Jeanette Leonard Gilder, journalist and author

JEANETTE Leonard Gilder (1849-1916) was a successful author and journalist who worked for the Chicago Tribune, Boston Saturday Evening Gazette, Boston Transcript, Philadelphia Record and Press, and other newspapers.

She was one of many thousands of women opposed to the women’s franchise in the late 19th century, a founder of the Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Extension of Suffrage to Women.

Gilder argued that suffragists were utopians. Instead of a paradise on earth, they would, she argued, unleash “the wheels of purgatory.” The intensely religious zeal and impossibly bright hopes of a perfect future she believed women would bring to politics is all too familiar to us today.

An excerpt from her essay, “Why I am Opposed to Woman Suffrage:”

IT has been quite a shock to people who do not know me, but who thought they did, to find me opposed to woman’s suffrage. Because I have been for so many years a working woman, and because the profession I chose is, or was at the time I entered it, supposed to be entirely a man’s profession, they thought I wanted all the privileges of men. But I don’t. You could have counted the women journalists on the fingers of one hand at the time I entered the ranks. Nowadays you could not find fingers enough in a regiment to count them on. There are now certain branches of journalistic work that are almost entirely given over to women, and women not only edit mere departments of daily papers, but there are those who edit the Sunday editions of some of the biggest dailies.

I am a great believer in the mental equality of the sexes, but I deny the physical equality. Read More »

Mary Ellison Embroidering, Mary Cassat; 1877

“WE feel that our present duties fill up the whole of our time and abilities, and that they are such as none but ourselves can perform…. Our fathers and brothers love us. Our husbands are our choice and are one with us. Our sons are what we make of them. We are content that they represent us in the corn field, the battle field and the jury box, and we them in the church, in the school room, at the fireside, and at the cradle. Believing our representation even at the ballot box to be thus more full and impartial than it could possibly be were all women allowed to vote, we do therefore  respectfully protest against legislation to establish women’s suffrage in Ohio.”

— Statement of 100 women protesting women’s suffrage, c. 1890, Louvain, Ohio

Alice Mary Robertson

DID you know that the second woman elected to the U.S. Congress was actually opposed to the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution — the measure that granted voting rights to women nationally?

Alice Mary Robertson, who represented her district in Oklahoma from 1921-23, was one of tens of thousands of American women who were so opposed to suffrage for themselves that they either spoke out against it or joined organizations fighting it. They were known as the “anti-suffragists” and, up until the day the amendment finally passed in August of 1920 after 70 years of agitation, they were a thorn in the side of the women who fought for the vote. They staunchly believed women had too much to do of pressing importance to get involved in politics in the same way men were and they honored the separate role and authority of men.

Robertson founded a boarding school for Native American girls that eventually became the University of Tulsa. She ended up in national politics because she wanted to make the best of voting privileges for women. She believed feminism was ‘bartering the birthright for a mess of pottage.’ She opposed any women’s organizations that functioned as “a club against men.”

The dowdy Robertson didn’t enjoy any of the celebrity of the Gilded Age suffragettes who hosted recruitment parties at Sherri’s restaurant and the tony Colony Club in New York City and who bankrolled the campaign to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. “I came to Congress to represent my district not women,” Robertson said, and she shunned some of the first feminist-style legislation.

When school children today learn about Elizabeth Cady Stanton or Susan B. Anthony, both icons of modern democracy, they rarely get the other side of the story.

In an interview with Judith Sharpe at In the Spirit of Chartres, I look at some of the myths about the battle for women’s suffrage in the late-19th and early-20th century. (The interview is free for the month of March.) The suffragists — or suffragettes — seem to be more revered with each passing year and especially received a lot of attention with last year’s 100th anniversary of the amendment. Some perspective on this issue is in order. Read More »

