We have now reached the 100th anniversary of the enactment of the Nineteenth Amendment which granted women the right to vote. The major east coast media is presenting innumerable celebratory reports and perspectives on the event – and well they should. It was a monumental action that led to the never-ending march to forming a “more perfect union.”
There is a common thread in most of these medial stories. They seem to be intentionally misrepresenting the facts of history. They are spinning the reports to mendacious narratives of the political left and the Democratic Party by two means.
The first is to NOT tell the full story of who supported suffrage and who opposed it – which political party supported it and which opposed it. If you actually study the history of the times, you will discover that it was the Republican Party that supported a woman’s right to vote – as it had supported the civil rights of Black Americans. And it was the Democratic Party that opposed and blocked earlier passage of the Amendment.
Virtually every prominent name associated with the suffrage movement, including Susan B. Anthony (after whom the Amendment was nicknamed), were all active and staunch Republicans. The list includes Republican Jeanette Rankin, who was elected to Congress before the passage of the Amendment – making her the only woman to have voted to give women the right to vote.
The second misinformation is even more sinister. The left-wing media intentionally switches the political polarities by intimating … suggesting …. spinning that Republicans were against the Amendment and Democrats supported it. These disinformation efforts spin off the grand lie of the Democratic Party, itself. On their national website they boldly – and dishonestly – declare that it was the Democratic Party that “fought for women’s right to vote.” That is as an audacious a lie as if they were to claim to be the Party of Black liberation.
Members of the Republican-controlled House had frequently attempted to send an Amendment to the states. It was opposed and repeatedly blocked through the opposition of Democrat President Woodrow Wilson (who was also a white supremacist) and the Democrat majority in the Senate.
Knowing that the Republicans were likely to take control of the Senate in the election of 1918 – all but assuring the passage of the Amendment – Wilson belatedly offered his endorsement. It had no meaning since constitutional amendments are not required to be signed by the President and they cannot be vetoed by the President. They go directly to the states for ratification.
All that history is lost – nay, ignored – by the mendacious reporting in the left-wing media. In understanding the pandemic of propaganda reporting on this subject, it is illustrative to at least dissect one recent example.
Jennifer Schuessler a New York City (where else?) liberal feminist writer (what else?) writing in the New York Times (where else?) had a column highlighting the activities of women who opposed the Amendment – a worthy subject. But Schuessler wrote with all the venomous bias that has come to characterize the elitist east coast news establishment. Despite the relative roles of the two major political parties, Schuessler found only two opportunities to mention the parties. They were two references to the Republican Party. In both cases they gave the false impression that Republicans resisted the Amendment.
In one case, Schuessler reported that 19 Republican Senate wives opposed adding women to the Fifteenth Amendment in 1871. That’s right. Schuessler compared the opinions of a hand full of Republican wives 47 years before Republican passage of the Nineteenth Amendment – a bit of information of no relevancy to the subject of her Times column. Even worse, the author gives that some sort of equivalency with the overwhelming opposition of Democrat Senators AND their wives in 1918. That is what propaganda looks like in the Fourth Estate.
Following the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, Schuessler alleges that the women opposing the Amendment moved on to work with the “nonpartisan League of Women Voters” — (OFFICIALLY nonpartisan) and “Others became active in the Republican Party, helping push it to the right.”
In terms of reporting the facts, that is essentially a lie. Oh, maybe there was one or two who opposed the Amendment who became Republicans. Who knows? Schuessler does not name any such person. The FACT is that the vast majority of women fighting FOR suffrage were – and remained – active Republicans. And it is unlikely that any Democrat women opposing the Amendment suddenly joined the GOP. Schussler’s contention is political poppycock … propaganda.
Schuessler stated that “some scholars” – another unnamed source – link the women opposed to the Amendment to later conservative Republican activists such as Phyllis Schlafly, who is more likely to have been a suffragette had she been born a half century earlier. Once again Schuessler makes a totally irrelevant and dishonest comparison with people of different eras.
The historic record on the suffrage movement is not easy to correct when the news media, academia and the elitist left combine to spread their false political narratives. But if you do a little research on the Internet, you will discover the truth.
So, there ‘tis.