♪I've been down to Madison
To see the folks and sights;♪
♪You'd laugh, I'm sure, to hear them talk
About the women's rights.♪
♪Now it's just as plain as my old hat,
That's plain as plain can be♪
♪That if the women want the vote,
They'll get no help from me.♪
♪Not from Joe, not from Joe;
If he knows it...♪
Looking back today,
it's somewhat difficult to understand
the violence of the opposition
to woman's suffrage.
Conservative opinion in the country was
of course almost universally opposed
to the idea of women voting.
The Church was divided in its position.
While some denominations
and individual clergymen
were among the most zealous
advocates of the movement,
others took the stand that women's
political emancipation would mean
the beginning of the end
of the social morality
which constituted
the moral strength of the nation.
The enfranchisement of women,
it was feared
would result in the dissolution
of the home and family
and the destruction
of the institution of marriage.
The most pessimistic of the prophets
predicted that the very act of
women's going to the polls and mingling
with the rough crowds on election day
would plunge the country into moral chaos.
Professional politicians and certain
powerful big business interests
were just as violently opposed
to vote for women,
if for very different reasons.
Political leaders felt that they knew
how to manipulate men for party purposes
but manipulating women
was an unknown quantity
which they wished to avoid
as long as possible.
The organized liquor industries,
with their fear of women's influence
on the prohibition issue, spent
countless thousands of dollars
lobbying against women's suffrage, which
they felt threatened their very existence.
Add to these elements the fact that
most men of the country
were understandably reluctant to forego
their traditional position
of sex superiority,
which was in a sense symbolized
by their power to vote
and the fact that many women were quite
as unwilling to give up
the protected position in which men's
chivalry had placed them
and perhaps we can understand why
the battle for woman's suffrage
was inevitably a long and stormy one.
After the disheartening failure to obtain
the franchise by federal amendment
at the close of the Civil War, when the
Negro was admitted to the vote,
the suffragists changed their tactics and
began to concentrate their main strength
on a policy of winning the suffrage
state by state.
By the turn of the 20th century the
National Woman Suffrage Association
was a powerful organization with
headquarters in New York
and an efficiently functioning machine in
almost every state of the Union.
Four states in the far West had already
granted women full suffrage as a result of
the Association's work and by 1914 almost
all the states west of the Mississippi had
joined the ranks of the suffrage states
and the Association was turning its forces
to the conquest of the traditionally more
conservative East.
Sinclair Lewis in the novel 'Ann Vickers',
published in 1932, has left an amusing
account of one of these state suffrage
campaigns during this period.
In the following incident from this work
one Dr Melvina Wormser of New York,
purportedly Chief Surgeon of the Manhattan
Hospital for Women,
President of the Better Obstetrical League,
author of 'Emancipation in Sex',
Doctor of Science of Yale and Vassar and
an officer in all known birth control
organizations,
is interviewed by the press in advance of
her scheduled speech at a suffrage rally
in a city called Clateburn, Ohio.
The professional suffragist, says Lewis,
had been cautioned about talking to the
press since the reporters, or at least
their editors, were always on the alert
for something scandalous from suffrage
headquarters, some hint that it was a
free love colony or (what was nearly as
good, says Lewis) a frenzied zoo of
manhaters, anarchists, atheists,
spiritualists or anything else
eccentric or discreditable.
The workers for the cause might attack the
water or gas departments,
the city orphanages, President Wilson or
even the Allies in the Great War,
but they must do so only as Christian
gentlewomen and solid taxpayers.
They must convince others that the vote
will not lead to moral laxity
but would immediately end prostitution,
gambling and the drinking of beer.
But Dr Melvina Wormser of New York,
as guest speaker,
was outside headquarters discipline and a
law unto herself.
Here the young suffrage workers in
'Ann Vickers' stand by in shocked silence
as Dr Wormser delivers her opinions
to the delighted reporters:
[Dr Wormser, do you believe in free love?]
Do I believe in free love? What do you
mean by that, young lady?
How can love be anything but free? If
you mean, do I believe that any authentic
passion, not just a momentary itch in the
moonlight, is superior to any ceremony
performed by some preacher, why of course,
don't you?
[What do you think about birth control?]
[Do you think women are brighter
than men?]
[Do you think there's any field women
should not enter?]
Oh, one at a time please! Let's see: do I
believe that women are brighter than men?
Tut tut, what a question! Not brighter --
just less mean. But don't try to get me to
riding men. I'm a folorn old maid, but I
adore 'em, the darlings.
What do you suppose men doctors would ever
do without their women nurses
and secretaries? I know! I was a nurse
myself, before I became a doc.
And now my chief satisfaction in life is
that I don't have to stand up when a
surgeon enters the room!
Silly customs like that -- just what a man
WOULD institute -- poor lambs, we have
to take care of 'em and their little egos!
That's why we need the vote, for THEIR
sake!
[Do you think there will ever be a woman
President?]
How do I know, young man? But let me point
out that women rulers -- Queen Elizabeth,
that lovely rakehell Catherine of Russia,
the last Chinese Empress,
Maria Theresa of Austria, Queen Anne, and
Victoria -- were better rulers than any
equal number of kings OR Presidents!
[How soon do you predict women's suffrage
will be the law of the land?]
You boys and girls might as well know that
I don't believe in hedging and pussyfooting.
This is going to be a long struggle. Not
just getting the vote.
That's a matter of a couple of years.
Then we've got to go on.
Birth control. Separate apartments for
married couples, if they happen to like them.
What women need is not merely the vote but
something more up here, in the head.
Don't need just exterior opportunity but
something interior, with which to grab the
opportunity when we get it, and use it.