Woman’s Work, John Sloan; 1912

“WITH the steady improvement in machinery and in education, the wife and mother can be more and more relieved of work. But the home depends as much as ever upon her love, her skill, her care. She now has means, which science has just taught the world, of learning how to provide, on proper principles, for children, how to dress sensibly, cook wholesomely, make the home sanitary. Nursing is a fine art now, and comforts can be placed within the reach of every invalid, if the mother knows how to do it. If home is to be hospitable, and a centre of social influence, all the artistic and homely powers are demanded. If the family is to be well- dressed, the mother must attend to it. If home is to be beautiful, the mother and daughter must make it so. In these days, there is little need of slaving; and there is a glimpse ahead of leisure for thought and self- culture such as men would find it hard to make. The long and enforced retirement of maternity may prove a time for most valuable improvement. In our social life there is too little culture that is the result of absorption by a quiet process of mental assimilation. The place where this can be best achieved is in the home. The danger of our fascinating modern life, with its endless calls and opportunities outside, lies in the strain it puts upon systems that are far more delicately organized than man’s. Nature meant that women should have periods of quiet. Let us honor our own natures, exalt our own opportunities, love and lead our own lives, and so bless the world and the Republic through perfected homes.

—– Helen Kendrick Johnson, Woman and the Republic — a Survey of the Woman-Suffrage Movement in the United States and a Discussion of the Claims and Arguments of Its Foremost Advocates (pp. 139-140). Kindle Edition.

Josephine Jewell Dodge

“WE who oppose woman suffrage are convinced that women suffragists support their cause because they view the whole situation from an unnatural angle. One morning in New York I heard a young woman discoursing with great eloquence on how she and her sisters could improve the manners and morals of men if they were given the ballot. That evening, this same girl was at a fashionable dance. She was gowned in an extremely décolleté fashion and the way she danced and bore herself was suggestive, to say the least. I do not believe this girl ever realized that, while her vote be powerless in an election, the cut of her gown, the manner of her dancing, and the words of her conversation could be made a tremendous influence for good among her friends, men and women, and thus throughout the whole community.

“She was misled, as many other women are, that good manners and morals can be legislated into men and women. Morals and manners are the fruits of women’s minds, not of the voting booth. And just so long as women clamor for political “rights,” and yet dress in garments that are the definition of bad taste, all the votes in the world will not change the trend in sentiment in society and throughout the whole country.”

— Josephine Jewell Dodge, anti-suffragist and advocate for working mothers, writing in The Courant (Harrisburg, Pa.) in May, 1913

John H. Vincent

“WHEN about thirty years of age, I accepted for a time the doctrine of Woman Suffrage, and publicly defended it.

“Years of wide and careful observation have convinced me that the demand for Woman Suffrage in America is without foundation in equity, and, if successful, must prove harmful to American society.

“I find some worthy women defending it, but the majority of our best women, especially our most intelligent, domestic, and godly mothers, neither ask for nor desire it. The instinct of motherhood is against it. The basal conviction of our best manhood is against it. The movement is at root a protest against the representative relations and functions by virtue of which each sex depends upon and is exalted by the other. This theory and policy, tending to the subversion of the natural and divine order, must make man less a man, and woman less a woman.

“A distinguished woman advocate of this suffrage movement says, ‘We need the ballot to protect us against men.’ When one sex is compelled thus to protect itself against the other, the foundations of society are already crumbling.

“Woman now makes man what he is. She controls him as a babe, boy, manly son, brother, lover, husband, father. Her influence is enormous. If she use it wisely, she needs no additional power.  If she abuse her opportunity, she deserves no additional responsibility. Her womanly weight, now without measure, will be limited to the value of a single ballot, and her control over from two to five additional votes forfeited.

“The curse of America today is in the dominated partisan vote — the vote of ignorance and superstition. Shall we help matters by doubling this dangerous mass? Free from the direct complications and passions of the political arena, the best women may exert a conservative and moral influence over men as voters. Force her into the same bad atmosphere, and both man and woman must inevitably suffer incalculable loss. We know what woman can be in the ‘commune,’ in ‘riots,’ and on the ‘rostrum.’

“Woman can, through the votes of men, have every right to which she is entitled. All she has man has gladly given her. It is his glory to represent her. To rob him of this right is to weaken both. He and she are just now in danger through his mistaken courtesy.”

