Southern Strategies

Southern Women and the Woman Suffrage Question

Elna C. Green

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780807861752
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The biographies of more than 800 women form the basis for Elna Green's study of the suffrage and the antisuffrage movements in the South. Green's comprehensive analysis highlights the effects that factors such as class background, marital status, educational level, and attitudes about race and gender roles had in inspiring the region's women to work in favor of, or in opposition to, their own enfranchisement.
Green sketches the ranks of both movements--which included women and men, black and white--and identifies the ways in which issues of class, race, and gender determined the composition of each side. Coming from a wide array of beliefs and backgrounds, Green argues, southern women approached enfranchisement with an equally varied set of strategies and ideologies. Each camp defined and redefined itself in opposition to the other. But neither was entirely homogeneous: issues such as states' rights and the enfranchisement of black women were so divisive as to give rise to competing organizations within each group. By focusing on the grassroots constituency of each side, Green provides insight into the whole of the suffrage debate.

1. Origins of the Southern Suffrage Movement

As a law abiding citizen; as a tax payer; as a graduate of a Kentucky High School where I took honors above every boy in my classes . . . as still the wife of one man (for thirty-two years); as a worker in the church all my life; as a worker in charitable and other civic organizations for the betterment of the community; as one who finds at fifty-two years of age, more time, leisure, money, brains, health and strength to study and handle the questions of the day . . . I beg and implore you to vote favorably on the Woman Suffrage question now.

Jessie E. Townsend

to Edwin J. Webb, 1914

Even before the twentieth century opened, the middle-class daughters of the New South, with time and resources at their disposal, looked at the cities their fathers had built and found much they disliked. Joining together in reform movements to soften the iniquities of industrial capitalism and assist the needy, southern women forged ahead of their menfolk in joining the progressive reform movements already underway elsewhere in the country. And as they worked on behalf of others by joining reform movements to help children, the poor, working women, and southern blacks, southern white women increasingly found themselves demanding something on their own behalf: the vote.

The southern suffrage movement, lagging a generation behind its northeastern counterpart, arose when it did because southern women trailed a generation behind their northeastern sisters in the critical experiences that produced support for woman suffrage. Those critical experiences were the products of an industrializing economy and urban living conditions, developments that were reshaping the region at the time southern women made their first halting steps toward organizing a suffrage movement at the end of the nineteenth century. As the builders of the New South attempted to remake the region in the image of the North, they unwittingly created the conditions that spurred suffragism: a growing middle class willing to endow colleges and send their daughters to them; an industrial working class plagued by poverty and in need of services that the state did not yet provide; and urban centers where those two classes lived in close proximity to one another. Reprising the experiences of their northeastern counterparts, middle-class women in the South embraced the suffrage movement after years of activism in other women’s organizations.

The National Movement

The history of the woman suffrage movement in the United States is usually dated from 1848, with the call for the enfranchisement of women at the Seneca Falls woman’s rights convention.¹ But the ballot for women constituted a small plank in a much larger platform, as the women of Seneca Falls demanded equality for women in all areas of civil, political, economic, and private life. Much more pertinent (or so it seemed in the context of the mid-nineteenth century) were women’s rights to control their own property, their rights to guardianship of their own children, their need for equal wages and access to higher paying professional jobs, and their desire to limit the size of their families. Suffrage remained a secondary demand at best and one with which not all women activists of the nineteenth century agreed.

Although suffrage remained controversial, the suffrage movement continued to gain support and respectability throughout the remainder of the century for a number of reasons. As women involved in the temperance crusade or in other reform efforts recognized their inability to influence legislators without the leverage of voting power, they learned to appreciate more the need for political clout. As women from other reform movements swelled the suffrage ranks, it ultimately became one of the largest mass movements of women in American history.² Moreover, “votes for women” served as a focal point, a source of unity among diverse groups with different agendas. A “clear, easily understood goal” that tapped the “strain of natural rights doctrine in American thought,” suffrage united a coalition of organizations behind a common goal. What originally had seemed the least viable demand of Seneca Falls eventually became the one demand upon which nearly all the major women’s organizations agreed.³

The nineteenth-century movement struggled through a series of internal troubles that threatened to undermine its effectiveness and perhaps destroy it altogether. As the Civil War ended, leading suffragists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who had been loyal foot soldiers in the abolition movement, now asked that they be rewarded for their work on behalf of the slaves and in support of the Union war effort. They asked that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments make women, not just black males, citizens and voters. Not all their suffrage colleagues agreed with this position, however, and the disagreement splintered the movement in two.⁴

Personality clashes and internal rivalries compounded the fundamental differences over tactics and philosophy as the suffrage movement tore itself apart. The issues at stake included how best to use chronically limited funds; whether men should be welcomed as allies; whether the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments should receive suffragists’ support; and whether the focus of their subsequent efforts should be on federal or state amendments.⁵ A formal split, occurring in 1869, produced two competing organizations: the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) and the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). Although it has been argued that the split arose from personal frictions generated by a struggle for power within the leadership,⁶ such an analysis only belittles the participants by dismissing the validity of their disagreements. More was at stake than personality. The question of federal or state suffrage amendments remained unsolved and would continue to cause the movement difficulty all the way through 1920. The tactical question took on even greater significance in the final decades of the suffrage movement when it entered the southern states.

