That such a question must be asked points out a democratic paradox. Universal suffrage—the term meaning that everyone has the right to vote—is described as a fundamental feature of modern democracy. But there is no democracy where universal suffrage is actually universal.

That may surprise you, because more than 100 countries on Earth claim to have universal suffrage. But by that, they mean only that there are no distinctions between voters based on gender, race, ethnicity, wealth, or literacy.

In reality, all democracies prevent many of their residents from voting, and do so without apology. Children and teenagers are denied voting rights because of their age. Many countries limit the voting rights of people in prison. Most democracies deny equal suffrage to members of their population who lack citizenship, residency, or other legal status.

So, if suffrage is ever going to be truly universal, the world must find a way to make the right to vote as much a part of every human being as the heart. It’s with you for your whole life, and it goes with you wherever you go.

I’ve been thinking about the need for portable voting rights while watching countries celebrate anniversaries of so-called “universal suffrage.” Of course, these commemorations are really about remembering the long-ago campaigns to extend the voting rights to women.

Such history deserves celebration, but it also should remind us that democracy, like other human enterprises, moves both backward and forward often at the same time.

This month’s 50th anniversary of women’s suffrage in Switzerland—which was granted very late, in 1971, by a majority of male voters who had secured their voting rights 123 years earlier—has been an occasion to consider all the ways that this very democratic country falls short. Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras are about to commemorate both the 1921 adoption of women’s suffrage, and the loss of those rights in 1922 when their shared federal republic fell. In the U.S., last year’s celebrations of the centennial of women’s suffrage also noted how that advance came with new restrictions on voting by non-whites and immigrants.

These pasts point to a hard fact: suffrage is problematic for democracy, because it tears at a fundamental contradiction within it. That contradiction is embedded in the roots of the English word suffrage, including the Old French sofrage, meaning “intercessory prayers or pleas on behalf of another.”

“On behalf of another” signals the democratic contradiction: Democracy appeals because it allows us to govern ourselves, and vote in our own self-interest. But democracy, unlike American waistlines or solids under heat, does not expand naturally. Extending suffrage requires us to share our own democratic rights with others, even though it reduces the power of our own votes.

This internal and eternal democratic conflict of interest—democracy requires selfishness and selflessness—is why no human society has given voting rights to everyone. To make suffrage truly universal, we citizens, and our nations, must surrender the power to decide who else will get the vote. Suffrage, the right to vote, must be a universal human right, granted automatically at birth.

Achieving this sort of universality won’t be easy. The good news is that the right to vote is already enshrined within the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international agreements. But international human rights are notoriously hard to enforce. Universal suffrage will thus require an international treaty, or other agreement, with not just nations but with governments at all political levels—provinces, regions, cities—as signatories.

The details would be debated, but I would propose two fundamental provisions. First, every single human being has a right to vote in the country of which they are citizen. Second, every single person has a right to vote at the municipal level in the community where they reside, regardless of legal status.

The practical impacts would be profound. Truly universal suffrage would be a major advance of freedom for prisoners and ex-convicts, whose voting rights are often limited. More profoundly, universal suffrage would be the greatest expansion of children’s rights in human history.

There could be a backlash against giving toddlers a democratic voice. Today the most common voting age in the world is 18, with Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Scotland, Wales, and possibly soon Switzerland allowing voting at 16. If there must be a compromise, I would suggest either 15—the age at which the Dalai Lama assumed his temporal powers and Greta Thunberg launched her boycott—or 13—when Anne Frank began keeping her diary.
And giving non-citizens the right to vote where they live would offer timely protection for the rights of migrants, now under growing threat worldwide.

According to one survey, at least 45 countries now allow noncitizen residents to vote in their local, regional, or even national elections. This includes Australia, parts of Latin America, some U.S. municipalities, several Swiss cantons, and the European Union, which since 1992’s Maastricht Treaty has guaranteed local voting rights to residents who are citizens of other member states.

The enduring success of this E.U. rule suggests that when our voting rights cross national lines, we grow closer. In the same spirit, truly universal suffrage—and the principles that we all may vote where we live and where we have citizenship—might make a fractured world more unified, and more democratic.

