[LWVNM Action] NM's Senators Instrumental in Suffrage Amendment's Lack of Progress and Passage-Article in New Mexican today

Fri May 22 17:44:26 MDT 2020

Santa Fe Plaza would have been a highlight on the National Votes for Women Trail if Senator Thomas Catron had respected women. See attached 1915 clipping about the national and local delegation of women pleading for him to stop blocking the suffrage amendment from getting out of committee and on to the Senate floor.  It took Senator A. A. Jones to defeat Catron in 1917 and replace him as head of Senate Committee on Woman Suffrage to get the amendment moving through Congress. A glimpse at the story is in today’s New Mexican newspaper.
Women’s rights are still a work in progress 101 years later as we await the formal adoption of the ERA because SJR6 is stalled in Congress after passing in House. Would our foremothers have believed that we’re watching the long struggle play out again with the antis? Meredith Machen
https://www.santafenewmexican.com/pasatiempo/sphere-of-usefulness-new-mexico-and-womens-suffrage/article_d3a8babc-6f97-11ea-ab2a-23fc6a5b19dc.html?utm_medium=social <https://www.santafenewmexican.com/pasatiempo/sphere-of-usefulness-new-mexico-and-womens-suffrage/article_d3a8babc-6f97-11ea-ab2a-23fc6a5b19dc.html?utm_medium=social&utm_source=email&utm_campaign=user-share> &utm_source=email&utm_campaign=user-share
'Sphere of Usefulness': New Mexico and women's suffrage <https://www.santafenewmexican.com/pasatiempo/sphere-of-usefulness-new-mexico-and-womens-suffrage/article_d3a8babc-6f97-11ea-ab2a-23fc6a5b19dc.html> 
·        Jason Strykowski
To commemorate the centennial of the Susan B. Anthony Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, guaranteeing women the right to vote, we take a look back at several key players from New Mexico who had pivotal roles in championing the rights of women.
About 150 women gathered to march through Santa Fe on Oct. 21, 1915. As hundreds watched, they drove and walked from the Chamber of Commerce on Palace Avenue past Lincoln Avenue through the Plaza and onto Water Street. They went around the capitol, past the old Palace, and finally to the home of Sen. Thomas Benton Catron.
There, these women hoped that Catron would hear their pleas for voting rights and return to Washington, D.C., and his post on the Senate Chair Woman Suffrage Committee with a more enlightened perspective. Ultimately, they wanted Catron to support the Susan B. Anthony Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, finally giving women the right to vote. Catron, though, was unimpressed.
“All these suffragists had come to New Mexico, these are nationally known suffragists, and they came to New Mexico to appeal to Catron,” says Dr. Meredith Machen, past president of the League of Women Voters of New Mexico. These national suffragist organizations also wanted local voices to make an impression, not just with Catron but with their fellow New Mexicans. Emma St. Clair Thompson of the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage recruited Nina Otero-Warren and Aurora Lucero-White Lea to speak at the event. For her part, Otero-Warren came from a successful family with deep roots in New Mexico and was the most important suffragist in the state. Lucero also had a distinguished lineage: Her father was secretary of state in New Mexico. Later in life, Lucero-White Lea became a professor of Spanish at Highlands University.
Another speaker at the event, Julia Duncan Brown Asplund, summarized Catron’s response: “His arguments were medieval. For instance, he quoted the Bible as saying that the story of the creation told how the Lord had given Man dominion over Woman,” Asplund, who went on be the first librarian at the University of New Mexico, told the Santa Fe New Mexican. “The Senator referred to the curse inflicted on man to labor and the curse on woman to bear children. He admitted that bearing of children was something, but he did not find it nearly so important as the labor of man to support the family.”
Not surprisingly, Catron did not support woman suffrage upon his return to the U.S. Senate. He would only stay in the position until the end of the term, but he had successfully rebuffed the suffragists in 1915. For Catron, it was the end of a long career that took him from the Confederacy in the Civil War to attorney general of New Mexico Territory to leadership of the Santa Fe Ring and ultimately to the U.S. Senate. Catron, though, was not entirely to blame for New Mexico’s failure to enfranchise women.
New Mexico was late to suffrage, in part, because it had also been late to statehood. New Mexico and Arizona, in fact, were the last two states admitted to the Union in the contiguous United States in 1912. Accordingly, national suffrage organizers had less to gain in New Mexico where voters were enfranchised only on the territorial level. Distinguished research professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of Suffrage: Women’s Long Battle for the Vote, Ellen Carol DuBois says, “Whereas the citizens of a state can vote for the president, the citizens of a territory cannot.” Suffrage organizers had little to gain from promoting their efforts in New Mexico.
