♪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 stance that women's political emancipation would be
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!]