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While women make up 51 percent of the U.S. population, they remain underrepresented across the board when it comes to positions of leadership in politics and across the public and private sector. The visceral shot of Wicks wearing a mask and a baby carrier seemed to cut directly to the heart of the evening’s central question: “Why Don’t Women’s Votes Put More Women in Power?”

The moderator for the discussion, Marisa Lagos, KQED’s California politics and government correspondent, recalled seeing Wicks and thinking about taking her own infant to the 2016 Democratic Convention. Is the pandemic pulling back the curtain on choices like those she and Wicks had to make, “a good thing in terms of power and convincing people you need to have a seat at the table—but you might need to have a high chair next to you?” Lagos asked the panelists.

“I really think women are fed up, and we’re in a moment of an awakening,” said panelist C. Nicole Mason, president and CEO of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. “We understand the issues,” she said, and the fact that systems are broken. “It’s the how: How do we get to a better place? How do we get to a workplace, a society, and an economy that values women as workers, as primary breadwinners in some cases, intellectual equals, powerful women, and leaders?”

California State Senator and author of the California Fair Pay Act Hannah-Beth Jackson, another panelist, shared that one of the reasons Wicks was on the floor that night was to vote on a bill that Jackson had put forward to expand paid family leave. The bill required a simple majority of 41 members to pass. “We got there only with three minutes literally left to spare in the legislative session,” Jackson said. More legislation, she argued, that is “reflective of the fact that women are indeed in the workforce and are valued in workforce” is needed to create a culture shift. “We have to change the laws. We have to change the mindset.” She added that it’s “having more women at the table in the room where it happens that’s going to help transform this.”

That’s a philosophy fellow panelist, Rosa “Rosie” Rios, the 43rd Treasurer of the United States, has worked hard to realize. As head of the Treasury Department during the Obama administration, Rios initiated and led efforts to place a woman on U.S. currency for the first time in more than a century.

Rios recalled her first days in the Treasury Department. “I walk in there, first female confirmed, and there’s no nursing room,” she said. “I’m started to notice women who were supposed to come back from maternity leave weren’t coming back. And I’m thinking, what century did I just walk into?” Rios ended up using her own budget to create a nursing space in the building (something that the Affordable Care Act of 2010, she pointed out, would eventually mandate for every federal facility).

The first step to making change is to recognize what’s missing, said Rios. “That was the beginning for me on this journey I continue on today in how every one of us can make a difference in how we think about facilitating a more inclusive environment,” she said.

Johns Hopkins University historian Martha S. Jones, author of Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All, brought a longer perspective to the night. Circling back to the image of Wicks—“a woman lawmaker in the 21st century bringing her child into the chamber”—Jones said it made her “think about enslaved women who were required to leave their children in order to care for the children of others. These are complicated, interwoven stories,” she said.

Building a more equitable path forward requires taking centuries of diverse women’s experiences into account. “Early history reminds us that we have been here before, and we know how to do better,” Jones said. “I hope we take lessons from that past and the ways in which silences are often built into our stories to tell stories that are more inclusive and more reflective of who we are as a diverse community of women in the 21st century.”

As the night went on, the discussion roamed between past and present, Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm—the first woman and the first African American to run for the nomination of a major party for president—and Kamala Harris’s vice presidential nomination.

“There’s a question about how to measure or weight the significance of her nomination as one measure of women’s process,” said Jones. “In my view, it would be a mistake to suggest it took 100 years for a Black woman to ‘make it’ onto the Democratic party ticket as a vice president.” Considering that it’s only been 55 years since the Voting Rights Act, she said, “Harris’s rise to power is in part a reflection about how in a short half-century-plus, Black women, despite the impediments, have built an extraordinary degree of political power, political life, political force in this country.”

The historian added that it’s also notable that Harris was one of six Black women to be vetted seriously for the ticket. “Senator Harris is the candidate, but she alone doesn’t tell the story of how Black women get from 1965 to 2020 in such an extraordinary fashion.”

