8/8/2011:
1920 was a crucial year for women’s rights in America. The struggle for equality certainly wasn’t over, but when women were finally granted the right to cast their vote as equal citizens, it was the result of decades of strenuous effort. In August of 1920, a lot of North Dakotans were talking about the future for female kind. It took thirty-six states to ratify the amendment, and thirty-five had already done so, North Dakota included. It looked like Tennessee was poised to put the amendment over the top, marking an historic moment in history.
So, as newspapers went to press on this date, they read a little differently than they would have a few years earlier. It’s interesting to look at the adjustments in advertising, business, news, and other parts of daily life. For instance, some quick-thinking sellers thought to advertise their dresses for a “new kind” of “practical” woman. If women are going to be voting, the advertisers might have thought, it may be a good time to start encouraging their practicality! Or maybe they just hoped to capitalize upon the political climate. Either way, the advertisement encouraged women to do more than look attractive in an uncomfortable gown.
And as a huge group of anti-socialists organized in Western North Dakota, they took something into consideration that they never had before. It was proposed to have a woman serve as a district chairman to “create interest among women . . . for with the possibility of suffrage being adopted,” the paper read, “the vote of the women will be a great factor in the fall election.”
And in the “As a Woman Thinks” section of the Forum, a woman commented on her comfortable new clothes, lifestyle, and rights when she wrote, “We made ourselves miserable in the old days so that men would care for us, and it is a new but blissful era when we can make ourselves comfortable and attractive at the same time.” She wrote that while some men will always want uneducated women who suffer for their “idiotic fashions,” most will come to wonder “what he saw in her.” She predicted progress. And today, though there have been decades of struggle, most North Dakota women would agree she was right.
Dakota Datebook written by Leewana Thomas
Sources:
The Fargo Forum, August 9th, 1920
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution