The Petticoat Rule The Petticoat Rule is the argument that granting women the right to vote would lead to a government run entirely by women. Based on the 1910 novel The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy concerning Madame de Pompadour’s influence on France. In November 1913, a group of Houston business men dressed in drag as suffragists marched in a mock parade organized by their local men's social club. Some of the men who marched drew their guns and pretended to shoot the women suffragists who stood along their parade route. Opposition for women's equality widely existed but this public statement was extraordinarily threatening. By 1915, Brownsville social matron Pauline Kleiber Wells had organized the Texas Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage (TAOWS) after meeting in New York City at the headquarters of the National Organization Opposed to Woman Suffrage. Wells, married to the powerful South Texas politician Jim Wells, Jr., focused on the expected roles of women at that time: her children, piano, reading, and theatre. Rather than speaking engagements to build grass roots support with Texas citizens, Wells relied on the distribution of flyers throughout Texas. In 1918, Wells traveled to Austin to lobby Texas Legislators. In her speech, the first by a woman to the Texas Senate, Wells said her goal was to "save the citadel of the Home" arguing that suffrage was "identified with feminism, sex antagonism, socialism, anarchy, and Mormonism.” Wells lobbied hard against suffrage in 1918 but fell short without new Governor William Hobby's support. Hobby supported votes for women, unlike his predecessor, the impeached Texas Governor James E. Ferguson. With Governor Hobby’s support, the Primary Suffrage Bill passed both the Texas House and Senate and was signed on March 26, 1918. The law went into effect just in time for Texas women to vote in the Texas Primary seventeen days later. In Travis County alone, 5,856 women registered to vote—almost equal to the number of male voters! In 1919, Wells had 100,000 flyers distributed throughout Texas to lobby against the 19th Amendment, warning voters that most women did not want to vote, that voting would destroy homes, and that socialism and domination by African Americans would be the direct result if voting was approved. On May 24, the 19th Amendment was defeated by 25,000 votes, forcing the suffragists to take Wells and her anti-suffrage fight seriously. Fortunately, Wells’ success was short-lived as Governor Hobby called the Texas Legislature into Special Session and by June 28th, Texas became the first in the South and ninth in the nation to ratify the 19th Amendment. With this, Wells and her anti-suffrage movement officially ceased. Notes: [1] In this essay, I focus on the response of anti-suffragists to women demanding political rights in state or federal legislatures, where laws on voting rights are crafted, and thus where women’s claims demanded an answer from powerful men. Recent scholarship analyzes the “myth of Seneca Falls” and how it has obscured important aspects of the long struggle for women’s equal political and civil rights. As Judith Wellman and others have argued, “the ideas expressed at Seneca Falls [New York] did not burst full-grown upon the scene” in 1848, but were part of a “long debate about republican ideals and about the essential meaning of the Declaration of Independence.” Opponents of woman suffrage could ignore the 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments more easily than a legislative petition, which prompted a response from legislators. In 1846, “six ladies of Jefferson county” petitioned for woman suffrage, arguing that New York had “departed from the true democratic principles upon which all just governments must be based” by imposing taxation without representation on women and leaving them unable to defend “their individual and personal liberty.” Jacob Katz Cogan and Lori D. Ginzberg situate the 1846 petition in the context of antebellum state constitutional conventions and debates over the realization of individual rights in republican government. See Judith Wellman, “Women’s Rights, Republicanism, and Revolutionary Rhetoric in Antebellum New York State,” New York History 69, no. 3 (July 1988): 354–355; Jacob Katz Cogan and Lori D. Ginsberg, “1846 Petition for Woman’s Suffrage, New York State Constitutional Convention.” Signs 22, no. 2 (Winter 1997): 428, 438–439; also Lori D. Ginzberg, Untidy Origins: A Story of Woman’s Rights in Antebellum New York (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). On the Seneca Falls “myth” as the origins story of the woman suffrage movement, a narrative that elides other important historical actors and events, see Lisa Tetreault, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). While Seneca Falls and the Declaration were undoubtedly important both historically and also