Communication Currents

Congress is at the epicenter of democratic politics; yet, the messages that Congress sends through its policies and deliberations rarely reflect fully the public opinions on the issues. Such divergence is not only due to the sheer diversity of the American electorate; it is also rooted in the institutionally-specific communication practices that move the policy making process. With a focus on the issue of women’s political enfranchisement, this article explores more specifically how jurisdictional questions affect the way Congress constructs the meaning and purpose of political reform.

Women’s political interests have long had a rough time getting legislative attention. The passage of the 19^th Amendment in 1919 set a long-awaited precedent for federal involvement with women’s citizenship rights, yet it hardly opened the door for further legislative investments in women’s equality. A closer look at the way the congressional debates over the 19^th Amendment assembled the rationales for women’s enfranchisement around the issue of jurisdiction offers important clues into the legislature’s historical resistance to feminist arguments and proposals.

When the House and Senate deliberated on the merits of a federal constitutional amendment granting women the right to vote, they paid little consideration to the principled arguments for women’s equality that the woman suffrage movements had developed and popularized for nearly 70 years. Instead, they focused on the jurisdictional question of whether woman suffrage should be treated as a matter of federal or local state policy. Resistance to federal involvement was particularly powerful among members of Congress who viewed the 14^th and 15^th Amendments as the proper, yet politically controversial, legislative precedents for federal action. Overcoming the jurisdictional roadblocks to the Woman Suffrage Amendment then hinged on proving that the national Congress had a special interest in granting women the right to vote.

Three seemingly disparate lines of argument assembled to authorize federal action. The first one appeared somewhat paradoxical; it suggested that a federal amendment would in fact aid, rather than infringe upon, the states’ prerogative to control access to the franchise. Having just debated the Prohibition Amendment, it seemed to Congress that there were some moral principles that transcended party or local interests. Unfortunately, the moral principle that the legislature associated with the woman suffrage issue was not women’s equality, but the country’s interest in maintaining racial discrimination. Consequently, federal passage of woman suffrage appeared prudent primarily as a way to bolster the white political majorities in states by increasing the tools that local government would have at their disposal to enforce racial discrimination at the polls. 

There was a particular reason the federal Congress was especially committed at that time to more actively promote racial discrimination. Race is a mobile discourse and by the early twentieth century it was used not only to frame African Americans, but also to define various groups of immigrants who had historically had access to the franchise. World War I had only intensified nativist and other anti-immigrant sentiments. So the commitment to undermining the voting rights of the African American population was extended also to the task of combating alien suffrage. In the absence of a federal constitutional premise for banning non-citizens from voting, and in the context of a state-by-state movement to amend local constitutions to limit immigrants’ access to the franchise, Congress recognized its prerogative over immigration policy as a resource that could be put to use in the interest of local discrimination. The passage of the federal Woman Suffrage Amendment, which in the view of Congress was meant to only enfranchise white women, appeared to be useful for denying immigrants the franchise.  

Finally, federal involvement with woman suffrage was justified as a war measure: an act of national defense and a matter of foreign policy. On the one hand, the floor speeches routinely invoked women through the most conventional and sentimental feminine imagery. For Congress, women were of value to the nation as women; their feminine vulnerability would simultaneously justify the country’s involvement with the war and it would symbolically provide care and respite from the suffering of military action. On the other hand, granting woman suffrage would also assert the country’s international standing as a progressive leader by setting off a contrast with the oppressive regimes of the enemy. As Senator Reed (D-MO) argued, granting woman suffrage would be “a certificate of our democracy to other lands.” Significantly, Congress had a very specific notion of what democratic principles could restore international order.  With the passage of the 19^th Amendment, the U.S. national Congress imagined it would set an example and bring to the world “the principles of liberty and justice, of righteousness and Caucasian equality” (Senator Vardaman, D-MS).

Even if at first they may appear quite disparate, the three lines of argument that Congress explored in the course of its deliberation over the 19^th Amendment were held together by a common thread: a national policy investment in asserting whiteness as a definitive feature of the U.S. state that required a re-charting of the country’s political cartography. Consequently, the 19^th Amendment cannot be understood as an act of mass enfranchisement. On the contrary, Congress used the subject of woman suffrage as an opportunity to re-negotiate federal and state jurisdictions over the franchise in order to limit the political access of African Americans and immigrants, including immigrant women, thus intensifying the trend of civil rights infringement after the Reconstruction period.

For all women, the legislature’s rhetorical approach created a significant political handicap. After waiting for 70 years to be recognized as political subjects in their own right, women were instead framed not as constituents but as tools of public policy. The 19^th Amendment debates did not just set a policy precedent; they inaugurated a long-lasting discursive disposition towards women’s empowerment. To this day when Congress debates issues of concern to women, the arguments are rarely rooted in a commitment to gender justice. Instead, women’s status is typically treated instrumentally, as a means to solving other problems of concern to legislators.