Planks from the Suffrage Platform - As Stated By Mrs. C.C. Catt.

Broadside: “Planks from the Suffrage Platform — as Stated by Mrs. C.C. Catt.” Raleigh: Capital Printing, [ND, but ca. 1920].

8-1/2 x 12,” printed on news stock; 1/2” closed tear at top edge; minute touches of wear; very good.

The broadside attacks Mrs. Catt for her insistence that the suffrage movement encompasses those of all color and for her pacifism during World War I. It quotes her as declaring “Suffrage Democracy knows no bias of race, creed, color, or sex...”; and cites a letter by Carrie Chapman Catt printed in the Crisis: “This same negro magazine...has an article advocating intermarriage of the races and the annulling of all 'Jim Crow' and segregation laws.” (The writer indicates that legislation is already afoot “along these lines.”) The broadside points to her definition of feminism as a “revolt against artificial barriers which laws and customs interpose between women and human freedom.” Her activities as a pacifist are framed to suggest she is unpatriotic, thrusting aside all considerations other than “Suffrage first.” The South’s firm resistance to woman suffrage stemmed largely from the identification of the movement with its Abolitionist origins. Even though, in the interest of gaining Southern support, the NAWSA had distanced itself from its African-American members and their objectives, southern anti-suffrage forces still found ‘smearing' suffrage leaders for their lack of anti-black bias an effective weapon.

This group of anti-suffrage materials reflects the range of anti-suffrage arguments: woman suffrage (1) would diminish women’s commitment to home and family and thus weaken the basis of American society; (2) contradicted sacred texts and authority and its advocates were apostates; (3) would expose women to unseemly public venues (polls) and responsibilities (jury duty); (4) would place them in competition with men; (5) would bring 'bad' women into the voting pool (good women did not want the vote any way); (6) would allow suffrage to spread to African-American women. A reading of these various pamphlets and broadsides conveys how the tone of anti-suffrage arguments alternated from the caustic to the ‘scientific' to the dispassionate, but sincere to the vicious. Southern anti-suffragist inevitably linked the woman suffrage campaign to its abolitionist roots; these broadsides underscore the personal relationships between Susan B. Anthony and Fredrick Douglass, for instance. The suffrage broadside attacking anti-suffragists, in turn, reflects standard NAWSA characterizations of the anti-suffrage interests: the brewing and liquor industry; corrupt politicians; wealthy women immune from the effects of anti-labor statutes and other laws which affected working women and their families. While some anti-suffrage arguments sound quaint 80 years after passage of the 19th Amendment, anti-feminism retained sufficient strength to deny ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment.

(#4993)

Item ID#: 4993

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