'1920 by David Pietrusza

Author:David Pietrusza
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2011-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

Rumors also swirled around other women: forty-three-year-old Mrs. Annette A. Adams, the first female Assistant United States Attorney General; Chicago’s fifty-nine-year-old Elizabeth Merrill Bass (“a woman of culture and accomplishments”), chair of the party’s women’s bureau organization; and Tammany Hall’s sixty-three-year-old Miss Elizabeth Marbury, a theatrical producer and one-time publicity agent for dancers Vernon and Irene Castle, a woman as Wet as Mrs. Olesen was Dry. Speculation, however, still festered that the word “he” in the Constitution barred women from the presidency or the vice-presidency.

Mrs. Bass became the first woman to preside over a session of a major party convention, and Democrats promised to dispatch five thousand female speakers to support the ticket. But opposition to suffrage remained, and not just from men. Mrs. Alice Hay Wadsworth, wife of Senator James W. Wadsworth Jr., chaired the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage. At one point, Mrs. Wadsworth lunched with Eleanor Roosevelt, attempting to enlist her in the cause. “I was very noncommittal,” the once strongly anti-suffrage Eleanor wrote to her mother-in-law.

Mrs. Wadsworth warned states contemplating ratification:In behalf of this organization of women determined to uphold the constitution of the United States and the federal principle embodied in State’s Rights doctrines upon which our government rests, I express profound respect to you for withstanding the pressure to which suffrage leaders boldly proclaim they are subjecting you and to which they boast you must eventually accede. We infer, you understand, that ratification cannot stand the legal tests bound to ensue in the courts, and that these cases, should ratification be obtained in time for women to vote this year, would hold up the election result and throw the country into political chaos, possibly necessitating a second election.

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