“
A social movement that only moves people is merely a revolt. A movement that changes both people and institutions is a revolution.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait
"All politics is local."
--- Tip O'Neill, former Speaker of the House
Strategy is a grand word! Overused, true, especially by those with little to no understanding of either its classical meaning or its historical impact in a variety of grand events. In this age, everything that whiffs of a plan becomes a strategy. The purpose of this short essay is to disabuse you all of this misconception. A plan is a plan. A strategy is considerably more. Typically, a strategy consists of a series of (hopefully) interlocking plans, each advancing a goal ever further unto its glorious and victorious conclusion! What we are going to discuss and try to understand is how to construct and execute such a strategy without getting lost in the often dense forest of plans. To do this, we re going to spend a little time looking at one of the most important social campaigns in human history and, more specifically, the history of the United States: the movement to secure the political rights of women, otherwise known as the Suffragette Movement.
"
People say, what is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time."
- Dorothy Day
As noted, the plans are the bricks with which the wall of social change is built. But it is the strategy of a movement that tells you that a wall needed to be built in the first place. Further, not only does strategy tell you that you require a wall to achieve your goal, but strategy tells you what kind of wall you need, as well as what kind of bricks you need to make that wall. And few movements in American history fired up a more diverse load of bricks than the movement to secure equal political and social rights for women in the United States.
The task was epic. While we take women's political equality largely for granted these days, less than 200 years ago such a vision would've--and did--brand the espouser a bonafide lunatic. Indeed, many of the first suffragettes would share that fate as the men who dominated the institutions of politics and their agents such as the court system began with little to no tolerance for a demographic that was largely, as a matter of law, still seen as property similar to slavery. In fact, it was this comparison that provided one of the first effective propaganda blows that the fledgling movement would land. Even more impactful were the suffragettes of color, like the legendary Ida B. Wells, who manage to check both very large boxes. It was Wells who would begin the creation of the initial strategy of persuading the large masses of women used to obeying every command of their husbands or other male family members who acted as essentially the wardens of social propriety and were, in turn, responsible for defending the honor of their women while they were in a legally propertied state.
Thus the first plan that needed to be developed was how to expand the active participation of women in their own liberation! Just to add to the importance of this nearly universal first step in effective movement building, in my own analysis of social movements as a graduate student in political science many years ago, the historical record is fairly clear that movements that assumed a large, natural constituency for rights were headed for defeat!
Fortunately for American women, the first cohort of national leaders for female emancipation were senstive to the social forces that had colonized the minds of a large segment of women. For example, Cady-Stanton, Anthony andmany other prominent suggragettes in the early days of the movement knew they would be taking on more than just their own men. They would be taking on some of the most powerful institutions in *any* society, particularly religious leadership, who generally frowned on any attempt to change the dominant social orders of the day. As a result, beginning from the landmark meeting at Seneca Falls, NY in 1848, most of the years between then and the final push to the 19th amendment passed in 1920 were filled with the proliferation of local franchises of suffragettes all over the country, painstakingly recruited and expanded, often surreptitiously and in conditions of significant risk tothe well-being of many women, especially those women organizing in the working class of America. In the end, the liberation of American women and their inclusion as full, equal citizens in the country that they had given so much to took over 70 years! And that was just to change the law! That's the easier part of social change. It gets harder. Sometimes a whole lot harder.
It's one thing to get the law changed. It's another entirely to get people to generally agree with and support that change so as to avoid a movement-killing clash between progressive ambition and reactionary conservatism**. I need to be clear here that I'm not using either of these terms the way many of you are accustomed to understanding them in conventional politics in the media. But they are the correct terms, and we will eventually cover the topic of fighting over meaning of key terms. For the moment, however, I ask you to try to do your best to resist all those little alarms that might be going off for some of you right now and get to the finish line of this essay!
So how did the suffragette movement accomplish these goals of increasing their support among a broader array of citizens, especially men?
The biggest strategy that the movement relied on was to universalize the concepts of liberation by changing the language of liberation from male-centric to gender-neutral. If any of you are following the political fight over trans rights in the US at this time, you might recognize the deployment of those linguistic tactics from so long ago to the present day! For example, the suffragettes took great care to always humanize women in whatever social role they were found in, especially motherhood. Mothers occupy a special place in all human societies--hence the universalism--and the suffragettes understood that images of mom in chains could be a very powerful manipulator of emotion in the broader public. This was the positive strategy of the suffragette movement. Doubly effective was when this positive imagery was matched with its negative image corollary: mom as property.
A cursory search of the images of the early days of the 20th century show a highly coordinated strategy of exploiting these competing images of womanhood in order to manipulate the emotional reception for suffrage in the nation's male population. This tactic proved especially effective among working class males, who themselves were frequently fighting for their own recognition as political equal citizens in an economy whose politics held workers to be anything but equal with the owners of business properties. It could be argued that the liberation of American women often came down to the singular positive image of mom providing a caring presence for her family and thus a person worthy of legal protection versus the negative image of mom wearing chains as she labored away in the hot, steaming kitchen serving a table full of lay about males commanding ever more unreasonable service.
This, incidentally, is what a good plan looks like. And the suffragettes were loaded with good plans. Immensely creative in their application of politics to their goal, direct and unyielding in their demands for their upgrade in status, and relentless in their presence on one of America's most impactful political battlefields in her history. Armed with good plans, all that remained was to land on a winning strategy. And, as we have just seen, they did. They managed to communicate their vision of female value in American society effectively enough to enough people that, over time, that vision replaced the more traditional vision of women as property and servant to a male-dominated household.