Freedom's no good to a pussycat, only to a
tigress!
And women have got to stick together. Men
always have had the sense to -- drat 'em --
Sex loyalty. We ought to lie for one
another and sneak off and have a good drink
together, like the men.
[Do you want to rival men?]
[Do you think there's any field that should
be closed to women?]
I believe that there is no field that men
control now that women can't enter,
completely. Medicine, law, politics,
physics, aviation, exploring, engineering,
soldiering, prize-fighting, writing sweet
little rondels -- only I hope women'll be
too sensible for either the prize-fighting
or the rondels, which are both forms of
male escapism, and singularly alike if you
look at 'em!
Only I don't expect women to imitate or
try to displace men in any of these fields.
I'm not one of the gels who believes that
the sole difference between males and
females is in conception. Women have
special qualities which the human race has
failed to use for civilization.
I know a woman can be as good an architect
as any man -- but she may be a different
sort of architect. I bring something to
medicine that no man can, no matter how
good he is.
[Well, how about the army?]
Well, if you think women can't go to war,
remember what the Teuton tribes, marching
with their women along, did to the
beautiful, virile, professional men
soldiers of Rome! But the pig-headed
masculine world forgot that lesson for
fifteen hundred years and never discovered
it till Florence Nightingale happened in
and bullied the masculine British War
Office into some of the common sense that
any normal girl would have at seven!
[Do you want to rival men?]
No, I don't want to rival men. But I don't
want to be kept by the tradition of
feminine subjection from the privilege of
working eighteen hours a day.
I'm not much of a democrat. Believe
inferiors ought to be subjected,
if they ARE inferiors! But if a girl
secretary is smarter than her male boss,
let HIM be HER secretary.
Listen! In 1945, maybe you'll have to go
to England -- that's where they invented
this Inferior Women myth, so men could
have their clubs -- maybe you'll have to
go to England to find anybody so benighted
that he'll even know what you're talking
about when you speak of considering
candidates for a job as male and female,
or on any other basis except
their ability!
[Why 1945, Dr Wormser?]
I speak of 1945 because I have a hunch
that after we get the vote we'll be less
ardent feminists. We'll find that work is
hard. That jobs are insecure. That we must
go much deeper than woman suffrage --
maybe to Socialism; anyway, to something
that fundamentally represents both men and
women, not just women alone.
And a lot of suffragists that pretend to
hate men will find the dear brutes are
nice to have around the house. We'll slump.
But then we'll come back -- not as shadows
of men, or as noisy professional females,
but, for the first time since
Queen Elizabeth, as human beings! There!
You ought to be able to get sufficient out
of what I've said to make trouble enough
for me to satisfy even a suffrage speaker!
Good-day.
[Oh, thank you, Dr Wormser!]
[Goodbye, Doctor, and thank you!]
This goes on Sinclair Lewis's Ann Vickers
as what the newspapers made of Dr. Wormser's
interview the next morning: "Love is
nothing but a temporary itch caused by
moonlight. But even so, it is more
important than lasting marriage.
Because marriages are performed by
ministers who are all childish. Free
love-that is, taking any sweetheart, any
time you choose is not only permissible
but necessary for any free woman. Men are
much meaner than women. Men doctors boss
their nurses around and treat them simply
terrible. The next president of the United
States will be a woman and she will be
lots better than any man. Marie Louise of
Russia was the greatest king who ever
lived. As soon as we get the vote, then
we're going on and advocate birth control
socialism, and atheism. All married
couples will live in separate apartments
and women will imitate men and sneak off
and get drunk together. Women must lie
about one another's whereabouts to fool
the men. Women will make better soldiers,
prize-fighters, engineers, and poets than
men, and men are fit only to be the
secretaries and servants of women. I know
that talking frankly like this will get
me into trouble, but all suffrage speakers
love publicity and I guess I'll get plenty
on this." Dr. Wormster's interview had the
effect of selling out the house for the
suffrage meeting that evening, with
hundreds more trying to get in.
(Crowd sounds) The crowd was threatening
and snarling. ["I oughta ride them out on
a rail!" "Bunch of floozies, all of them
crazy, that's what they are!" "I
wouldn't have a woman doc for a sick cat!'
"Free love! I'd like to show em some free
love..with a club!" "Bunch of crazy
anarchists!"] But there were enough
sympathizers with the movement to keep
down violence. Backstage, before the
meeting, the suffragists were nervous and
apprehensive. "Oh, those cursed newspapers!
Will some of you explain to me why every
single reporter and editor on a paper can
be a liberal or perhaps a Red and the
paper itself is conservative as the
measles? Oh, don't worry Dr. Wormser, I
have my Dudley and my two large brothers
out there. They've stopped at the club
for a drink and by this time they'll be
equal to handling at least 300 bullies."
(Cheers) "8:27. Oo, let's get started,
Doctor, and get it over!" "Listen, you
girls. Eleanor, Pat, and Ann. The minute
the doctor starts talking, you all skip
to the back of the house and if anything
starts, see what you can do will you?"
"Right, Mrs. Birgardes I certainly will!
"Come on girls let's go, let's go out
there and face them Dr. Wormser,
are you game?" "Oh, they don't
bother me in the least, I'm used to
them. After you Ms. Bogardes."
"At a girl Dr. Wormser, Never say die!"
(Cheering) "Let's start the convention."
"On with the ball and chain!" "Hooray for
the lady Doc!" "Votes for the skirts!"
"Ladies and gentlemen, I'm afraid that in
unavoidable haste of getting out the news
papers our friends and reporters
considerably exaggerated the radicalism of
of the speaker for this evening. I will
let her speak now for herself, I present
Dr. Melvina Wormser!"