity as expandable.