By 1915, when Otero-Warren and Lucero-White Lea descended upon Catron’s home, the national suffrage movement was around 70 years old. Temperance work and abolition organizing crystallized at the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention where Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott called for women’s rights. Their energy and efforts soon moved to the state level where voting rights were largely organized. “The United States Constitution says almost nothing about who can vote. The Constitution leaves the major power to determine voting to the states, where it remains,” says DuBois.
The movement found success in the West, where suffrage began in Wyoming Territory in 1869. Their success continued in Colorado, Idaho, Utah, and elsewhere. It took some time, however, to cross the Mississippi River. “In November of 1917, in their second attempt, suffragists convinced the male voters of New York to amend their constitution. At that point, the 43-man delegation to Congress became entirely pro-suffrage. It’s at that point that the tide in the House turned,” DuBois says.
In the Senate, Catron’s replacement on the Woman Suffrage Committee, New Mexican Andrieus Jones, took a more proactive stance. “It took Andrieus Jones, first of all, to defeat and replace Catron and get (the amendment) out of the Senate committee,” Machen says.
Jones was, in part, persuaded by an encounter with Maud Wood Park, member of the National American Women Suffrage Association, who broke down in tears in front of Jones. “Crying was what all women lobbyists feared,” wrote DuBois in Suffrage. Despite Park’s fears, her demeanor succeeded in enrolling Jones in the cause. He brought the Susan B. Anthony Amendment to the floor.
“The head of the national suffrage committee was so confident that she bought a new dress,” DuBois says. “The Senate had always been the more mildly pro-suffrage chamber. It was easier to be pro-suffrage when there was no chance of it passing.” Divisions in the Democratic Party, though, muddied the waters. The Susan B. Anthony Amendment failed to pass twice before the new Republican majority took up the cause and passed it in June 1919.
Months earlier, New Mexico’s governor had presaged the vote in the Senate. In a speech to the New Mexico Legislature, Gov. Octaviano Ambrosio Larrazolo said, “Slowly but steadily, the women of our country have been extending their sphere of usefulness. No longer confined exclusively to domestic duties, woman has been enlarging her field of [productivity] so that today we find her engaged in many of the industrial pursuits of life.” His comments were, intentionally or unintentionally, a direct rebuke of Catron’s earlier remarks.
Larrazolo’s push for suffrage proved necessary at both the state and national levels. Although the 19th Amendment had passed in the House and Senate, it still required three-quarters of the states for ratification. New Mexico took the anchor position in the relay race for suffrage and ratified the 19th Amendment on Feb. 21, 1920. They were the 32nd state to do so of the 36 states required. Somehow, suffragists had pushed through the Susan B. Anthony Amendment amidst the Great War and between outbreaks of Spanish Influenza.
In New Mexico, the suffrage movement proved instrumental in advancing Otero-Warren’s career. In addition to her duties as superintendent of the Santa Fe school system, she ran on the Republican ticket for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1921. Otero-Warren kept the race close but ultimately lost. The loss didn’t dissuade her. Otero-Warren remained politically active, serving on the state Board of Health and in the American Red Cross. Eventually, she also turned her attention to writing and published a book in 1936.
Although women had finally won the right to vote, their struggle for equality was anything but over. In 1923, suffragists introduced the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Congress, and the efforts to ratify that amendment are now older than the initial drive for the vote. The results of the 2016 presidential election also called the progress of equality into question. “I think that the election of Hillary Clinton would have been reason to cheer,” DuBois says. “As a point from which to look back, in some ways the place where we stand is a more profound moment.”
“We’re still fighting for rights,” says Machen. “The right to control our bodies, that’s what we are trying to do.”
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This year, on the centennial of woman suffrage, several online exhibits celebrate the achievement. The Center for Southwest Research at the University of New Mexico organized and posted “We Knew Exactly What We Wanted and WE. GOT. IT.” at  <http://goto.unm.edu/womens-history> goto.unm.edu/womens-history. Meanwhile the New Mexico Humanities Council placed a Women 2020 Initiative on their website at  <http://nmhumanities.org/> nmhumanities.org. ◀
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Please also see attachment about Porch Parades (flier is in draft form). Because of the pandemic, we’re planning something safe instead of the Women’s Equality Parades in August. More info to follow. 

Meredith Machen
League of Women Voters of New Mexico                                            
 <tel:505-577-6337> 505-577-6337 c
projects at lwvnm.org
meredith.machen at gmail.com

Empowering Voters - Defending Democracy
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