#anti-suffrage

[questionableadvice]

~ 10 Reasons Why the Great Majority of Women Do Not Want the Ballot, 1914

[chemung-valley-curator]

Wrong Side of History: The Anti-Suffragists By Rachel Dworkin, Archivist

2020 marks the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, which granted American women the right to vote. Since I’ve already written about the suffrage movement here, here, and here, I thought I’d write about the movement’s dark sister: the anti-suffragists. (READ MORE)

[oberlincollegearchives]

Another upcoming event alert!

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, guaranteeing women’s constitutional right to vote. Oberlin College and the Oberlin College Libraries will be holding events documenting the suffrage movement this year.

“Tainted: The Anti-Suffrage and Race Politics in the Crusade for Women’s Votes” is a discussion that will cover the opposing voices to the suffrage movement.

The event will be on Tuesday, March 10 from 4:30 PM-6:00 PM in Hallock Auditorium.

To learn more about suffrage and Oberlin: Marianne P. Dascomb and the Suffrage Movement Oberlin's Women: A Legacy of Leadership & Activism

[mudwerks]

(via Seeing the Power of Political Posters - The New York Times)

Huey Newton in a Black Panther poster, at the New-York Historical Society.

Anti-suffrage 1909 postcard

[vculibraries]

“Heed not the song of the suffrage siren! Seal your ears against her vocal wiles!”

Anti-suffrage handbills outline the arguments and fears of the women and men opposed to giving women the vote. Take a close look at what people were saying in the years before 1920.  “Annotating Suffrage” on the Social Welfare History Image Portal.

[thesociologicalcinema]

Declaration of Principles: Of the Southern Women's League for the Rejection of the Proposed Susan B. Anthony Amendment to the Constitution of the United States

1. We believe in the political principle of Local Self Government and that State Sovereignty is essential to the Liberty, Happiness, True Progress, and Welfare of the American People. 2. WE ARE UNALTERABLY OPPOSED TO THE ADOPTION OF THE SUSAN B. ANTHONY AMENDMENT TO THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES, which Amendment will force the unrestricted ballot upon unwilling majorities in Southern States, and will place the control of the electorate outside of Sovereign State. 3. We deny the Justice of the Compulsory Regulation of the Electorate of our States by a combination of other States, who have no sympathetic understanding of our peculiar Social and Racial problems. 4. We oppose any measure that threatens the continuation of Anglo-Saxon domination of Social and Political affairs in each and every State of the Union without strife and bloodshed which would inevitably follow an attempt to overthrow it. 5. We oppose SOCIALISM, BOLESHVISM [sic], RADICALISM and all the Social disorders that are now disturbing the world and are rapidly encroaching upon our own Republic, and believe that these disorders will be aided and multiplied and more effectually forced upon the Conservative States such as we represent through the adoption of the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. 6. We declare that the REJECTION of the Susan B. Anthony Amendment to the Constitution of the United States in NO way affect the right of the several individual States TO SO AMEND THEIR CONSTITUTIONS, as to enfranchise the women of those States where a majority so elect; and to throw safeguards and limitations upon electoral qualifications as local conditions demand. 7. We believe that in its present form, we live under the fairest and most liberal Government in the world, and desire to see it perpetuated in order that generations coming after us may enjoy the same Liberty in the Pursuit of Happiness we have enjoyed; and to that end, we pledge our most earnest and continued efforts in behalf of the Rejection of the Susan B. Anthony Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, and call upon all true Americans to join us in this fight.

Anti-Suffrage Answers

1. Suffragists say: Taxation without representation is tyranny.We say: It is folly to use this Revolutionary War Cry as an argument for woman suffrage. Men do not vote because they pay taxes. Why should women?2. Suffragists say: Women are deprived of citizenship because they may not vote.We say: Women are citizens without the ballot, but the State requires a different service from its men and women citizens. Man's political service to the State is counterbalanced by woman's service in the home. If there were no families and no homes, there would be no State. One service is fully as important as the other.3. Suffragists say: Women belong to the disfranchised class of criminals and idiots because they have not a vote.We say: Only suffragists make such a classification. Criminals have been disfranchised by statute: idiots may not vote for obvious reasons. Women having never been enfranchised cannot be spoken of as a disfranchised class.4. Suffragists say: The welfare of children is woman's work. Why should not women vote for child welfare laws?We say: The best laws to protect working children have been passed through the influence of the National Child Labor Committee. Ohio, Massachusetts, New York and Wisconsin have better Child Labor Laws today than some of the States where women vote.5. Suffragists say: Women are wage-earners. Why should not women vote on laws governing the conditions under which they must work?We say: Some of the best laws regulating the employment of women have been passed in recent years in the great manufacturing Eastern States where women do not vote.6. Suffragists say: Property qualification, religious qualification, and also color qualification have been abandoned. Why should sex disqualification continue?We say: Because Sex is a distinction imposed by Nature which precludes men and women from doing similar work equally well. Government is MAN'S work. Voting is a part of the machinery of government.Source: Josephine A. Pearson Papers, August 1920.

[providencepubliclibrary]

“No, she isn’t dead - at least physically.”

Married to a suffragette. Willis N. Bugbee. 1910, Lebanon, Ohio.

[deltiologists]

postmarked 1910 (date and month illegible) —> sent to savannah, new york. design is a famous anti-suffrage image.

Hello: 

Say I want you to come up Friday night and bring a lady friend along with you because I am going to have a friend with a Phoney-graff talking machine rather so we will have a little noise around here. 

Be sure and come, wont you?