Gilded Suffragists by Johanna Neuman

Author:Johanna Neuman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS000000 History / General
Publisher: NYU Press

7

The Tactical Turn

Militant political action . . . had broken down hitherto unimaginable taboos. . . . An emotional earthquake had shattered the intangible yet suffocating prison of decorum.

Winifred Holtby1

IT was a day of presidential firsts for William Howard Taft. After lunch on Thursday, April 14, 1910, he left the White House for the Arlington Hotel, where he became the first president to address a suffrage group, welcoming to Washington members of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Then he traveled to Griffith Stadium, where he became the first president to throw out the ceremonial first pitch on opening day of the season. Taft is much remembered for his baseball achievement—even now honored as one of the Washington Nationals’ “racing presidents.” But it was his speech to the suffrage group that reverberated through political circles, exposing a tactical warfare over decorum.

Worried that Taft’s appearance would rouse Democratic enmity against Republicans, Senator Elihu Root of New York had beseeched the president to make clear that his welcome was not an endorsement.2 Taft agreed. He would be polite, even decorous, but would spell out the rationale for his opposition to suffrage. And so he told the audience that it was dangerous to extend the ballot to “Hottentots,” a slang word for South Africans, “or any other uneducated, altogether unintelligent class.” Since the rest of the female citizenry didn’t really want the vote, he reasoned, the ballot would be exercised only “by that part of the class less desirable as political constituents and be neglected by many of those who are intelligent and patriotic and would be most desirable as members of the electorate.”

Reaction was immediate. As the Syracuse Post-Standard put it, “When these words fell from the President’s lips, the walls of the convention hall echoed a chorus of feminine hisses. It was no feeble demonstration of protest. The combined hisses sounded as if a valve on a steam engine had broken.”3 It had. Female hissing heralded the end of gender deference in politics, nurtured since the Revolution, challenged during the Civil War, and reinvigorated during the cult of manhood embodied by the century’s new president, Theodore Roosevelt.4 Women who had “grown up with Victorian standards of modesty” now felt empowered enough to raise their voices.5

Suffrage leaders tried to hush the hecklers, and later wrote a letter of apology to the president, but they could not silence the movement’s newfound freedom of expression.6 Like chivalry, challenged by gender equality, decorum loomed as the next great test for female advocates as they crossed from domestic concerns to the public square. In an editorial entitled “The Sowing of Bad Seed,” Vogue Magazine warned that “the urgent calls to throw off the alleged tyranny of man have seen so many seeds of discontent sown upon all kinds of soil.” The result, thought Vogue, was “a large crop of shouters for rights who have no real conception of just what rights they are shouting for.” The magazine, usually an arbiter of fashion trends, now blamed the

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