— John H. Vincent (1832-1920), Methodist founder of the Chautauqua movement

“I would like to make motherhood a governmental institution. I would pension all mothers and have them provided for first to last by the State. I believe that motherhood should be independent of any man.”

— The Rev. Anna Howard Shaw (1847-1919), president of the National Suffrage Association for ten years

“The home of today is a permanent check on the growth of humanity.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935), suffrage leader and lecturer

Inez Milholland Boissevain leading a suffrage march in Washington, D.C.

“It certainly will not be long before the influx to the voting ranks of these millions of younger women whose impressions are being formed in the more alert, stirring air of today will bring the real issue more sharply before us; and it is to be assumed that the institutions most likely to be changed are the home and marriage itself.”

— Inez Milholland Boissevain (1886-1916); “The Suffragist” magazine, Dec. 23, 1916

(Thanks to Terry Morris)

Factory automation with industrial robots for palletizing food products

PROLETARIATS OR PROPRIETORS?

By Charles Pinwill

The role of socialism these last two hundred years has been to represent the proletariat. There is nothing wrong per se with representing the proletariat. Socialists of all types, trade unionists, Fabians, Communists and Social Democrats have all seen this as their special role in political and economic life. Helping the economically disenfranchised, when it has been a motive of these groups, is in itself a commendable aspiration.

Unfortunately, this goal has usually entailed the conceptual limitation of viewing the proletarian status of most people as being, in the main, an unavoidable and eternal condition with little prospect of amendment. This has not been wholly so, for many have championed measures such as home ownership and superannuation for the working public.

Overall though, those who have represented the builders, butchers and bakers have seen the wage as the sole means of sustenance for most (notwithstanding the provision of social security in dire need).

The world, however, is changing and we are going to have to re-examine our premises. The ongoing technological revolution has made goods much less expensive to produce and lessened the need for human labor.

Technology is displacing employment and making it both more productive and efficient. Those who see the resulting unemployment as threatening are missing a major and world-changing consideration. Industrialized societies are becoming more profitable in a hitherto little observed way, a fact which has now been measured and demonstrated.¹

In the United States in 2014, the total aggregate income of all US citizens amounted to $10.1 trillion. This was the amount paid to Americans to induce them to produce and sell the sum total of consumer products of $12.5 trillion. The excess in value of consumer products given above was a total deficiency of consumer incomes of $2.4 trillion. This amount is surely a societal profit!

This profit of $2.4 trillion amounted to $7,500 per person over the whole population, or $30,000 per family of four. Read More »

JOHN PURDY writes:

That is a fine article you posted [about women’s suffrage.] I can’t help chuckling, thinking about how Nancy Pelosi would respond. The elephant in the room that set the stage for Women’s Suffrage was the extension of the franchise to all male citizens. One can’t help wondering how things might have turned out if it had remained restricted to male property owners. Read More »

ANTHONY ESOLEN has written a thoughtful article at Chronicles magazine on the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage:

One hundred years have now passed since both houses of Congress passed the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granting women the right to vote.

For a long time, both major parties were ready to grant the suffrage, should American women clearly ask it of them.  The question was never whether women were worthy of it.  It was rather what, if anything, the change would mean for men, women, family life, and the common good.

Men and women of letters, male and female reformers and religious leaders, ranged on both sides of the issue. The liberal Theodore Roosevelt, for example, was for suffrage, while Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer, first woman architectural critic, was solidly against. A public debate over the matter took place in the pages of the August 1894 issue of The Century Magazine. Arguing against women’s suffrage was Rev. James Monroe Buckley, Methodist minister and editor of the influential weekly newspaper Christian Advocate. For suffrage was Senator George Frisbie Hoar (R-Mass.).

It’s worth looking closer at what these 19th century prophets predicted would result from suffrage, so that we can know them by their fruits, and use their insights to judge the modern results of suffrage. Voting is a mechanism, a tool, and so should be judged by the work it does: the nation and culture it produces. Only a fool continues to use a crooked T square. If the house falls, of what avail was your philosophical commitment?