as an inspiring origins story, understanding them as examples of a multifaceted, ongoing debate among different groups of Americans over the founding ideals and republicanism illuminates how a postrevolutionary, status-based republic began to become a democracy with individual rights. [2] This essay primarily addresses the women who organized against woman suffrage. Calling themselves “remonstrants” or anti-suffragists, which suffragists shortened to “Antis,” they persuaded legislators and the electorate to vote against woman suffrage repeatedly. Anti-suffrage men opposed woman suffrage as clergy, public intellectuals, legislators, and sometimes in organizations; however, many were the silent partners or agents of women’s organizations. For a useful introduction, see Manuela Thurner, “‘Better Citizens without the Ballot’: American AntiSuffrage Women and Their Rationale during the Progressive Era,” Journal of Women's History 5, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 33–60. [3] Rebecca A. Rix, “Gender and Reconstitution: The Individual and Family Basis of Republican Government Contested, 1868–1925” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2008). [4] Cogan and Ginzberg, “1846 Petition for Woman’s Suffrage,” 431–432. [5] Robert J. Steinfeld, “Property and Suffrage in the Early American Republic,” Stanford Law Review 41, no. 2 (January 1989): 356, 364; Nancy F. Cott, “Marriage and Women’s Citizenship in the United States, 1830–1934,” American Historical Review 103, no. 5 (December 1998): 1451–1454. [6] Stephanie McCurry, “The Two Faces of Republicanism: Gender and Proslavery Politics in Antebellum South Carolina,” Journal of American History 78, no. 4 (March 1992): 1252–1259, 1263–1264. [8] William J. Novak, “The Legal Transformation of Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century America,” in The Democratic Experience: New Directions in American Political History, ed. Meg Jacobs, William J. Novak, and Julian E. Zelizer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 93–98, 105–112. [9] Ellen Carol DuBois, “Outgrowing the Compact of the Fathers: Equal Rights, Woman Suffrage, and the United States Constitution, 1820–1878,” Journal of American History 74, no. 3 (December 1987): 836–862; Adam Winkler, “A Revolution Too Soon: Woman Suffragists and the ‘Living Constitution,’” New York University Law Review 76, no. 5 (2001): 1456–1526. [10] Faye E. Dudden, Fighting Chance: The Struggle over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 124; on the anti-suffragists in Washington, DC, see Susan E. Marshall, Splintered Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Campaign against Woman Suffrage (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 19–23. [11] The women who penned the anti-suffrage petition to Congress published it in the editorial pages of Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine, a popular monthly periodical well known for its promotion of what historians have called “the cult of domesticity,” to garner thousands of signatures for its presentation to Congress. The petitioners were culturally and politically influential women. Phelps did not sign the petition, but she publicized it and probably placed it for publication in Godey’s. Married anti-suffrage women often followed the tradition of being identified by Mrs. [husband’s full name], a social convention that reflected coverture, family lineage, and social position. Almira Lincoln Phelps, “Woman’s Rights: An Earnest Movement in Opposition to the Extension of the Suffrage—Address to the Women of the Country,” New York Times, February 27, 1871; Marshall, Splintered Sisterhood, 20; “A Uniform Divorce Law—New Movement for the Anti-Suffrage Woman,” Chicago Tribune, November 2, 1871; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan Brownell Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 3, 1861–1876 (New York: Fowler & Well, 1882), 494–495; On petitions and remonstrances, see Susan Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, and Women’s Political Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). [12] Marshall notes that the DC remonstrants remained a cohesive group only through the 1871 crisis. Marshall, Splintered Sisterhood, 19–23. [13] Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, 3:99–103, reprints Dahlgren’s testimony and notes her ongoing influence. [14] Caroline Fairchild Corbin, Letters from a Chimney-Corner: A Plea for Pure Hopes and Sincere Relations between Men and Women (Chicago: Fergus, 1886), quoted in Report of Senate Select Committee on Woman Suffrage in “Views of the Minority” [to Accompany S. Res. 5], 49th Cong., 2nd sess., S. Rept. 70, 1 (April 29, 1886); Rix, “Gender and Reconstitution,” 89. [15] Siegel, “She the People,” 997–1003. [16] Congressional Record, 47th Cong., 1st sess., 229 (1881), cited in Siegel, “She the People,” 1001. John Tyler Morgan was a former