Back during the women’s suffrage movement, what were the principal arguements against it? Did anyone offer anything more than “it’s not proper” or “it’s not their place” or similar meaningless platitudes?
NOTE: I’m not asking for a debate about women should have the vote, nor am I looking for reasons why they shouldn’t. I’m just trying to get inside the heads of those who opposed women’s suffrage.
I guess one of the aspects here is the notion that political influence should be granted to households, not individuals. The man would represent the entire household with his vote, making another vote for the woman unncessary.
This Wiki article also mentions some of the arguments used against women’s suffrage, including the point (interestingly brought forward by a woman) that women were more inclined to enforce moral issues in the field of politics and should therefore not be allowed to vote.
In general, men back then just felt women didn’t have the intellectual tools to vote responsibly. This attitude didn’t go away all that quickly – I remember reading a book written in the 60s that implied that Warren G. Harding won the election of 1920 (the first after the passage of the 19th amendment) because he was so handsome that women voters decided to vote for him on that reason alone.
It’s hard to get into their heads becasue our heads now are in such a different place. There was genuinely a perception (by many) in those days that deep thinking was bad for a woman. That too much intellectual consideration would cause hysteria (madness) or, even, physical problems with the lady-parts. So, by preventing women from voting, or mixing much in the male intellectual world, men were ‘protecting’ them from harm.
There was also a perception that women would always vote the way their men told them to vote. This would give married men two votes vice a single man’s single vote. And a man with a wife and several daughters would get 3 or more bites of the pie vice a single man.
These are the two arguments I can think of off the top of my head.
There was almost some justification for this one. Women were instrumental in bringing about Prohibition, after all.
Today we have debate about whether the uneducated ought to vote. Some parties try real hard to set up barriers which have the effect or reducng voting among the uneducated. At the time of the women’s suffrage movement, women were, on average, less educated then men.
[ul]
[li]Why should married men have two votes and bachelors only one? (And Mormon husbands would be able to multiply their vote who knows how far!)[/li][li]Women are mentally unfit for politics. It overheats their undersized brains.[/li][li]Women own the household and exercise their powers in that realm. Men have politics, war, and business. That is how God ordained it and man shall not disobey His Divine Plan.[/li][/ul]This is an interesting quote from the era or just before, from a prominent woman who achieved power without the vote at all:
“We” are convinced they We are doing a great job. “They” are different to Us and are not to be trusted.
Why Women Do Not Wish the Suffrage, from the September 1903 issue of the Atlantic Monthly.
The problem with that is that it doesn’t take into consideration households headed by a woman; there have been cases where vote was granted by household (by “fireplace” was the exact term in the election of kings that led to Guipuzcoa and Vizcaya joining Castilla, I’m talking early Middle Ages in Spain) and this included those houses headed by a woman. Definitely an unusual situation, though.
Mind you, people who thought of “the man” as representing “the household” wouldn’t even understand what someone mentioning the possibility of a household headed by a woman was talking about.
There was also the exact opposite argument that women would vote differently from their husbands and giving women the vote would destroy families when wives and husbands fought each other over candidates.
It didn’t make any sense then either.
A speech that lists many of the arguments against suffrage and refutes them.
In the U.S. debates on suffrage, frequent reference was made to the Bible in “explaining” that God intended women to be perpetually subordinate to men, that “a woman’s place is in the home,” etc. It was thought that women would become coarsened or tainted by their involvement in the grubby business of politics, and would necessarily not be raising the kids and cooking the meals as their husbands expected them to.
RealityChuck, I’ve often read the same thing about Harding and the election of 1920.
One still occasionally encounters that comment about Harding, mostly because he’s an easy and fun President to denigrate. In reality the two years between the Armistice and the election of 1920 were two of the most difficult years in American history (inflation, unemployment, violent labor unrest, race riots, the Red Scare, the onset of Prohibition, the controversy over the League of Nations, Wilson’s stroke, and even a thrown World Series!), and the Wilson administration was wildly, staggeringly unpopular. Cox pledged to continue its policies. That was why Harding won.
Perhaps not as unusual as it seems. In the early United States also, where there were property qualifications to vote, property-owning widows could sometimes exercise the franchise. (Never-married women with property were all but unknown.)
The elimination of property qualifications actually worked against female suffrage, as lawmakers simply redrew the requirements as being a white (except in New England) male, without bothering to make an exception for female heads of household.
New Jersey gave widows & spinsters worth at least £50 the franchise in 1776, but politicians came to despise “petticoat electors” so much that women’s suffrage was revoked in 1807.
Bumped.
A good overview of all the preposterous arguments trotted out back then:
In the UK property where property qualifications remained for voting till 1928, one of the arguments used was that it would increase the upper class vote bank.
The simple answer is that women were, and have been throughout most of history, second-class citizens with limited rights. Men occupied the higher levels of politics, business, education, arts and clergy and jealously guarded that privilege.
Having actively kept women away from such positions it was possible to point to their lack of attainment as an indication of their lower aptitudes. Those attitudes do not shift easily, as this public information film from the 1930’s clearly shows.
Similar issue in the UK, where female householders had the vote for local government, but not Parliamentary, elections (it’s a minor subplot in Arnold Bennett’s novel An Old Wives’ Tale) for quite some time in the 19th century. The extension of the suffrage for Parliamentary elections in 1918 was only to women over 30 or householders: universal adult suffrage didn’t come until 1929.
Quite so, and those attitudes remain to this day - can’t count how often I’ve seen arguments on this very board that point to women’s lack of ability because 'look at all the great achievements in history, all men". The fact that women have been forced to be glorified servants for all time is conveniently ignored.