Four organizations and one long argument
The National Woman Suffrage Association was the wing of the American suffrage campaign founded by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in May 1869, and it existed because the American Equal Rights Association, formed in 1866 to press the vote for Black Americans and for women as one demand, had just broken in two.
Later the same year, in November 1869, Lucy Stone and others founded a rival body, the American Woman Suffrage Association. The two ran in parallel for twenty one years, merged in 1890 as the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and the merged organization then split again in 1916, when the Congressional Union became the National Woman's Party. Five organizations, one continuous argument.
What the initials stand for, and when each was formed
The initials are the first obstacle for anyone meeting this subject in a history course, so here they are in one place, with the founding dates and the position each organization took.
| Organization | Formed | Founded by | Position it took |
|---|---|---|---|
| American Equal Rights Association (AERA) | 1866 | Campaigners from the antislavery and woman's rights movements together | The vote for Black Americans and for women, pressed as one demand |
| National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) | May 1869 | Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony | Opposed the Fifteenth Amendment because it enfranchised men only; wanted a federal amendment for women |
| American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) | November 1869 | Lucy Stone and others | Supported the Fifteenth Amendment; worked for the vote state by state |
| National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) | 1890 | The merger of NWSA and AWSA | Both approaches at once, states and Congress, under one national leadership |
| National Woman's Party (NWP) | 1916, from the Congressional Union formed in 1913 | Alice Paul and the Congressional Union | Pressure on the party in power, public demonstration and picketing |
Why the associations split in 1869
The associations split in 1869 over the Fifteenth Amendment, which was ratified in 1870, which barred the denial of the vote on account of race, and which said nothing about sex. The American Equal Rights Association had been formed in 1866 to demand the vote for Black Americans and for women together. That alliance was already under strain from the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, which introduced the word male into the Constitution for the first time, and it did not survive the Fifteenth.
Stanton and Anthony argued that a suffrage amendment covering men and not women should not be ratified, and several of the arguments they made against it, in speeches and in print, were explicitly racist. That is stated here without softening because it is what the sources contain. Lucy Stone and the campaigners who followed her took the opposite view: an amendment that enfranchised Black men was worth having on its own terms, and the vote for women could be pursued afterward, one state at a time.
NWSA against AWSA: the difference in full
The difference between NWSA and AWSA was a difference about three things, not one, and only the first was the Fifteenth Amendment.
- Scope of the demand. NWSA treated suffrage as one item in a wide program of legal change for women. AWSA kept to the vote and left the rest alone.
- Route to the vote. NWSA wanted a federal amendment and tested the Constitution directly, which is why Susan B. Anthony voted in Rochester, New York, on 5 November 1872 and stood trial at Canandaigua in June 1873. AWSA campaigned in state legislatures and referendum campaigns.
- Reading of the Constitution. NWSA held that women were already citizens entitled to vote and set out to prove it, which is why Anthony delivered one speech repeatedly across her county between her arrest and her trial, titled Is it a Crime for a Citizen of the United States to Vote? AWSA asked legislatures to change the law instead of asking courts to read it differently.
Neither had won a national amendment by 1890. Wyoming Territory, which granted women the vote in 1869 as the first jurisdiction in the United States to do so, had been won by neither of them. The merger followed.
What NAWSA did between 1890 and 1920
NAWSA after 1890 combined the two approaches its founders had spent a generation opposing. Anna Howard Shaw, ordained a Methodist Protestant minister in 1880 and qualified in medicine in 1886, was its president from 1904 to 1915. Carrie Chapman Catt presented the Winning Plan in 1916, which set state campaigns and the federal amendment running as one coordinated effort rather than as alternatives.
NAWSA also drew on organizations that were not suffrage organizations at all. The National Women's Trade Union League, founded in 1903, connected the demand for the vote to industrial labor. Florence Kelley, Chief Factory Inspector of Illinois from 1893 and head of the National Consumers League from 1899, spoke in Philadelphia on 22 July 1905 on child labor and the vote, arguing the franchise as an instrument of industrial reform rather than as an abstract right. Mary Church Terrell, first president of the National Association of Colored Women from 1896, spoke in Washington in 1906 on what segregation in the capital actually meant. The campaign's most famous platform voices, such as Sojourner Truth at Akron in 1851, belonged to conventions that predated every one of these associations.
NAWSA against the National Woman's Party
The quarrel between NAWSA and the National Woman's Party was about tactics and about who to blame, not about the goal. Alice Paul formed the Congressional Union in 1913, the year she organized the Woman Suffrage Procession in Washington on 3 March, the day before Wilson's inauguration. The Union became the National Woman's Party in 1916.
Its method was to hold the party in power responsible for the failure to pass an amendment, and to demonstrate in public until it did. The Silent Sentinels began picketing the White House in January 1917 and kept it up for about two and a half years, through arrests, imprisonment and forced feeding during hunger strikes. NAWSA did not picket. It worked the Winning Plan Catt had presented in 1916, running the state campaigns and the federal amendment together. Both organizations were still in the field when Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment on 4 June 1919 and Tennessee ratified as the thirty sixth state on 18 August 1920.