During a question and answer session with the audience, the panelists spoke about the need for building a women’s base that cuts across lines of race, class, gender identity, and sexuality.

“We all know when the doors of opportunity and access swing open, many of the women who face different kinds of barriers are the last ones to come through the door. The 19th Amendment is a prime example of that,” Mason pointed out, with a nod to the 100th anniversary of its passage, which inspired the When Women Vote series.

But there’s an opportunity in this moment, she said, to build a more inclusive coalition. “I’m optimistic as we think about the pandemic and the economy and working women and all of these things—Kamala Harris, and this moment,” Mason continued, “that we are able to find some of this common ground but not [lose] sight of those differences that are also important in shaping women’s lived experiences.”

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That Shaw, who was president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, had come to a Midwestern state like South Dakota was not unusual; the region had a rich but contentious history with woman suffrage. The familiar narrative of women’s struggle to win the vote places national leaders like Shaw, Susan B. Anthony, and Carrie Chapman Catt on the East Coast, marching in parades in New York City or Washington, D.C. And that narrative defines their fight as a matter of women’s rights, based on calls for liberty and equality. But looking more closely at Shaw’s speech reveals the regional complexity of the movement—which was nationwide, and entangled in complicated local and regional issues that were not purely about justice. Shaw’s riveting address combined the struggle for woman suffrage with a broader debate about immigration in the region that ultimately asked difficult questions about a person’s “fitness” to vote.

Midwestern states like South Dakota had large immigrant populations, the majority from Germany, who tended to view woman suffrage with a mix of skepticism and hostility. Often living on farms in isolated ethnic enclaves, some opposed the cause because they espoused conventional gender roles and thought politics too corrupt for women. Others feared that women voters would seek to curtail cherished cultural practices like drinking, and argued that suffragists merely wanted the ballot to institute prohibition.

Indeed, many Midwestern suffragists had come to support woman suffrage through the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, or WCTU. These Midwestern suffragists were also often Yankees, either born in the Northeast or to parents from the region—and mostly white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant—who saw the ballot as necessary to protect their homes and communities from corruption caused by vices like drunkenness. But by the early 1910s, most Yankee suffragists in the Midwest had begun to distinguish their work in the WCTU from their work for suffrage. State associations elected new leaders with no formal ties to the WCTU, hoping to send a message that their desire to vote had nothing to do with Prohibition.

Still, immigrants opposed the cause, and Midwestern suffragists grew increasingly frustrated. They began to disparage their foreign-born neighbors as stubbornly and irrevocably ignorant. “They probably know little of our American ideals,” declared one Iowa suffragist.

By 1914, the suffragists’ frustration had turned to outright prejudice—and Shaw expertly tapped into those long-simmering fears. World War I had just erupted in Europe, and while the United States did not join the flight until April 1917, the conflict weighed heavily on the people in her audience. Native-born Americans were suspicious of South Dakota’s large German population, and as Germany invaded Belgium and northern France, many in the state—men and women—had begun to cast Germans as lawless aggressors. At the podium at the Congregational Church, Shaw amended her usual pro-suffrage lecture to unveil a novel argument: that citizenship was a civic responsibility, that the vote was a duty rather than just a right, and that politically-active native-born women were more deserving of the franchise than their ignorant male immigrant neighbors.

Shaw began her talk by reviewing some well-worn assumptions about gender and citizenship. During the 19th century, she said, government seemed like “some subtle thing beyond the reach of the inexperienced [woman]”—a mysterious force that citizens, and especially disenfranchised women, only felt distantly. During the early 20th century, however, women had grown close to politics and, as Shaw put it, “should be a part of the government.” Civic virtue had long been a hallmark of Midwestern political culture. Yankees were the first group to settle in large numbers in the region after the Civil War, often donating their land, money, and time to develop infrastructure and public institutions. Later generations, in turn, venerated Yankee pioneers’ activism, which demonstrated what they saw as steadfast resolve in the face of hardship and loneliness.

