If Libs Had Had Their Way, Women Couldn't Vote Today

March is Women's History Month, so it's a good time to highlight an excellent article on how vehemently the Left fought against giving women the right to vote in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

David Catron's two-page article, Republicans and Women's Rights: A Brief Reality Check, was written in April 2012 in response to the Left's modern 'GOP War on Women' myth. In the process, though, he provides a timeless history lesson all women should know about who really was — and who really was not — on their side during a forty-year legislative war between conservatives and liberal-progressives to secure women's right to vote.

That war began in 1878, when a California Republican named A.A. Sargent introduced the 19th Amendment only to see it voted down by a Democrat-controlled Congress. It finally ended four decades later, when the Republicans won landslide victories in the House and the Senate, giving them the power to pass the amendment despite continued opposition from most elected Democrats -- including President Woodrow Wilson, to whom the suffragettes frequently referred as "Kaiser Wilson."  ...

...the Republicans continued to introduce the 19th Amendment in Congress every year, but the Democrats were able to keep it bottled up in various committees for another decade before allowing either chamber to vote on it. In 1887 it finally reached the floor of the Senate. Once again, however, it was defeated by a vote of 34 to 16. After this setback, advocates of women's suffrage opted to put pressure on Congress by convincing various state legislatures to pass bills giving women the vote. This met with some success. By the turn of the century a variety of Republican-controlled states, including Wyoming, Colorado, and Idaho, had granted women suffrage. During the first ten years of the new century, several other states gave women the vote, including Washington and California.

Congress, however, didn't deign to vote on the issue again until 1914, when it was once again defeated by Senate Democrats. It was subsequently brought up for a vote in January of 1915 in the House, where it went down by a vote of 204 to 174. Nonetheless, the Republicans continued to push even after it was defeated yet again in early 1918. The big break for 19th Amendment came when President Wilson, a true Democrat, violated his most solemn campaign promise. Having pledged to keep the United States out of the European conflict that had been raging since 1914, he decided to enter the war anyway. This set the stage for the 1918 midterm elections in which voter outrage swept the Republicans into power in both the House and the Senate. This finally placed the GOP in a position to pass the amendment despite Democrat opposition.

The 19th Amendment was "passed by Congress in 1919 and ratified by the states in 1920," thanks to conservatives who simply refused to stop fighting for women.