Ten Thousand Petitioners Appeal for a Sixteenth Amendment
12/14/1877
After attempts to include universal suffrage in the 15th Amendment failed, women across the United States advanced several strategies for achieving woman suffrage. For example, the American Woman Suffrage Association focused on a state-by-state strategy, while the National Woman Suffrage Association supported a constitutional amendment. This petition from residents of Wolcottville, Indiana includes a message from the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) that provides insight into how the organization rallied support for a suffrage amendment.
The first page of this petition provides a recap of the petition drive NWSA had sponsored a year earlier. The summary is in the form of a letter to “the Friends of Woman Suffrage” from Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The letter celebrates the introduction to the House and Senate of petitions bearing the names of more than 10,000 people supporting a proposed Sixteenth Amendment. NWSA lauds the increased attention the issue had received recently and calls for an even larger petition drive to follow.
The final four paragraphs on the first page include instructions for carrying out the new petition drive, providing information on how petitions were to be circulated and the role of NWSA in coordinating the drive and delivering the petitions to Congress. Petitioners are also reminded to follow the instructions for creating two different types of petitions: “To Signers” (located on the second page of this document) a petition designed for many signatures, and the “Petition for Relief from Political Disabilities” for individual petitioners. (An example of this type is the Petition of Clemence S. Lozier).
An example of a petition bearing the signatures of both women and men is printed on the back of this announcement. This petition was referred to to the Committee on the Judiciary in the House of Representatives on December 14, 1877. In January of 1878, Senator Aaron Sargent proposed an amendment to the Constitution using language that would ultimately be the text of the 19th Amendment, passed 42 years later. The 19th Amendment, guaranteeing the right of women to vote, was ratified in 1919 thanks in part of decades of action by citizens like these from Wolcottville, Indiana, who exercised their right to petition the government to draw attention to the cause of woman suffrage.
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