Introducing: The Wrong Side of History - The Women Who Fought Against the Vote

Speaker A: Hey, everyone, this is Jay, the producer for Secret Leaders. And as Dan, Chris and I have all gone on to do different things, I have been making a show that I think you're gonna like. It's called Wrong side of History. And it's all about helping you understand history's bad guys in the way they understood themselves. I'm gonna explain the worldview of the people who ended up on the wrong side of history from their perspective so you understand what they feared and what they valued and why it all made sense to them. In this season, we're talking about one of the strangest movements in modern political history, the women who fought against getting the vote and why they thought that getting the vote would be a disaster for women, children in the nation. And if that is hard to believe and kind of doesn't make any sense, let me explain. So I'm going to play you the first episode and if you like it, follow Wrong side of History wherever you're listening now. All right, let's get into it. The anti suffragists. For decades, they stood in the way of progress. These people, most of them women, did everything they could to stop themselves and other women from getting the vote. Were they fooled? Were they coerced? Were they self hating? Maybe they just couldn't even imagine a world with rights. Over the next couple of episodes, we're going to dive into the worldview of the American anti suffragists. What were they really fighting against? What were they really fighting for? And how did they understand the world? Hello and welcome to the Wrong side of History. I'm Jay Singleton and this is a show where I help you understand some of history's bad guys in the way that they understood themselves, to actually understand what they feared, what they valued, and sometimes discover how things might have made sense from their perspective. No one thinks that they're the bad guy. Nobody wakes up one day and says, today I'll be on the wrong side of history. And so, uh, here's the question. If no one thinks that they're the bad guy, how do well meaning and intelligent people end up there? If you think history is often told too simply, with clear heroes and villains. If you've ever wondered how people could genuinely see the world so differently, then this is for you. Through this show, I want to give you the opportunity to try on a new perspective, to see things from the perspective of people who history has so resoundingly rejected as backwards. But more than anything, this show is a challenge. It's an experiment and radical empath over the next few episodes, I want to tell you about the women who opposed the women's suffrage movement in America. First, I want to help you understand what they feared. That is why they thought the vote would be a disaster. And then I want to help you understand why they thought they had so little to gain by getting the vote. But before all that, I need to tell you three things from the outset that might be pretty hard to swallow, and frankly, you'd have every reason to be suspicious of, but go with me. Women got the vote in America in 1920, and up until that point, suffrage was never popular with the majority of women. Two, for many years, men were more progressive on it than women. And three, up until 1916, there were more women recorded as actively being organized against getting the vote than there were in favor of it. These women were called the antis. And if all of this sounds inconceivable, I think it makes a little bit more sense. If you can see the world the way they did. You see, for them, the vote was about so much more than casting a ballot. It was a symbol of a wider rearrangement. Their role in a new republic, the status of women in society, the role of government in private life, religion, tradition, even capitalism and socialism. These women who opposed the vote, the antis, they genuinely thought that they had very little to gain and everything to lose, that defending the country against the vote was the best thing that they could do for women, children, and the nation. And by the 1900s, with the suffragist movement becoming more successful, they felt that they could no longer ignore it. M. But what were they so afraid of? I want to start with a core concept that helped shape the way the antis saw getting the vote. And this doesn't just tell you what they were afraid of, but it also tells you what they sought to protect. And that is the ideology of separate spheres, or what many people would call today gender roles. I think you might already have an idea in your head about what gender roles are, but let me just lay it out for you, and then we'll go into the elements that this worldview is based on, because it's not what you think. Because to the people who are living it and to the people who support it, it's not a hierarchy, and it's not really about keeping people out of certain roles. M. So in the 19th and early 20th century Anglo America, many people believed that men, women, and society were better off if each sex had its own sphere of authority. Men were supposed to run the public sphere of law, business, and government. Women were supposed to run the private sphere of home, children and community. Men and women were said to have different natural aptitudes. Men as providers and protectors, women as nurturers and moral guardians. And in return, men were expected to show women a certain level of charity, patronage, deference. And the supporters of separate spheres would consider these things to be the special privileges that women were entitled to and in need of. But overall, separate spheres ideology was about three morality, protection and specialization. So first, I want to help you understand the moral argument. What is the moral argument for separating people's roles in the world based on sexual? What could be the moral argument for maintaining a social and legal arrangement that kept men and women's roles in society distinct? What did the Antis see? Now, I can imagine, as you hear about gender roles with your modern ears, it can validate how unequal this time was, how unjust it was that women were expected to stay in the private sphere of home, children and community, while it was expected men could go out into business and government, shaping the world, getting all the wealth and the status, and then giving women the crumbs of chivalry and patronage and telling them that these were special privileges, when really it was because of their dependence that they would even need such special privileges. And I understand that it would be seen that way at this time. But to be clear, for the women who supported separate spheres, that is not how they felt about it. In fact, many of them thought that the private sphere was actually the better deal and the higher calling. Because if your sense of injustice comes from the impression that women are being excluded from the positions of power and influence, the Antis would disagree. They didn't see themselves as powerless. But why? Well, in our modern context, it can be hard to separate these two things, but these women very much saw themselves and women in general as political actors, just not partisan ones. They didn't equate not casting a ballot to mean political powerlessness. In fact, politics without party was a key idea to how the Antis saw women's unique power. This informal influence is a big part of the reason that the Antis felt that they didn't need a formal vote. They thought that they had a different kind of power. But we'll talk more about that in a later episode. You see, morality played a huge part in why the Antis didn't want to be made to be partisans by being given the vote. I'm going to read a quote from a reverend of the time. It's Reverend