The words, and which side chose them
A suffragette is a member of the British campaign for votes for women, and the word began life as an insult printed in a British newspaper.
It was built by attaching the diminutive ending of kitchenette and statuette to suffragist, and the point of the ending was to make the women it described sound small and unserious. The British campaigners took the insult, kept it, and used it about themselves. The American campaigners did not. In the United States the word for a person who wanted women to have the vote was suffragist, and that is the correct word for Susan B. Anthony, for the Declaration of Sentiments of 1848, and for every American organization that worked for the Nineteenth Amendment.
Suffrage means the right to vote. It carries no sense of protest, no sense of militancy and no gender: men have suffrage, states extend suffrage, and a suffragist is simply a person who wants the franchise extended. Everything that distinguishes the two words was added afterward, by a hostile writer in one country and by the women who decided to wear the insult in that same country.
Where the word suffragette came from, and who meant it as an insult
The word suffragette came from the British press, not from the movement, and not from America at all. English forms diminutives with that ending routinely, and it is generally belittling when applied to a person rather than to an object. Applied to women demanding the franchise, it did the work a hostile label is meant to do: it separated them from the respectable suffragists, and it implied that what they were doing was a performance rather than a political demand.
What happened next is the unusual part, and it is the reason the word survived. The British campaigners adopted it. A label chosen by an opponent stopped being usable as an attack once the people it described printed it on their own material and answered to it in public. That adoption is a British event. It happened in Britain, to British organizations, and it did not cross the Atlantic.
Why American campaigners called themselves suffragists
American campaigners called themselves suffragists because that was the ordinary English word and because they had been using it since long before the other one existed. The American campaign had already run for decades by then. It had held the Woman's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York, on 19 and 20 July 1848 and adopted the Declaration of Sentiments there with one hundred signatures. It had split into the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association in 1869 and merged them again in 1890. Susan B. Anthony had voted in Rochester, New York, on 5 November 1872 and stood trial at Canandaigua in June 1873. None of that was done by anybody calling herself a suffragette.
By the time Alice Paul, 1885 to 1977, organized the Woman Suffrage Procession in Washington on 3 March 1913, having brought the tactics of the public procession and the standing picket back from London, the word was established in Britain and had been declined in the United States. Paul imported the methods. She did not import the name. The organization she went on to build, the National Woman's Party of 1916, and the association she had left, the National American Woman Suffrage Association, disagreed about almost everything tactical and agreed about this.
Suffragette against suffragist: the difference set out
The difference between suffragette and suffragist is national first and tactical second, and it is never a difference of degree within one country's campaign.
| Suffragist | Suffragette | |
|---|---|---|
| Meaning | A person who campaigns for the right to vote | A member of the British campaign for votes for women |
| Origin | The ordinary English word, in use throughout the nineteenth century | Coined in the British press as a diminutive insult |
| Who used it about themselves | The American movement, and British campaigners too | British campaigners only, after adopting it from their opponents |
| Applies to | Men and women, in any country | Women, in Britain |
| Correct for the American campaign | Yes | No |
Note the last two rows in particular. Suffragist covers men: Frederick Douglass, who spoke for the ninth resolution at Seneca Falls in 1848, was a suffragist, and the word is exact. There is no male form of the other word, because the other word was invented to describe women and to diminish them.
The colors, which are also different
The colors of the two campaigns differ, and they are a quick test of which movement a picture or an object belongs to. The American colors are purple, white and gold. The British colors are purple, white and green. A sash, a badge or a banner in purple, white and green is British; the same object in purple, white and gold is American. An object sold as suffragette memorabilia in purple, white and green is reproducing the British scheme, whatever the caption says.
Why the wrong word reaches American readers
The wrong word reaches American readers because the popular material about votes for women is largely British. Feature films, television history for children and museum merchandise carry the word suffragette in their titles because they are about the British campaign, and the American reader who meets the subject through them meets the British vocabulary attached to an American question. The word then gets applied backward to Anthony, to the 1848 convention and to the 1919 vote in Congress, none of which it fits.
The error is not a matter of etiquette. Using suffragette for the American campaign hides the thing that actually distinguished the two movements, which is that the American associations argued for seventy two years about tactics and never adopted the confrontational identity that the British word carries. It also hides the fact that the American campaign was fought largely in conventions, state legislatures, courtrooms and Congress, which is where its documents come from.
What to call the Americans when you write about them
- Write suffragist for any American campaigner, including Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Carrie Chapman Catt and Alice Paul.
- Write suffragette only when you mean the British movement, and say so in the sentence.
- Write the woman suffrage movement or the women's suffrage movement for the American campaign as a whole, which is what its own organizations called it.
- Avoid suffragette entirely when writing about people who did not live into the century in which the word was coined, such as Sojourner Truth, around 1797 to 1883.
- Check the colors before captioning an image: purple, white and gold is American, purple, white and green is British.