No Votes for Women (Women, Gender, and Sexuality in American History) by Susan Goodier

Author:Susan Goodier [Goodier, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780252094675
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2012-03-15T07:00:00+00:00

6. Antis Adjust to Enfranchisement, 1917–1932

After spending twenty-five years opposing woman suffrage, Annie Nathan Meyer had some difficulty adjusting to her changed political status. Meyer, an intellectual maverick and one who never backed down from criticism or an argument, fired off an editorial to the New York Times ordering anti-suffrage women not to vote.1 Antis, Meyer declared, should let socialist and radical factions win “just once” to show governmental leaders how widespread radicalism had become. Public censure was swift and brutal.2 An editor for the Chicago Herald wrote that because Meyer believed that “the grant of woman’s suffrage having put the country in a bad mess, the anti should see that the country suffers as much as possible.” Meyer was, in the editor’s words, “acting like a child who has been spanked.”3 An editor for the socialist New York Call condemned Meyer as well, contending that “she would rather see this ruin effected, so as to be able to say ‘I told you so!’ than have the noble patriots like herself step into the breach and by working and voting perhaps save the country she sees so desperately threatened.”4

Obviously stung by the responses to her idea, a contrite Meyer sought understanding through a more carefully crafted article in the New Republic. She wrote that after recommending the scheme in the New York Times, she had also suggested the idea at an anti-suffrage meeting. The former National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage president Josephine Dodge “immediately rebuked” her by saying, “You and I place our country above any controversy; at such a time a question of suffrage or non-suffrage must be of relative unimportance.” Meyer admitted that she could see the sense in her friend’s words. Regretting her rash decision to dash off her thoughts to a newspaper before privately testing the idea on her anti-suffragist friends, Meyer was as close to a public apology as she would ever get. She concluded the article by asserting that the act of voting contributed to the greater good of the country and promised that she, too, had upheld her duty to register and vote.5 Although Meyer apparently collected every article, critical or laudatory, for her scrapbooks, she does not mention this specific incident in her 1951 autobiography. In fact, there she assessed women’s enfranchisement by writing only, “How could we possibly refuse to vote but permit women whose whole outlook on life differed from ours to have their say, unopposed?” Meyer’s question could have just as easily referred to suffragists as it could have to uneducated immigrants. Either way, by the time Meyer wrote her autobiography she was ostensibly reconciled to women voting.6

While some women persisted in anti-suffrage activities after 1917, as we saw in the previous chapter, the more typical former anti-suffragists in New York State put aside their old animosities and tried to work with former suffragists in an attempt to create the better world Lucy Price had foreseen through women’s participation in politics.7 Political expectations for women were very high,

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