Confederate brigadier general, a descendant of President John Tyler of Virginia, and an architect of white supremacy in Alabama. See Encyclopedia of Alabama. [17] Siegel, “She the People,” 1000n160, 1003; on the “redemption of the North,” see Keyssar, Right to Vote, 96–138. As Keyssar notes, by the mid-1870s, a significant number of public intellectuals and politicians lamented the adoption of universal manhood suffrage in the wake of the Civil War, amid reports of Reconstruction’s failures and the rise of immigration, industrialization, the political machines, and reform movements. Finding it impracticable to restrict manhood suffrage, northern opponents of democracy resorted to controlling the frequency, procedures, and scope of political questions in local and state elections and enacting voter registration laws to control the electorate. A northern and western variant of southern disfranchisement, these methods of reducing democratic participation and direct representation came under increasing scrutiny in the 1890s–1910s, fueling not only Populism but also woman suffrage as part of a larger reform coalition. [18] The “doldrums” saw lack of suffrage progress in Congress and northeastern states, with annual battles in which pro and anti arguments changed little. Ellen Carol DuBois, Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 90–91, 301n6. [19] Rix, “Gender and Reconstitution,” 96. [20] Marshall has traced the Brahmin origins of the early Massachusetts remonstrants, many of whom were members of the state’s founding Winthrop, Parkman, and Peabody families. Male relatives of the early remonstrants included Massachusetts legislators, publishers, and public intellectuals, including legislators George G. Crocker and Robert C. Winthrop; Harvard historian and critic of universal manhood suffrage Francis Parkman; and Henry Houghton and his son, of Houghton Publishing. Marshall, Splintered Sisterhood, 28–32, 81, 87. [21] Francis Parkman, Some of the Reasons against Woman Suffrage, Printed at the Request of an Association of Women (Boston, 1884), condensed his two essays of 1879 and 1880 in the North American Review. His “The Woman Question,” in the October 1879 issue, inspired a rebuttal from Julia Ward Howe, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Wendell Phillips, and Lucy Stone, “The Other Side of the Woman Question,” in the November 1879 edition. The editors of the North American Review gave Parkman the last word, “The Woman Question Again,” in January 1880. On the remonstrants’ relationship with Parkman and the enduring popularity of this pamphlet over decades, see Marshall, Splintered Sisterhood, 81; on his arguments, see Rix, “Gender and Reconstitution,” 138–141; for a useful summary of the 1879–1880 debate, see Tim Garrity, “The Woman Question: Francis Parkman’s Arguments against Woman Suffrage,” Chebacco: The Magazine of the Mount Desert Island Historical Society 13 (2012): 6–18. [22] Marshall, Splintered Sisterhood, 24. [23] Harvey M. Lawson, History and Genealogy of the Descendants of Clement Corbin (Hartford, CT: Hartford Press, 1905), 158–59; Bernice E. Gallagher, Illinois Women Novelists in the Nineteenth Century: An Analysis and Annotated Bibliography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 26–27; Jane Jerome Camhi, Women against Women: American Anti-Suffragism, 1880–1920 (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson, 1994), 85–86, 238–239. [24] There are many scholarly treatments in different fields on Jane Addams and Hull House; the following illuminate why anti-suffragists feared both for decades. On their importance in shaping Progressive state and federal social reforms through the early New Deal, Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); on Hull House and Chicago as a “frontier” environment for reform epistemology, empiricism, and practice, Lela Costin, Two Sisters for Social Justice: A Biography of Grace and Edith Abbott (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), esp. 41–62; for an overview of Jane Addams’s contributions to political and social thought, see Patricia Shields, ed., Jane Addams: Progressive Pioneer of Peace, Philosophy, Sociology, Social Work and Public Administration (New York: Springer International Publishing, 2017); on the Illinois suffragists and their leaders’ views on democracy, see Grace Wilbur Trout, “Side Lights on Illinois Suffrage History,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 13, no. 2 (July 1920): 145–199. [25] Marshall, Splintered Sisterhood, 27. [26] Rebecca J. Mead, How the Vote Was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868–1914 (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 1–4. [27] Susan Goodier, No Votes for Women: The New York State Anti-Suffrage Movement (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013). [28] As Manuela Thurner argues, the race, class, and ideological differences