While conventional ideas about gender reinforced distinct roles for the men and women who settled the vast prairies, Midwestern women often transcended these boundaries, stepping in when towns lacked basic municipal services, starting garbage collection services, establishing public parks, and raising funds for public schools. Most of these women were Yankees, and many spoke of themselves as virtuous citizens who sacrificed on behalf of their communities. By 1914, Progressivism, a reform movement that promoted government action and direct democracy, was flourishing throughout the United States, and native-born women in the Midwest heeded its call. For example, in Clay County, Iowa, one group of women focused on “pure food” initiatives to promote sanitary conditions in meat processing facilities and end the sale of adulterated foods by sponsoring a film series and articles in local newspapers.

In contrast, Shaw suggested, South Dakota’s naturalized male immigrants were taking advantage of naturalization and its benefits without giving back. She alleged that foreign-born men—mainly Germans—were filing papers to become citizens, and thus gain the vote, at a remarkable rate. This may not have been true: the National Archives reports that 25 percent of all the foreign-born individuals listed in the census from 1890 to 1930 had not become naturalized or even filed their first papers. But the system was certainly haphazard and disorganized, and for generations had allowed noncitizen immigrants to assert voting rights with great ease. In 1914, a number of Midwestern states, including South Dakota, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio, had allowed or still allowed male foreigners to vote before becoming citizens.

Shaw suggested that naturalization was a nightmare because it was wrongly assumed that “any person, upon arriving at the age of 21 years, if he be male, is fully capable of assuming the responsibilities of government.” Instead, Shaw suggested, many foreigners were too ignorant to be good citizens. At one citizenship hearing, she told her audience, a “foreigner appeared…and after going through the usual form, was asked the question, through an interpreter: Who is the president of the United States? He very promptly and intelligently answered, ‘Charles Murphy.’”

Shaw’s shocking story struck a nerve with her audience; one observer remarked that she left a “favorable impression” because she presented “undeniable truths.” When Shaw commented that foreigners “all over the country today on account of the war in Europe” were “very anxious to take out their first papers of citizenship,” she pandered to growing fears that Germans had plotted to take advantage of the chaotic naturalization process as a means of undermining their adopted nation.

Shaw’s speech to the Congregational Church in the fall of 1914 reflected how powerful nativism was becoming as a political force in the Midwest. She surely hoped her remarks about citizenship, including her not-so-veiled nativist anecdote, would convince voters to support woman suffrage. But her speech also rang an ominous tone that resonated well beyond the 1914 campaign.

Despite Shaw’s efforts, voters in South Dakota defeated the 1914 amendment by about 12,000 votes. Newspaper reports indicated that voters still believed either that suffragists only wanted the ballot to enact temperance legislation or that woman suffrage was far too radical. Undeterred, state suffrage leaders secured another amendment bill in 1916, but defeat again dashed their hopes. Nativist ideas percolated, and by 1916, suffrage leaders across the Midwest were commonly targeting the right of immigrants to vote.

In South Dakota and Iowa, state officials produced propaganda and issued post-election reports that accused Germans of seeking to commit electoral sabotage as part of elaborate terroristic plots. In one case, press directors in South Dakota created a map that indicated in black the counties in which residents had defeated the 1916 amendment. A note above the map read that “the ‘German’ counties are all black,” meaning that those counties that defeated suffrage in 1916 had majority German populations. The message was clear—Germans had masterminded the defeat of woman suffrage.

Nativist fear built into outright hysteria, and Midwestern suffragists began recasting decades of foreign resistance to assimilation as treason. They argued that to protect democracy, only those citizens who understood civic responsibility should vote. By 1917, when the United States entered World War I, suffragists crystallized their message. In South Dakota, propaganda warned of the untrustworthy “alien enemy” while celebrating patriotic suffragists who sacrificed “so deeply for the world struggle.” Another message deemed the “women of America…too noble and too intelligent and too devoted to be slackers” like their German counterparts.

That rhetorical maneuver finally gave woman suffrage the political leverage it needed to achieve victory. In November 1918, voters in South Dakota passed a woman suffrage amendment to the state’s constitution with an impressive 64 percent majority. Of the first 15 states to ratify the 19th Amendment, about half were in the Midwest—a startling shift for a region that had seemed permanently opposed to woman suffrage.

