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A woman opposing the women’s vote
A WOMAN OPPOSING THE WOMEN’S VOTE Josephine Pearson led the anti-surage ght
By Allie Clouse
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USA TODAY Network
In 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.
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 An anti-suffrage opposition wherposter suggesting ever they went. that women’s Suffragists argued suffrage would women should vote allow black women because they were to vote. TENNESSEE also subject to taxes STATE LIBRARY AND and the law. “Antis” ARCHIVES wanted to preserve 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.
In her autobiography, Pearson wrote that one scholar told her that she “thought as a man.” A family member mentioned in a letter to Pearson that she hoped to see the day that Pearson was elected to the Senate.
Instead, she used her education and political savvy to write essays against suffrage, feminism and other topics she thought would honor her mother’s dying wish.
Elaine Weiss, journalist, researcher and author of “The Woman’s Hour,” called Pearson a “prolific letter-to-the-editor writer” — often penning letters that cut straight to the core of anti-suffrage ideals.
It wasn’t long before wealthy men, lawyers and lobbyists encouraged Pearson to take a more active role in the anti-suffrage movement. Nashville lawyer and liquor lobbyist John Jacob Vertrees invited Pearson to visit the city and consider joining the Tennessee State Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage. In 1917, she became its president.
Later, Vertrees would say that he chose her for three reasons: She had the experience and education to answer questions about anti-suffrage, she was from Tennessee, and she was “too brainy” to tell legislatures what to do, according to Anastatia Sims, a history professor at Georgia Southern University and author of “Powers That Pray and Powers That Prey: Tennessee and the Fight for Women’s Suffrage.”
Many vested businessmen like Vertrees were paying for the anti-suffrage movement but wanted it to appear as if women made up the majority of the opposition. In Pearson they found the face of the movement in Tennessee, and she traveled the state for three years on behalf of the organization, while still living in Monteagle with her father.
Her focus honed in on the capitol beginning in mid-July 1920, when she hurried to catch the first train to Nashville after Gov. A.H. Roberts called a special session to vote on the 19th Amendment.
What ensued after can best be described as what journalist Joe Hatcher said was “the bitterest, barefisted, name-calling, back-biting session in the state’s history.”
The battle in Nashville
Pearson recalled the day she left Monteagle as “the very hottest day” she ever experienced. She felt a different type of heat in Nashville, facing up against famous suffragist leaders Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and Sue Shelton White, a local feminist leader and chairman of the National Woman’s Party.
Pearson checked into the cheapest room at the Hermitage Hotel and reserved the assembly rooms to use as anti-suffrage headquarters to prepare for the “World War,” she would write.
Suffragists and anti-suffragists didn’t pull their punches in that war. The groups attacked one another publicly with posters and pamphlets while lobbying behind the closed doors of legislators’ offices.
Sims wrote that the antis sent so many telegrams to pro-suffrage representatives that two legislators complained that they were “called up every half hour day and night so that they had no sleep.” Another legislator was threatened by the antis, who warned he would lose his teaching job if he didn’t change his vote.
Suffragist leaders embarked on a statewide speaking tour to convince Tennesseans that the men who owned the biggest whiskey, textile and railroad companies were motivating and paying for the anti-suffrage efforts.
Sims said the clash between the two movements was so intense that suffragist leader Abby Crawford Milton insisted that the devil himself had been working with the antis to keep the ballot from women that summer in Nashville.
A racist antisuffrage pamphlet distributed by the Southern Women’s League for the Rejection of the Susan B. Anthony Amendment
TENNESSEE STATE LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES
A collection of newspaper clippings about the anti-suffrage movement with a photo of Josephine Pearson in the top
right. TENNESSEE STATE LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES
Anti-surage political cartoons
Antis waged personal attacks on suffragists and legislators who supported the amendment. One anti-suffrage political cartoon titled “America When Feminized” pictures a hen with a “Votes for Women” sash leaving her eggs behind, telling the rooster to “set on them yourself, old man, my country calls me.”
The broadside makes claims that “the more a politician allows himself to be henpecked the more henpecking we will have in politics” and “a vote for federal suffrage is a vote for female nagging forever.” Women’s suffrage, it asserted, would masculinize women and feminize men.
They distributed materials that argued giving women the right to vote would destroy traditional gender roles and family relationships.
Another anti-suffrage poster titled “Home!” shows a father coming home to crying children. A note is tacked onto a “Votes for Women” poster that says “Back sometime this evening.”
Antis feared that giving women the right to vote would enfranchise Black citizens. Several anti-suffrage campaign posters and letters from leaders including Pearson reveal the racist views behind the opposition.
“The Truth About the Negro Problem” was one flyer that was circulated by the Nashville antis during the 1920 session that suggested enfranchising women, and therefore Black women, would cause a “Negro majority” that would tilt the vote out of white citizens’ favor.
“The better class of Negros themselves know they are better represented by able white men than they would be by designing politicians of their own race,” the flyer says. “Just as the majority of women themselves feel they are better represented by the fathers of their children than they would be by politically ambitious office-seekers of their own sex.”
The antis’ racist propaganda was widespread.
Pearson feared white supremacy would be overthrown if Black women gained the right to vote. In a letter to Tennessee residents, she wrote, “The fate of white civilization in the South may hang on a few votes.”
Though the 15th Amendment granted Black men the right to vote, barriers like poll taxes, literacy tests and other Jim Crow laws kept many from the voting booth. Black women faced those same barriers even after the passage of the 19th Amendment.
Pearson and other antis were interested in the protection of states’ rights, the preservation of family, and women’s moral and spiritual influence.
An undated anti-suffrage petition asked Tennessee women to sign “for the sake of your State and your sex” and cited several reasons for voting no on ratification.
Antis argued that motherhood was more important than politics, saying they trusted their fathers, brothers and husbands to represent them at the ballot box because their fathers and brothers loved them, they had chosen their husbands, and their sons were “what we made them.”
The right to vote wasn’t needed, they argued, because women had higher status and more protection in states where women did not have the right to vote and that they had more “power for good” if they remained non-partisan.
And women’s suffrage would increase taxation and add “undesirable, corrupt and job hunting female politicians to the ranks of the male.”
A er the vote
In her memoir, Pearson skips the part of the story that didn’t work out for the antis — ignoring the Senate vote for ratification and the dramatic House vote in which two legislators changed their votes at the last minute, tipping the scales.
One hundred years later, we know how the vote played out. Tennessee ratified the 19th Amendment, the result of a 72-year effort. What textbooks fail to tell us is what happened to the antis and Pearson after ratification.
Many Southern anti-suffrage activists went on to exercise their right to vote and become politically engaged, often running against the men who voted to ratify the 19th Amendment. They also engaged in organizations including the League of Women Voters and Daughters of the Confederacy. Some joined groups like the Women’s Ku Klux Klan or participated in the Red Scare.
As for Pearson, she continued teaching, writing and speaking out against suffrage until her death in 1944. She refused to ever vote herself, but still found a way to make her voice heard at many elections, as she wrote in her autobiography:
“The Patron of all Monteagle elections for the past (and) until this day (April 20, 1939), nervous and trembling came up to me saying, ‘You ain’t agoing to vote is you — you fit it too long and too hard! Tell us what you want voted and we’ll vote for you!’”
A group of Tennessee antisuffragists at their headquarters during summer 1920 in Nashville’s Hermitage Hotel
TENNESSEE STATE LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES PHOTOS
An illustration by members of the antisuffrage movement.