between suffragists and anti-suffragists should not be overstated; while anti-suffrage leaders were predominantly wealthy, white, and from northeastern patrician backgrounds, the suffrage movement “counted a fair number of socially prominent women among its activists, and . . . had its own share of elitist, nativist, and racist rhetoric.” Moreover, like suffragists, many anti-suffragists were devoted to social reform and philanthropy. Thurner, “‘Better Citizens without the Ballot,’” 37–38. [29] Early twentieth-century restrictions (including residency requirements, literacy requirements, and poll taxes) “made insurgency or political nonconformity virtually impossible.” Sara Hunter Graham, “Woman Suffrage in Virginia: The Equal Suffrage League and Pressure-Group Politics, 1909–1920,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 101, no. 2 (April 1993): 243. [30] Rix, “Gender and Reconstitution,” 233–236. [31] Jo Freeman, “The Rise of Political Woman in the Election of 1912,” in We Will Be Heard: Women’s Struggles for Political Power in the United States (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), 49–75. While all of the candidates treated women as important to victory, only the Socialist Party and Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party endorsed woman suffrage, and Jane Addams seconded Roosevelt’s presidential nomination at the convention. Freeman, “Rise of Political Woman,” 51–52, 56. In 1912, the western states in which women’s votes would influence the electoral college were Wyoming (1869), Utah (1869/1896), Colorado (1893), Idaho (1896), Washington (1910), and California (1911), for a total of 1.3 million women and thirty-eight electoral votes; Freeman, “Rise of Political Woman,” 51. By the end of 1914, nearly all western states and territories had enfranchised women, increasing the female voting population to four million. Mead, How the Vote Was Won, 4. [32] Daniel E. Kyvig, “An Era of Constitutional Activity and Faith,” in Explicit and Authentic Acts: Amending the U.S. Constitution, 1776–1995 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1996), 216–218; Bernard B. Bernstein and Jerome Agel, “Democratizing the Constitution: The Progressive Amendments,” in Amending America: If We Love the Constitution So Much, Why Do We Keep Trying to Change It? (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1995), 117–134. [33] Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987); Stanley Lemons, The Woman Citizen: Social Feminism in the 1920s (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990). [34] The Supreme Court struck down a state law to protect bakers’ health under the Fourteenth Amendment and its implicit “liberty of contract” in Lochner v. New York in 1905; in Muller v. Oregon (1908), the Supreme Court upheld a maximum hours law as legitimate on the basis of a state’s interest in women workers’ future maternal health. The problem of balancing women’s equality with men versus protecting women workers against “sweating” was settled in favor of equality—and “liberty of contract”—in Adkins v. Children’s Hospital (1923). Joan Zimmerman, “The Jurisprudence of Equality: The Women’s Minimum Wage, the First Equal Rights Amendment, and Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, 1905–1923,” Journal of American History 78, no. 188 (June 1991): 188–225; Siegel, “She the People,” 1012–1017; on Minnie Bronson’s professional history, rationale, and influence, see Rix, “Gender and Reconstitution,” 156n422, 178–181. [35] The defense of southern women and the “Lost Cause” southern legacy against federal enfranchisement was, Marjorie Spruill Wheeler argues, also mobilized to defend against southern Progressives and the harm that enfranchised women might do in regulating New South industries, including cotton, textiles, and liquor interests. Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 5–12, 17–20. See also, Elna C. Green, Southern Strategies: Southern Women and the Woman Suffrage Question (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Anne Myra Benjamin, Women against Equality: The Anti-Suffrage Movement in the United States from 1895 to 1920, rev. ed. (n.p.: Lulu Publishing, 2014), 337–361; Elizabeth Gillespie McRae, “Caretakers of Southern Civilization: Georgia Women and the Anti-Suffrage Campaign, 1914–1920,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 82, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 801–828. As McRae explains, southern anti-suffragism was not only about women’s roles, “but men’s civic responsibility, racial hierarchies, class privilege, and historical memory . . . the rise of industrialism, worsening labor relations, the influx of urban laborers (many of them women), a rising black middle class, and the challenges these changing conditions posed to patriarchy, familial authority, and the social order” (806). On Virginia, see Graham, “Woman Suffrage