Strange Bedfellows: War and Minority Rights

President Woodrow Wilson’s own evolution on this question was symbolic. Though now remembered as a man of good standing in the Progressive movement, Wilson had in fact been a longtime opponent of gender equality. Before the war, he told his staff that he thought a “woman’s place was in the home, and the type of woman who took an active part in the suffrage agitation was totally abhorrent.”

The war flipped him. He came to see women’s suffrage not only as “an act of right and justice” but also more pragmatically as “a vitally necessary war measure.” In an impassioned 1917 speech before the Senate, Wilson urged Congress to support women’s suffrage: “We have made partners of the women in this war; shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right? This war could not have been fought … if it had not been for the services of women.” Shortly after his speech, the Nineteenth Amendment eclipsed the two-thirds requirement in both chambers of Congress and was quickly ratified.

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