While Shaw’s speech was meant for an audience living in an important historical moment and place, it also resonates today. Suffragists had no qualms about using nativism to open democracy to women. They were willing to skewer immigrants in their decades-long quest for political equality. Shaw’s remarks also remind us how many assumptions Americans have made—in 1914 and today—about the rights and responsibilities that accompany citizenship.

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Many adventurous and patriotic young women longed to defend their country during the Great War. They discovered that if they wanted to serve in uniform, they could not merely perform as well as the young men in the American Expeditionary Forces, who sailed to Europe in 1917 to help the Allies defeat the Germans. Women, still denied the vote, would have to perform better. They would have to do something the men could not. America’s ongoing Industrial Revolution gave the “Hello Girls,” as the first female recruits came to be known, their opportunity to serve the nation and earn full rights as citizens.

In May 1917, the month after Congress declared war on Germany, General John Pershing sailed for France. He stuffed his ship’s hold with the newest technologies: Military tackle had undergone a revolution since Pershing served in the Indian wars of the 1880s. Planes had replaced horses. Trucks had overtaken mule trains. Telephone wires had outrun flares and semaphore flags.

Sitting near a war bonds poster depicting Joan of Arc, Raymonde Breton (R) visits her sister Louise in the Signal Corps barracks at Neufchateau, later bombed by German planes. Photo courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration.

Invented in the United States, American telephones reached farther, conveyed more messages on a wire, and reproduced sound with greater fidelity than telephones anywhere else in the world. They were the only military technology in which America enjoyed superiority over both allies and enemies. When the British commanding officer in World War I used an American-built line to place a call from France to England, he exclaimed, “Would you believe it? They actually recognized my voice in London before I told them who I was!”

Commands to advance or retreat, and to fire or stand down, were relayed by phone during the Great War. If America was going to position its immense armies quickly and effectively, it needed experts to handle this critical technology. “The importance of intercommunication in warfare cannot well be exaggerated,” wrote Brigadier General George Squier, chief signal officer for the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Without communications for even an hour, “the whole military machine would collapse.”

At home, telephone operating was sex-segregated. Callers rang female operators, who connected nearly every call made. Their job was demanding. With hands darting like hummingbirds, operators connected hundreds of impatient callers each hour. Diligent and quick, they talked with customers while manipulating plugs in a constantly changing pattern.

U.S. General John “Black Jack” Pershing inspects switchboard operators serving in occupied Germany. Women remained on duty until discharged after World War I ended in November 1918. The last women were relieved in 1920. Photo courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration.

When Pershing arrived in France, he found male recruits ill-suited for this work. They were inefficient, and prone to frustration when dealing with rude callers. Few doughboys possessed the foreign language skills necessary to cooperate with French telephone operators when making long-distance connections. Necessity required innovation, so Pershing—an innovative thinker who had been nicknamed “Black Jack” after he commanded an African-American regiment on the frontier—departed from precedent, law, and the wishes of the Army itself to recruit women. Before most doughboys arrived, and well after they left, bilingual women served in France. They withstood submarine warfare, cannon fire, influenza, aerial bombardment, and petty-minded bureaucrats to send the word over there.

Most worked behind the lines in safer regions of France. But one small group, led by Grace Banker, a 25-year-old graduate of Barnard College, followed Pershing from the short but intense Battle of St. Mihiel to the desperately extended Meuse-Argonne Offensive, lasting 47 days. The women ran switchboards 24 hours a day within range of artillery fire that lit up the horizon and shook their equipment. Enemy planes buzzed overhead. A German prisoner of war overturned an oil stove and burned their barracks to the ground. Yet the indomitable women embraced every challenge. The highest aspiration of nearly every female Signal Corps member was to serve as near the battle as possible.

Grace Banker, with three service stripes on her sleeve, wears the Distinguished Service Medal, awarded to only 18 Signal Corps officers of the U.S. Army, including her. Photo courtesy of Robert, Grace, and Carolyn Timbie.