in Virginia”; on North Carolina, see Elna Green, “Those Opposed: The Antisuffragists in North Carolina, 1900–1920,” North Carolina Historical Review 67, no. 3 (July 1990): 315–333. On opposition to African American women voting from northerners as well as southerners, suffragists and anti-suffragists, see Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 107–135. [36] The 1915 US Supreme Court decision in Guinn v. the United States struck down the “grandfather clause” as a violation of the Fifteenth Amendment. Patricia Sullivan, Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: The New Press, 2009), 15–24, 47–48. [37] It is important not to overstate the commitment of suffragists to universal equality or to idealize their vision; nonetheless, by the mid-1910s anti-suffragists were correct in observing suffragists’ participation in a broad reform movement—in print culture, in union and political endorsements, and in reformers’ commitments to multiple reforms such as social welfare, universal civil rights, worker rights, international peace work, economic equality, and new forms of direct democracy. Indeed, Carrie Chapman Catt’s vision for “applied democracy” highlighted this vision and the role of suffrage within it. W. E. B. Du Bois devoted a special issue of the Crisis to universal suffrage as a right of citizenship in its 1917 “Suffrage Number.” Carrie Chapman Catt in “Votes for All: A Symposium” (with Anna Howard Shaw and Mary Garrett Hay), Crisis, November 1917, 19–21; Jean Fagan Yellin, “DuBois’ Crisis and Woman’s Suffrage,” Massachusetts Review 14, no. 2 (Spring 1973): 365–375; for Catt’s description of applied democracy and postwar citizenship, see Rix, “Gender and Reconstitution,” 315–328. [38] Kristi Andersen, After Suffrage: Women in Partisan and Electoral Politics before the New Deal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 55–56. [39] Goodier, No Votes for Women, 118–64. On the anti-suffragists through their post-ratification litigation and organization, see Benjamin, Women against Equality, 364–373. [40] Putnam objected to the federalization of maternal health and welfare programs in the Sheppard-Towner Act (1920) and other social welfare legislation, which she viewed as unconstitutional; she also objected to the levelling aims of the reformers connected to the Hull House network and the League of Women Voters. Rix, “Gender and Reconstitution,” 314–381; Sonya Michel and Robyn L. Rosen, “The Paradox of Maternalism: Elizabeth Lowell Putnam and the American Welfare State,” Gender and History 4, no. 3 (Autumn 1992): 364–386. [41] On the Supreme Court cases, see Siegel, “She the People,” 1003–1019, and Rix, “Gender and Reconstitution,” 342–378. On former anti-suffragists mobilizing the Massachusetts electorate against ratification of the Child Labor Amendment in Massachusetts, see Rebecca Rix, “Every citizen a Sentinel: Every home a sentry box!”: Revolutionary Men, Home Protection, and the Popularization of Modern Conservative Thought in the 1920s” (paper presented at American Society for Legal History Annual Meeting, Miami, Florida, November 2013). [42] For a short, useful (and admiring) introduction to the coalition defeating the amendment, see Bill Kauffman, “The Child Labor Amendment Debate of the 1920s; or, Catholics and Mugwumps and Farmers,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 10, no. 2 (Fall 1992): 139–169. The Catholic’s, working class’s, and farmers’ fear of reforms that seemed to treat children more as future citizens than as members of families and social communities was not unreasonable in light of Prohibition, which interfered with church and ethnic traditions, threats of losing children’s work on farms and as family wage-earners, and a recent Supreme Court’s decision to strike down an Oregon law compelling children to attend public schools. Former anti-suffragists helped this coalition with political and rhetorical contributions, helping to create and circulate the early ideology of modern conservatism as they battled against feminism, Prohibition, the Children’s Bureau and the Sheppard-Towner Act, a federal education bureau, a federal bureau of social welfare, a federal anti-lynching law, and, of course, the Child Labor Amendment. See also, Kim E. Nielsen, Un-American Womanhood: Antiradicalism, Antifeminism, and the First Red Scare (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001); Jan Doolittle Wilson, The Women’s Joint Congressional Committee and the Politics of Maternalism, 1920–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007); Kirsten Marie Delegard, Battling Miss Bolsheviki: The Origins of Female Conservatism in the United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Rix, “Every citizen a Sentinel!” |
What did the term petticoat rule mean when it was used by anti suffragists in the early twentieth century?
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