Read more. Read More »

“MRS. [Cora] Seabury avers that where woman is, homes will naturally exist. Homes have not existed ‘naturally.’ There was a long, long time in human history when not a dream of a home existed. From lawless individualism to tribal life, from tribe to clan, from the clan, at last, through mighty struggles, the family was evolved — the final grouping of the race — the social unit. That point was not reached until man the savage, man the rover, had consented to be bound, and bound for life, to one woman. It has been one object of Christian civilization to hold man to this saving compact. First to hold his spirit by affection for wife and child, and next to hold his material interests for the sake of society. The work has so well progressed that to-day the man’s family is dearer to him than his own life. He will live for them, and fight for them; and the women who proclaim that man is woman’s enemy, are the assassins of their own peace and of the growing peace of home.”

— Helen Kendrick Johnson

Woman and the Republic: A Survey of the Woman-Suffrage Movement in the United States and a Discussion of the Claims and Arguments of Its Foremost Advocates, 1897

THE great American anti-suffragist (one of many thousands of women opposed to the women’s franchise), Helen Kendrick Johnson (1844-1917), wrote in her 1897 book Woman and the Republic: A Survey of the Woman-Suffrage Movement in the United States and a Discussion of the Claims and Arguments of Its Foremost Advocates:

In demanding equality, Suffragists assume that there is not and has not been equality. In asserting that “there is no sex in mind,” they really have had to maintain that there is one sex in mind, and that the masculine, to which woman must conform. If man wanted clinching arguments to prove his superiority, could he find another to match this one which suffrage has furnished him? The quaint wit of the Yankee put it neatly when he gave the toast, “Woman–once our superior, now our equal!” Man has said: “The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.” He has also said, with Martin: “Whatever may be the customs and laws of a country, the women of it decide the morals.” The civilization of no nation has risen higher than the carrying out of the religious ideals of its best womanhood. If man has the outward framing of church and state, woman has the framing of the character of man.

Read More »

Reading room of the Boston Public Library

THINGS HAVE been very busy at home this week as my husband and I work on repairs and renovations. A contractor is doing root canal on our house today and everything is a mess. I haven’t been able to blog much, but I expect to return to normal in time for Holy Week, which begins on Sunday.

Here, in the meantime, is an interesting letter I received this morning:

Grace A. writes:

I immensely enjoyed reading The Bostonians, thanks to the recommendation on your site. However, I would be interested to know what you make of the final sentence in the book:

“It is to be feared that with the union, so far from brilliant, into which [Verena] was about to enter, these were not the last [tears] she was destined to shed.”

Initially, I was dismayed, thinking that he had undone his entire story with that one sentence, but it’s hard for me to believe he would do such a thing, and the sentence is vague enough to mean something else.

This was only my first work of Henry James, and I plan to read others to attain a better grasp of his views in general, but if you wouldn’t mind sharing your opinion, I think it would help me to make sense of it. Read More »

Suffragist Charlotte Despard in London in 1910

BRITISH feminists celebrated the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage this week. Well, they sort of celebrated — if saying how oppressed women remain and perpetuating outrageous myths about the female vote constitute celebration. If stumping for socialism, promoting myths about “democracy” and disdaining men is celebration, then, yes, it was a big party.

What these jubilant heiresses of the often ugly suffrage movement never mention is that for most of British history, the vast majority of men didn’t have the national vote either and that women had long had the vote on the local level.

Not until 1910 — eight years before women — did a majority (not all, by any means) of British men have the right to vote. Many, however, were effectively disenfranchised by cumbersome rules. Feminists also do not mention that many women in Britain (and America) were uneasy about giving women the vote, given that men were the ones responsible for paying taxes and dying in wars. The suffrage movement was taken over by bullying militants, predecessors of the socialist resentment freaks of today.

Beginning around 1910, their tactics became quite violent, including arson attacks and the bombing of the house belonging to the chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George.

