A Woman Who Remembers 75 Years Ago When Women Won The Right To Vote -- Her Vision: Ms. President

Are women biologically ill-equipped to vote? Are women too emotional, too irrational, too idealistic, too nurturing to make good decisions? Too sheltered and delicate for the rough-and-tumble? Too invested in family for the cold, hard world of dog-eat-dog?

That's what opponents of women's suffrage said back in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Remembering those days brings a hearty laugh from Margaret Backup, a Tacoma resident who helped to win the vote for women - a milestone whose 75th anniversary falls on Saturday.

At 100, with her ears, eyes and mind working just fine, Backup says she never understood that "shrinking violet" description of women.

"Well, of course, that was the very thing I knew wasn't true," says Backup, who was just a slip of a girl when she began plying her neighbors with women's-suffrage petitions at the behest of her mother, a tireless campaigner for the vote. "My mother had so much intelligence, and it felt like she was a disenfranchised citizen when she didn't have the right to vote."

Backup remembers attending political meetings with her mother, who was a close friend of Emma Smith DeVoe, a leader in the fight to gain voting rights in this state. Theirs was not a militant approach, she remembered, but "very gentle," emphasizing that women's vote would help the whole family.

By the time Congress approved the 19th Amendment on Aug. 26, 1920, guaranteeing that right across the country, women and their

male supporters had been campaigning for it for 72 years.

"WOMAN SUFFRAGE FIGHT FINISHED!" screamed a headline in The Seattle Daily Times, the newspaper you are reading now. "Jollifications are Planned in Capital," read the subhead.

The fight was finished, but was the war won? What about those awkward ideas about women that flourished before 1920?

"The masculine represents judgment . . . while the feminine represents emotion," as one tract put it. Or, "The predominance of sentiment in woman renders her essentially an idealist. She jumps at conclusions."

Did getting the vote dash such notions?

"They may take different forms, but I perceive that they're still there," says state Sen. Jeanne Kohl, D-Seattle. "I think what's happened is they're more subtle. It's much harder to get a handle on them, but they still present themselves."

She talks about speeches that "make a lot of us roll our eyes." Her floor resolution recognizing child-care providers, for example, elicited speeches from some legislators on the benefits of mothers staying home with their children.

Kohl remembers one constituent, a lifelong Democrat, who told her he'd probably vote for her opponent, a male Republican with no legislative experience. "Well, he's a man," the man told Kohl, who had been a state representative for three years. "You haven't earned it yet."

The notion that women are different from men is a "double-edged sword" in politics, says Susan Carroll of the Center for the American Woman and Politics.

While women politicians still get asked if they can handle "big budgets" or be tough enough to handle other big issues, they also are believed to bring a different perspective into politics, Carroll says. In fact, women legislators often focus on women, children and the elderly.

When it comes to women voters, pollsters have concluded there is now a permanent "gender gap."

Not only do women prefer Democrats while white men prefer Republicans, women even seem to like a president who "feels their pain." As one public-opinion specialist told The Washington Post, that's noticeably different from men, who tend to say things like: "I don't want my president to feel my pain, I want him to get tough with North Korea."

Women and men also appear to have different attitudes about the role of government, says Carroll: "Women favor a more activist government, and are less in favor of cutting back."

These splits between women and men occur in all sorts of races, dividing even groups such as conservative Christians.

Political analysts say that's because women have had "different experiences."

And they've had them for a long, long time.

Margaret Backup lived at a time when the phrase "women's rights" was virtually an oxymoron. A husband held the rights to all property, including his wife's belongings, paychecks, and his wife herself. Women didn't even have the right to become guardians of their own children.

Nor were all women sure about the issue. "I can remember one woman saying that she didn't have any knowledge of politics; many women felt that way," remembers Backup.

Those feelings were reinforced by omnipresent propaganda. "Household hints" in a Massachusetts journal advised women to put the vote in perspective: "Housewives! You do not need a ballot to clean out your sink spout. . . . Control of the temper makes a happier home than control of elections."

But women turned around the "too soft, too nurturing" image. With the vote, they argued, we'll help clean up politics, take care of children and families, work for reform in the mines and garment industries, and do something about booze.

Liquor interests, sure that women voters would be nothing but trouble, disseminated unflattering images of these anti-booze banshees. If the small minority of suffragists had their way, one article warned, women everywhere would become "large-handed, big-footed, flat-chested, and thin-lipped."

It was a rough fight, and not just rhetorically. Women went to jail, were beat up, vilified and called subversive for their views, notes Helen Wheatley, assistant professor of history at Seattle University.

"Please don't ever say that women were `granted' the right to vote," cautions Chris Gaston of the Seattle Chapter of the National Organization for Women. "Women gave their lives to win the right to vote, and they won it fair and square. They fought for it, and they fought hard."

Nobody fought harder than an African-American woman named Isabella Baumfree, who spent the first 26 years of her life as a slave in New York. Once free, she named herself Sojourner Truth and began denouncing racism and sexism.

At one women's-rights conference in Ohio, she addressed those who said women were too weak to have such power. "Look at me!" she commanded, raising her muscular arm into the air. "I have plowed. And I have planted. And I have gathered into barns. And no man could head me."

Pausing, she demanded: "And ain't I a woman?"

In many of the frontier states, women had already won the right to vote well before 1920. In Washington state, the vote was alternately won and lost beginning in 1883, in the territorial days. In 1910, women won the vote permanently.

"The `timid flower' thing didn't work so well here," says historian Murray Morgan. "These were pioneer women you're talking about, who were here when times were tough."

And they didn't forget their political enemies.

Morgan tells the story of George Turner, a territorial Supreme Court judge.

Laws, Turner said, can't make "timid, shrinking" women as strong as men or change their "life theater," which, he said, "is, and will continue to be, and ought to continue to be, primarily the home circle."

When women got their vote back, one of the first things they did was help to defeat Turner in his bid for election to the U.S. Senate.

Backup, who's been a steady voter throughout her lifetime, believes she's made a difference. During the Vietnam War, she protested the war in Washington, D.C., marching with the Jeannette Rankin Brigade - named for the first woman elected to Congress, in 1916.

Change is a slow process in our system, says Backup, but it comes.

Today, she notes, there are many women governors, unthinkable in the first decades of her life. "I wouldn't be surprised in the next century to see a woman sitting in the White House," she says, chuckling a little at the thought of it.

That sentiment would satisfy Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association during the final years of the suffrage movement, and described as a "brilliant general" for the strategy she developed. These are Catt's words upon ratification of the 19th Amendment:

"The vote is the emblem of your equality, women of America, the guaranty of your liberty. . . . Women have suffered agony of soul which you never can comprehend so that you and your daughters might inherit political freedom. That vote has been costly. Prize it. The vote is a power, a weapon of offense and defense, a prayer. Understand what it means and what it can do for your country."