Anita Pollitzer

The National Woman's Party
and the Fight for the Nineteenth
Amendment

Anita Pollitzer grew up in a socially conscious and politically active family in Charleston, South Carolina.  Her parents were leaders of the Jewish community, and her older sisters Carrie and Mabel were involved with the National Woman’s Party from its inception in 1913. Though Pollitzer marched for suffrage as an art student in New York City in 1915, it wasn’t until her return to Charleston in 1917 that her passing interest took a more serious turn. She helped her sisters host a talk by Elsie Hill, a charter member of the National Woman’s Party, and quickly fell under her spell. “We talked suffrage,” she wrote to O’Keeffe after the talk. “The point is to push things thru Washington, to do it Federally rather than state by state. I am muchly interested . . . I’ll tell you more when it happens.”

By the fall of 1918, Pollitzer was standing with the Silent Sentinels outside the White House – and at the front lines of the tumultuous and controversial fight for the 19th Amendment. Alice Paul, founder of the National Woman’s Party, quickly recognized her potential and sent her on the road to canvas for support. “Snow miles high,” Pollitzer wrote to Paul from Wyoming, “influenza epidemic so bad that it was considered immoral for six women to meet in a parlor.” Instead, she “tramped the automobile roads and papered the trees with posters.”

She became Secretary of the National Woman’s Party legislative committee in 1920 when she was just 25 years old, making her the youngest of the NWP’s officers. Paul would later call her “one of the most successful organizers we ever had. She has a great deal of initiative, enthusiasm, and personal charm. She was particularly good in press work, interviewing, money raising and speaking.”  Pollitzer employed all these skills as she stumped for the vote, culminating in Nashville in August 1920 when ratification depended on a deeply divided Tennessee legislature. “A little suffragist came to my office this morning,” influential Republican former Tennessee governor Ben Hooper told his wife, “and made me do everything except jump through a hoop and if she had asked me I’d have done that too.”  She worked the same wiles on Harry Burns, the state’s youngest representative who had declared support for the antisuffragists. In the end, though he cried “Aye” as he cast the deciding vote for ratification. When the final tally of 49 for and 47 against was read aloud, the newspapers claimed that the cheering could be heard clear across Nashville’s Cumberland River.

After the 19th Amendment was passed, Pollitzer worked closely with Alice Paul, helping craft and promote the Equal Rights Amendment. She succeeded Paul as national chair of the National Woman’s Party from 1945 to 1949. Even after she retired from the NWP, Pollitzer never stopped working for women’s rights.  Her ceaseless efforts on behalf of the Equal Rights Amendment, which languishes to this day in Congress, helped bring the bill the closest it’s ever come to being enacted into law.