Once the woman suffrage cause was reinvigorated in the 1890s, so too was its opposition, the anti-suffragists. While suffragists argued that the vote would allow women to spread their influence and clean up society, their opponents maintained that suffragists endangered society by abandoning the home. Anti-suffrage men and women were persuaded by arguments that, in a culture in which sex roles were defined and separate, the vote threatened femininity and, by extension, society. It would be unnatural, anti-suffragists argued, for women to behave like men by entering politics. Women were believed to be mentally unfit for politics, for they might be corrupted by the rough and tumble masculine world. Other anti-suffragists put forth more overtly self-interested arguments against female suffrage. Political machines and saloon owners, for instance, feared that women’s supposed innate moralism would undermine the political, economic, and social status quo just as women’s reform efforts jeopardized their livelihoods.
Ironically, some anti-suffragists tried connecting the woman suffrage movement to “un-American” groups, or immigrants, in an attempt to discredit it. Many suffragists, however, made their argument for the vote on the grounds that the votes of middle-class native-born white women would outweigh the votes of “undesirable” elements that already voted. Women would support reform of the corruption and vice associated with urban immigrant life in the eyes of “old stock” Americans. Despite the growing appeal of the suffrage cause, anti-suffragists argued that woman suffrage in the end would have little impact. Pointing to states where women already had the right to vote, they maintained that women did not vote as a bloc and therefore did not bring a distinctive voice to political issues. They also contended that women were not that interested in gaining the vote.
Although anti-suffragist arguments resonated with many voters, anti-suffragism never became as potent a political movement as suffrage. Anti-suffragists, however, did organize to create some effective roadblocks to women’s right to vote. In 1911, the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage (NAOWS) was founded by a group of state anti-suffrage organizations. Josephine Dodge was its president. NAOWS helped defeat suffrage referenda in a number of states, including, most notably, Massachusetts. Many NAOWS members were clubwomen who believed that female suffrage diverted women’s energies away from women’s community-based reform work. Many historians agree that woman suffrage did diminish the single-sex networks and the reform that they spearheaded. NAOWS disbanded after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.
Further reading: Susan Marshall, Splintered Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Campaign against Woman Suffrage (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997).
—Natalie Atkin
World History