Their efforts, along with those of female Army nurses and private volunteers, helped shape another great debate: whether or not to grant women the vote. World War I altered expectations about citizenship globally. Not only did the Russian, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and German Empires fragment into a dozen new nations, but cracks also ran under the British, French, and Dutch Empires as diverse peoples claimed a right to popular sovereignty. Within older democracies, groups who never had much voice raised theirs with new conviction.

Women, in particular, leveraged the conflict for suffrage. By war’s end, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Great Britain, New Zealand, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and 10 other countries had enfranchised females. Not surprisingly, the nation latest to the war was also late to the vote. Accustomed to congratulating itself as the vanguard of democracy, the United States brought up the rear. Its suffrage movement had struggled for 70 years without producing victory. Founders like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton died without seeing their life’s work fulfilled.

But the war—and female recruits’ efforts in battle—changed the mind of one crucial U.S. leader: President Woodrow Wilson. Prior to his election in 1912, he told an aide that he was “definitely and irreconcilably opposed to woman suffrage; woman’s place was in the home, and the type of woman who took an active part in the suffrage agitation was totally abhorrent to him.”

Six years later, at the height of American fighting in France, Wilson told the U.S. Senate that the women’s vote was vital to the “realization of the objects for which the war is being fought.” He hoped America might eventually organize an enduring democratic peace, guaranteed by a League of Nations. But how could the United States lead the free world if it was behind everyone else? Once women’s suffrage was entangled with Wilson’s foreign policy goals, it became necessary, not discretionary. The president made two arguments: The United States could not hold itself aloof from world opinion, and women had amply earned the privileges of citizenship.

General Pershing Entering St. Mihiel by Ernest Clifford Peixotto, 1918. Image courtesy of Division of Armed Forces History, National Museum of American History.

“Are we alone to refuse to learn the lesson?” he asked the conservative Senate. Wilson made scant reference to suffragists in his speeches to Congress. Militant activists continued to irk him. But he had come to admire female citizens doing their duty “upon the very skirts and edges of the battle itself.” The war could not be fought without them. “Are we alone to ask and take the utmost women can give—service and sacrifice of every kind—and still say that we do not see what title that gives them?” the president asked. “Shall we admit them only to a partnership of sacrifice and suffering and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and of right?”

When the war ended on November 11, 1918, Grace Banker received the Distinguished Service Medal for assuring “the success of the telephone service during the operations of the First Army against the St. Mihiel salient and the operations to the north of Verdun.” Only 18 out of 16,000 eligible Signal Corps officers received the medal. Grace Banker was one of them. Thirty other women received citations for “exceptionally meritorious and conspicuous services” in the war zone.

U.S. Army Signal Corps Female Telephone Operator uniform. Worn by Helen Cook, Chief Operator. Gift of Helen Cook through The National Society of the Colonial Dames of America. Image courtesy of Division of Armed Forces History, National Museum of American History. On view in Uniformed Women in the Great War.

Sadly, such recognition was transitory. Once operators returned home in 1919 (two died in France), the Army denied them veterans’ bonuses, victory medals, hospitalization for disabilities, and even a flag on their coffins. As a result, the Hello Girls commenced a new struggle for recognition as veterans that eventually caught the second wave of feminism. In 1979, assisted by the National Organization for Women, 31 survivors received their World War I Victory Medals at last.

Yet every Hello Girl had the satisfaction of knowing she had demonstrated women’s willingness to fulfill the hardest duty of citizenship. As testimony in the Congressional Record for 1918 and 1919 shows, the men who helped pass the Susan B. Anthony Amendment—which finally gave women the right to vote—understood this, too.

“Women have performed more than their part in this great struggle for democracy, freedom, and liberty,” Senator William Thompson said, echoing many others. In the United States, France, and England, female citizens had produced food, guns, ammunition, planes, and trains. They loaded baggage, drove trucks, operated switchboards, and were ready, “if necessary, to shoulder the gun and march to the front themselves.” Thompson had traveled throughout the war zone. Women, he found, were praised everywhere.

Women’s activism laid the basis for women’s suffrage. World War I secured it. The Hello Girls fought on both fronts.

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