HERO’S OF SUFFERAGE
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WOMAN OPPOSING THE
WOMEN’S VOTE Josephine Pearson led the anti-suffrage fight
By Allie Clouse
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USA TODAY Network
n 1914, Josephine Pearson leaned over her mother’s deathbed in the family’s modest home in the small East Tennessee town of Monteagle and vowed to continue her mother’s fight — to stop women’s suffrage. Pearson was about 45 years old at the time, and it’d be six years before the 19th Amendment would make its way in front of Tennessee legislators, awaiting only one more state ratification before it would become law. “Promise me,” Amanda Pearson begged Josephine, “you will take up the opposition, in my memory.” “I was, of course, dazed,” Josephine wrote in 1939. “‘Yes, God helping, I’ll keep the faith, my mother.’” Pearson kept her promise. In 1920, she stood on the front steps of the state capitol, fighting against women’s right to vote as the president of the Tennessee State Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage.
Becoming an ‘anti’ Many people in the 1800s opposed giving women the right to vote, but it wasn’t until a group of women published a petition to the United States Congress in “Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine” opposing suffrage in 1871 that anti-suffragists banded together and mobilized. As suffragist organizations spread across the country, antis followed, meeting them with opposition wherAn anti-suffrage ever they went. poster suggesting Suffragists argued that women’s women should vote suffrage would because they were allow black women also subject to taxes to vote. TENNESSEE and the law. “Antis” STATE LIBRARY AND wanted to preserve ARCHIVES the traditional role of women in the household and, especially in the South, feared giving all women the right to vote would enfranchise Black voters. Pearson was, unlike many of the other antis, not one to practice what she preached. As a well-traveled university dean who was not married and never had children, she didn’t fit the motherly homemaker image that she and other “antis” tried to protect.
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