Who Voted for Woman Suffrage: 1915 & 1917 New York State Suffrage Referenda

Abstract

Who Voted for Woman Suffrage:1915 & 1917 New York State Suffrage Referenda Rusty C. Tobin (bio) On November 14, 1917 in the village of Andover, New York women representing suffrage clubs from all over Allegany County gathered at the home of Roxanna Bradley Burrows, the Assembly District Leader of the Allegany County Woman Suffrage Party. They came to celebrate their efforts in the successful passage the week before of a New York State referendum granting women full voting rights in New York State. The women processed to the local Methodist Church for a buffet luncheon and then marched to the library for further ceremonies. An American flag, a gift of the Lucy Stone Club, was presented to the village and raised. The women gave the flag salute and ended the ceremony with their suffrage "yell." At some point during the afternoon they probably sang their suffrage song "Its Coming, Its Coming, The Vote for Which We Pray."1 While a week earlier, suffragists in New York City held a much larger victory celebration in New York City's Cooper Union, rural women in New York were equally as jubilant and proud of their victory.2 Click for larger view View full resolution New York State was the first state east of the Mississippi to allow full voting rights to women and the victory occurred three years before women in the nation won the right to vote by the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. [End Page 422] This was the result of a referendum in which male voters were simply asked yes or no to permit women the right to vote in all elections. Just two years prior, in 1915, however, the exact same referendum was put before the male voters and failed to pass. Some historians attribute responsibility for the victory in 1917 to the turnaround of New York City voters who had voted overwhelmingly against the 1915 referendum.3 Out of 1.3 million votes cast in 1917 the margin of victory was only 102,353 votes (see table 1). While New York City residents passed the referendum by 103,000 votes, the rest of the state defeated the referendum by only 1,510 votes and male voters upstate provided 49.7 percent of the "yes" vote total. Click for larger view View full resolution Table 1. New York State 1915 & 1917 Referenda Source: County by county votes for the 1915 referendum are located in New York Legislative Record and Index. Albany: The Legislative Index Co., 1916, 854–55. The 1917 figures are in The New York Red Book, Albany, NY, 1918, 822. Referenda on the same issue just two years apart offers a unique opportunity to explore transformations in voting patterns. It is important to distinguish where woman suffrage support across the state came from before one can explain the reversal of sentiment between 1915 and 1917. This article examines the voting patterns apparent in the two New York State referenda and demonstrates that support for woman suffrage was statewide and that there was a mix of rural and urban regions among twenty-nine upstate counties that gave a majority vote in favor of woman suffrage in 1917. [End Page 423] Local political context is important in understanding most elections and the woman suffrage victory in New York is no exception. Other amendments as well as political offices that were on the ballot in both 1915 and 1917 strongly influenced voter turnout within different communities and this, in turn, affected the vote. In addition, some rural social groups provided strong organizational support for woman suffrage and the social makeup of each county also affected the vote. While the issue of which male voters changed their minds between 1915 and 1917 may never be known, the organizational work and strategies of upstate suffragists and their opponents is not thoroughly understood. An analysis of the state referenda is a place to begin. Advocacy for woman suffrage in New York State has a long history. Even before the 1848 Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York in which a Declaration of Sentiments modeled on the Declaration of Independence was adopted, suffragists engaged in a variety of strategies to gain the...