Suffragette or suffragist
Suffragette and suffragist are not synonyms, and the difference between them is national before it is anything else: suffragist is the ordinary English word for a person who campaigns for the right to vote, used on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the nineteenth century, while suffragette was coined later in the British press as a diminutive insult and was then adopted by part of the British campaign.
American campaigners used the first word and rejected the second. For the campaign that produced the Nineteenth Amendment, suffragist is the correct word and suffragette is wrong.
The three differences, in the order that matters
National
The national difference is the one that decides almost every case a reader will meet. Suffragist works everywhere and always: it describes anyone of any sex in any country who wanted the franchise extended. Suffragette describes the British movement, and using it outside that context imports a foreign campaign into an American sentence. The American associations, from the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association of 1869 through the National American Woman Suffrage Association of 1890, called themselves suffrage associations and their members suffragists.
Tactical
The tactical difference is real but it operates inside Britain, not between Britain and America. There, the word marked a division of method within one country's campaign, separating those who worked by petition and persuasion from those who took a more confrontational approach in public. That is why a British history can put the two words in the same sentence without contradiction. An American history cannot, because the American campaign never generated a second word for a second method. It generated a second organization instead: the National Woman's Party, formed in 1916 out of the Congressional Union of 1913, whose members remained suffragists while picketing the White House from January 1917.
Who accepted the name
The question of who accepted the name is what turned a taunt into a label people would answer to. A word applied by opponents only becomes a name if the people it is aimed at pick it up, and in Britain part of the campaign did exactly that, printing it on their own material. In the United States nobody did. That is the whole of the transatlantic difference: same suffix, same insult, opposite response.
| Suffragist | Suffragette | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it belongs | The United States, and Britain before the split in tactics. | Britain, from the militant wing onward. |
| Where the word came from | Formed straightforwardly from suffrage, the right to vote. | Coined in the British press as a diminutive, and meant as a belittlement. |
| Who used it of themselves | American campaigners, their organizations and their newspapers, throughout. | British militants, who took the insult up deliberately. |
| What it implies about method | Nothing. It names the aim, not the tactics. | Confrontation: window breaking, arson, hunger strikes. |
| Correct for Susan B. Anthony | Yes. | No. She died in 1906 and the movement she ran never used the word of itself. |
| Correct for Alice Paul | Yes, for her work in the American campaign. | Only of her years in the British campaign. |
Why calling Susan B. Anthony a suffragette is an error
Calling Susan B. Anthony a suffragette is an error of fact and not of taste, for three reasons that stack.
- Chronology. Anthony lived from 1820 to 1906 and did her defining work well before the word was in circulation. She voted in Rochester, New York, on 5 November 1872, was arrested on 18 November 1872, and was tried at Canandaigua in June 1873 before Justice Ward Hunt, who directed a verdict of guilty and fined her one hundred dollars. Between the arrest and the trial she delivered one speech repeatedly across the county, titled Is it a Crime for a Citizen of the United States to Vote? Nothing in that record has anything to do with the British word.
- Nationality. Anthony's campaign was American. It ran against the Fourteenth Amendment of 1868, which introduced the word male into the Constitution, and through the split of 1869 that produced two rival American associations.
- Self-description. She and the organizations she founded used the word suffrage in their own names and suffragist for their members. Applying a label they never used, and which was invented to belittle, misdescribes them in their own documents.
The same objection applies to anyone in the American campaign who was dead or elderly before the word existed, including Sojourner Truth, around 1797 to 1883, Lucretia Mott, 1793 to 1880, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1815 to 1902.
Which word to use, case by case
- Write suffragist when the subject is the American campaign at any date between 1848 and 1920.
- Write suffragist when the subject is a man who supported the vote for women, such as Frederick Douglass, who spoke for the ninth resolution at Seneca Falls in 1848. There is no male form of the other word.
- Write suffragette when the subject is the British movement, and make the country explicit in the same sentence.
- Write woman suffrage or women's suffrage for the demand itself, in either country. The demand needs no adjective.
- Write neither when you mean the women's movement of the 1960s, which was not a franchise campaign at all.
Where the confusion is manufactured
The confusion is manufactured by popular material rather than by histories. Films, children's history series, costume hire, reproduction brooches and gift-shop jewelry all use the word suffragette because it is the more distinctive of the two and because the objects and the visual language they draw on are British. An American reader who arrives at the subject through a movie title or a costume label arrives holding the British word, and then applies it to the American facts waiting on the other side.
The colors are the fastest way to catch it. American campaigners used purple, white and gold. The British used purple, white and green. A reproduction brooch or sash in purple, white and green is a British object, and a caption calling it a relic of the campaign for the Nineteenth Amendment is wrong about the country before it is wrong about the word.
What the distinction actually protects
The distinction protects the shape of the American story, which is a seventy two year argument conducted mostly in conventions, courtrooms, state legislatures and Congress. Calling the Americans suffragettes smuggles in a picture of a short, confrontational campaign and quietly deletes the decades of convention minutes, printed resolutions and legislative work that produced the amendment Congress passed on 4 June 1919 and Tennessee completed on 18 August 1920.