Following the split of 1869, the suffrage movement fell into a predictable pattern of activity. The two sets of suffragists, working separately, held annual conventions, petition drives, lecture tours, and above all, endless travel by a dedicated cadre of suffrage workers. Furthermore, the same set of leaders continued to dominate the movement: Stone, Stanton, Anthony, Mott, and a handful of others led the movement for thirty years with very little change of leadership at the top.⁷

In the late 1880s, however, a new generation of suffragists began to rise to national prominence, waiting impatiently for the “old guard” to retire. As the first generation of suffragists now reached their seventies and eighties, the “New Women,” such as Carrie Chapman Catt, Nettie Rogers Shuler, Harriet Taylor Upton, and Anna Howard Shaw, assumed the highest national offices. Having had little to do with the experiences of abolitionism or the split of 1869, this second generation of suffragists saw no reason to continue operating two competing national organizations. In 1890, after several years of negotiations, the two associations finally merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).⁸

The unification of the suffrage organizations came at a time when the movement itself was experiencing declining enthusiasm and limited successes. Usually called “the doldrums,” the period from 1896 to 1910 was sluggish and unexciting. The union of the two organizations into a single, streamlined unit did little to halt the decline.⁹ Several factors contributed to the waning interest in the movement. First, after several relatively easy successes in the western states, the suffrage movement encountered its first organized opposition in the late 1890s. Antisuffrage associations and saloon protective leagues pumped money and political influence into the opposition, and state legislators responded to the pressure by refusing to experiment further with woman suffrage. Second, the overall mood of the American public had changed in the post-Reconstruction years. The earlier popular support for radical Republicanism and social reforms in general eroded in the face of rising conservatism in the Gilded Age. Americans had grown apprehensive of potential changes in family, gender, and race relations. The rising tide of foreign immigration and the growing influence of Social Darwinism helped to make the natural rights and liberal egalitarian philosophies of the past less persuasive. The new generation of suffrage leaders responded to the changing temperament of the times by concentrating on the suffrage issue alone rather than on a general critique of women’s role in society.¹⁰

The newly united organization chose Anna Howard Shaw as its president in 1904. Shaw’s lackluster presidency did nothing to help boost the movement out of its period of sluggish monotony. The emergence of two dissenting groups (the Congressional Union and the Southern States Conference) was at least partly an expression of dissatisfaction with Shaw’s leadership.¹¹ By 1915, the restlessness of the rank-and-file membership of NAWSA under Shaw’s direction had reached dangerous levels, and she agreed to step down.¹²

Shaw’s successor, Carrie Chapman Catt, was no match for Shaw on the lecture platform, but she was better suited for the generalship of this massive army of women. Catt possessed a talent for organization. She had demonstrated her expertise in the New York state suffrage campaign, and now, as president of NAWSA, she promulgated her “Winning Plan.” Assigning every state organization a specific duty, Catt’s winning plan rejected state campaigns, and focused instead upon the federal amendment as the quickest, most efficient way to enfranchise American women; the winning plan also tried to coordinate campaigns in such a way that the NAWSA could concentrate its resources and its staff in one or two states at a time.¹³

Partly because of the suffragists’ war work, partly because of the passage of the Prohibition amendment, partly because of the rising political clout of women voters in several states, and partly because of the successful lobbying effort mounted by the several suffrage organizations, Congress finally adopted the Nineteenth Amendment in June 1919 and sent it to the states for consideration. The effort to win ratification from thirty-six legislatures caused bitter fights in many states but nevertheless proceeded rapidly.

Opponents of woman suffrage across the country hoped that the “solid South” would remain true to its reputation and vote solidly against the amendment. Only thirteen states were required to block ratification of an amendment to the federal constitution, and “the South” contained thirteen states. But the South did not hold solidly together. It gave way around the fringes, as Texas, Arkansas, Kentucky, and finally Tennessee ratified the Anthony Amendment. Seventy-two years after Elizabeth Cady Stanton had insisted that woman suffrage be included in the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments, American women finally won their enfranchisement, and southern border states had provided the critical margin of votes.

The Southern Suffrage Movement

The story of the woman suffrage movement has been told several times now, and the outlines of the story as given above are generally familiar. In the southern states however, suffragism had an often different history, one that is not so well known. Suffrage sentiment, although present in individual southern women as early as the 1850s,¹⁴ never coalesced into a “movement” until the late 1890s. Even as late as 1900, Belle Kearney could write that “very slight effort has been made there to secure the ballot for women, and the thought is somewhat a new one to the masses.”¹⁵ The southern suffrage movement therefore matured more than a generation later than elsewhere in the country, and scholars have only just begun to scrutinize that delay.¹⁶

Southern white women of the upper and middle classes of the late nineteenth century, who might be expected to mirror the activities of their northeastern counterparts, remained tightly bound by the same restrictive forces that had limited the lives of their antebellum mothers and grandmothers. Still predominantly living in rural settings, most southern women continued to live in a world where family, church, and neighborhood were dominated by men. Even when women joined together in prayer circles or quilting bees, they were closely supervised by their ministers, husbands, or kin who guarded against the development of “bonds of womanhood” and the dangerous challenges to patriarchy that might spring from this separate women’s culture.

Although elite southern women often expressed interest in politics,¹⁷ they nevertheless remained untouched by many of the politically oriented reform move...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Southern Strategies: Southern Women and the Woman Suffrage Question
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Origins of the Southern Suffrage Movement
• 2. Origins of the Southern Antisuffrage Movement
• 3. Women of the Causes
• 4. The Ideology of Southern Antisuffragism
• 5. Organizational Strategies and Activities of the Southern Antisuffragists
• 6. The States’ Rights Faction: Kate Gordon’s Louisiana
• 7. The State Suffrage Campaigns: Virginia As a Case Study
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index