One suffragist, Mary Richardson, slashed a painting at the National Gallery in London with a meat cleaver. A Sikh princess, Sophia Duleep Singh, threw herself in front of the prime minister’s car.

Those actions have stoked a debate lately over whether the women should be considered “terrorists.” The Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn addressed that issue on Tuesday, pledging to pardon them posthumously if he ever claims the prime ministership. [Source]

Another myth about the movement is that the women’s war effort justified the female vote. Steve Moxon writes in his book The Woman Racket: the New Science Explaining How the Sexes Relate at Work, at Play and in Society:

The supposed contribution by women in general to World War One is mostly a myth. War work for women was voluntary, and even by the last year of the war only one in ten adult women had signed up. Less than half of these worked in engineering/munitions, where most chose (as they could do) to do nothing much different to the factory work they had done or might have done before wartime. Production was possible only because of the then new automised working techniques that allowed complete de-skilling, which itself was possible only with the continuous production that war demanded. The sheer volume of production and the dispensability of the lives of soldiers hid the appallingly low quality of output (shells insufficiently filled fell short on our own troops, and shells with faulty fuses failed to explode or blew up on firing). There was no question of keeping on these women for the entirely different skilled and semi-skilled work that resumed after the war. The much smaller numbers who replaced farm workers accounted for the precipitous fall in agricultural production. All-in-all, women’s war work was hardly an advertisement for women as workers

He adds:

In any case, there was a more profound basis for exclusive male enfranchisement than economics. Buried by the passage of time, but obvious to everyone at the time, was the grounding of worldly political power in the separate world of the male. The national vote was and was seen to be all about ‘imperial’ issues—law and order and the like—and therefore clearly the province of men (only men being required to take up arms and only men having an appetite to do so). Helen Kendrick Johnson, writing in 1913 (A Survey of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States and a Discussion of the Claims and Arguments of Its Foremost Advocates) explains:

Democratic government is at an end when those who issue decrees are not identical with those who can enforce those decrees.…Upon this depended stability, and without stability there is nothing. Stability required a majority of men.…Woman’s only relation to this defence is that of beneficiary, and therefore her relation to the laws with which that defence is associated must be one of advice and not of control.

This argument could be broadened to an economic one in moving from the issue of providing physical security to taxation. Women voting nationally was considered undemocratic, because very few women paid tax.

Underpinning these arguments was the near universally-held attitude that the world was and should be divided into two spheres of influence: that of children, morality, and the future of the human race (where woman held sway), and that of politics, which was not only much less important, but also much less high-minded (where men held sway).

There are good arguments indeed for giving women the vote, but there is no defense for the one-sided discussion. And at the end of the day, a vote ain’t much. That’s the brutal truth. The women’s suffrage movement is just one more development in the tired and sorry process of convincing the public that modern democracy is for the people when it is most definitely against the people. After all, the Powers That Be in our intensely stratified world, where the one percent control far more of world’s resources than ever before, don’t make a big deal of this anniversary because it disenfranchised them. Women have less power, if power be measured by the ability to act in one’s own best interests, today than they did before the days of Emmeline Pankhurst when they at least had an exclusive and healthy realm of independence and autonomy little controlled by government and politics. Elections are a brilliant means by which the people are enticed to submit willingly and enthusiastically. In that light, the enfranchisement, and subsequent politicization, of women have been regressive historical events. There was something to be said for the non-partisan voice.

Below is a bitter product of the resentment many of the suffragists fueled. Why does such a crank, someone who clearly despises half of the human population and implicitly disdains even her own father, who gave her life, have a voice in one of the most influential publicity organs in the world? Ha! The division she represents is all for the good.

YAHOO posted this humorous series of vintage anti-suffragette cartoons today, but not without giving us a dose of bitter medicine. Therese O’Neill of This Week informs us:

One of the most notable things about the arguments put forth by the anti-suffragette movement was how weak its position was. Anti-suffragette arguments relied heavily on emotional manipulation and downright hateful nastiness. Humor was a much-used weapon against suffragettes. They were easy to depict as embittered old maids, brutal scolds, and cigar-smoking transvestites.

