Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited

Unlike the suffragists, who needed to convert the American public to their way of thinking, anti-suffrage women articulated cultural values that were perfectly in keeping with this nation's traditions. Antis put into words what society had believed for a long time and had practiced for generations. The world of women, according to remonstrants, was blending too quickly with the world of men, especially in the political arena. A group of malcontents, according to the antis, now preached a new gospel of womanhood, one that threatened a national catastrophe. Those who wished to maintain a “loyalty” to their feminine heritage were called to the state associations opposed to woman suffrage during the decades from 1868 to 1920. Most antis wanted neither an inflexible society immobilized by the past nor an anarchic future fractured by selfish individualism. In molding the wisdom of the past to the demands of the present, remonstrants relied heavily on the safety of what had been rather than what could be. The two opposing camps of women both professed love for their nation, but drew apart—at times contentiously—as they sought to address the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. The antisuffragists ultimately became part of history's forgotten “losers.”

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