Ms. O’Neill forgets to tell us what those arguments were. But then you get the idea with these cartoons. Anti-suffragettes, who included many women, believed that political power was de-feminizing and that women can wield plenty of power without the vote.

Embittered old maids, brutal scolds and transvestites aren’t all that funny anymore, are they? They’re all too real.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

“THE Declaration of Rights and Sentiments” approved by the suffragists at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 is a remarkably puerile and deceitful political document. That it has achieved such immense historical stature is not a tribute to women’s rights but a glaring indictment. If eloquent 15-year-olds gathered to draw up a list of complaints against their parents, they would be no doubt be remarkably similar to the complaints in this document. The Declaration of Rights, which was written as a cheap knock-off of the Declaration of Independence even though the suffragists had absolutely no intention of declaring their own government or physically defending their views, intones at the end of its opening paragraphs:

The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

This was written by women whose daily existence was subsidized and protected by men, women who would not have publicly uttered these words without fear of arrest or imprisonment if truly they lived under “absolute tyranny” or even its close approximation.

First among the abuses of which mankind is alleged guilty:

He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.

As the anti-suffragist Helen Kendrick Johnson pointed out in her 1897 book Woman and the Republic, the franchise was never an “inalienable right” for anyone, neither in America nor in Britain. From the very beginning, suffrage was limited and carried property and citizenship qualifications. The vote was no more an inalienable right than being a senator was an inalienable right. Many men had been denied the vote. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the authors of the Declaration, obviously did not believe the vote was a natural right because she did not support granting the franchise to blacks after the Civil War.

The second count in the Declaration is this:

He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.

False again. Women did indeed have a voice in the formation of laws both privately, in their close individual influence over male voters, and publicly, in their formal right of petition. Here is an example cited by Johnson:

At the very time when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott were writing that indictment against the United States Government, Dorothea Dix was presenting a memorial to the National Congress asking for an appropriation of five hundred thousand acres of the public lands to endow hospitals for the indigent insane. [Women and the Republic, p. 25]

The proposal, which later included tens of millions of acres, ultimately passed the House and Senate but was vetoed by President Pierce, who was against extending federal power in this instance. Dix then took it to the state level and achieved success in seven states that ultimately led to separating the criminal from the insane throughout the country.

Not only did women have the right of petition, but because of women’s non-partisan situation they were arguably of especial influence in politics.

LAWRENCE AUSTER writes on the vanity of female politicians:

If you have a society in which men are running things and enforcing male standards of conduct in the public sphere, you can have an occasional woman in high public office and it will not harm the society. But once the appointment of women to conspicuous political positions becomes routine and expected, and once female standards of public conduct become normalized, thus pushing aside male standards, then you have things like this.

I would add two points. One, a woman in power has more incentive to flaunt her physical assets precisely because they may be all she has left of her femininity. This is why we see more and more cleavage. The essence has vanished with the pursuit of power.

Second, a society’s understanding of authority also weakens when a significant number of women enter elective public office. Eileen Behr, pictured below, is running for sheriff in suburban Philadelphia. She seems like a perfectly nice, competent woman, but her face changes the very definition of the office. She looks too nice to write a parking ticket.

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LAURA GRACE ROBINS has a good article here on Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Female Suffrage: A Letter to the Christian Woman, published in 1870. Cooper outlines practical objections, as well as theological ones. She wrote:

This grand and holy religion, whose whole action is healthful, whose restraints are all blessings–this gracious religion, whose chief precepts are the love of God and the love of man–this same Christianity confirms the subordinate position of woman, by allotting to man the headship in plain language and by positive precept. No system of philosophy has ever yet worked out in behalf of woman the practical results for good which Christianity has conferred on her. Christianity has raised woman from slavery and made her the thoughtful companion of man; finds her the mere toy, or the victim of his passions, and it places her by his side, his truest friend, his most faithful counselor, his helpmeet in every worthy and honorable task. It protects her far more effectually than any other system. Read More »