F.P. lodchitz and he's giving a sermon in a Boston cathedral. He says, man as natural protector. Father Lawgiver warns against unsexing women and dragging her into public life. Woman's charm and influence come from living in a sphere of heart. And this is the line I want you to remember. Women's charm and influence come from living in a sphere apart. Now, the idea of natural roles, as the Reverend says, might feel really restrictive and overly deterministic. It's the complete opposite of the liberal and individualist world that many of us have been raised in. But the anti see men and women as being born with certain powers and aptitudes that come with corresponding duties and responsibilities. They see it as in women's nature or shaped by God and by their work in the home to be purer, more selfless, and less corrupted by money and ambition. They see women's role as having a higher moral status and a special kind of authority. And all of this meant that women were supposed to stand apart from the crudeness of public life. But why? It's so that they could serve as the moral guardians of the nation, raising the next generation, setting the moral standards. But the suffragists, the people who supported getting the vote, they did have a counterargument to this. They'd say, you know, if you think women are so much better morally, why wouldn't you want more of that good influence in party politics? Great question. Valid point. Well, in response, the antis thought that entering politics as a partisan would actually undermine their moral influence in the world in two ways. First, there was the risk of being dragged into the mud that men were in. They worried that by entering party politics, they would become just as crude and competitive as men. All of the social ills that the suffragists and the antis would ascribe to men would appear in women just the same. So in order to keep women from being corrupted by party politics, they thought that women should stay out of the partisan world. The other way that they thought that getting the vote would undermine women's influence in the world is that it would undermine their greatest power. Moral persuasion. Many of the suffragists also believe that women were morally superior to men. But in their view, that meant that if women joined the political arena, they would have the opportunity to civilize it, which on one level, makes perfect sense. If an institution is filled with different kinds of people, won't that institution change? If the voting public of the nation includes more moral people, won't that change the government in the right direction? Well, the antis Thought that the system really couldn't be changed from the inside, only contained and managed from the outside. To them, the idea of trying to clean up party politics by entering it would be like trying to clean up a pool of mud by entering it. It was just seen as an inherently dirty game that would compromise anyone who tried to succeed in it. It was thought of as a necessary evil, one that needed to be restrained. And uh, so maybe you could think of it as something like the separation between church and state. The ideology of separate spheres reinforced women's moral authority through a sort of mutually beneficial separation of powers. One has the power of the secular world and the other has the power of, of the soul. By separating, the church can maintain its uncompromised moral status and it can serve as the moral standard to aspire to without having to make the real world. Compromises inherent in governing and the state can be more practical. The idea was that women were both naturally higher moral beings and corruptible by involvement in the public sphere, just as the church is corruptible. And they thought that the best way to protect the country from moral corruption was to protect women from moral corruption so that they could stand apart as a non partisan example. The fear was that if all women joined the partisan fight, they would lose the weight of that unbiased advocacy. They would simply be treated as another voter instantly distrusted by half of the government. Basically, if everyone's playing the game, who will be the referee? I think it's important to note that the antis and the suffragists don't disagree about everything. And this might be more common than we typically acknowledge. Even when groups have dramatically different visions of the best path forward, they often recognize the same problems. You might think of the women who oppose the vote as conservative, and in some ways they were. They were trying to preserve an institution and a value system that they thought was best. But what did they think it was best for? A lot of the women leading the anti suffrage movement were reformers in their own right. They shared many of the same goals as the suffragists. They just disagreed about the method of achieving them. Here are some examples of these reformist anti suffragists. One is Josephine Dodge in New York. She was building childcare for working mothers. She founded a day nursery. She pushed a whole network of day nursery reforms. There's Kate Wells. She was on the board of education in Massachusetts. She advocated for public health reforms and civic reforms. There's Ida Tarbell, one of the most impactful investigative journalists maybe of all time. Her Investigations helped break apart the Standard Oil monopoly with Rockefeller. And so all of these reformists, politically engaged, sometimes careerist women, also opposed women's suffrage because their argument wasn't that women shouldn't shape society, they were arguing that they already do through institutions, through moral authority, through non partisan civic power. And getting the vote will put them into the mud of party politics and weaken their ability to actually get those reforms. Think about it this way. You might trust a charity more than a for profit business. There's something about knowing that somebody has no team to root for, nothing personal to gain, no profile to raise that just makes you trust them more. And if getting the vote means diminishing the value of your opinion, well for some people that just wasn't worth it. And it was this impartiality and the pure intention of women's politics that the antis were afraid of losing. I think the charity idea is a really good example because you might want to do good in the world and be faced with this conflict that on one hand, if you do it as a charity, you spend the entire time sort of begging and asking and putting your hand out and, and trying to persuade people with resources to support you. And you might be tempted if you're a charity to be for profit. Say, you know, I don't want to beg people anymore. I don't want to have to ask the public. I don't want to have to justify everything on somebody else's terms. Why don't I just make profit and then I can do what I want and I can do good on my own terms. But there's a cost to going for profit that is the cost of having the uncompromised mission. And there are benefits to going for profit. And that is you have money, you can do what you want Anyways. I was just recording. I thought of that as a good analogy of why the soft power of moral authority might be desired over the hard power of the vote. So the idea that women could play a moralizing and civilizing influence in the world was a strong belief on both sides. But the antis thought that their influence was best kept separate. Having the vote would decrease their power as women rather than increase it. But this whole morality thing about women not being corrupted by the public sphere and keeping the power of separate moral influence was only one part of the separate sphere's ideology. Another part was the sense of protection that this arrangement of gender roles gave women. In Jane Camille's book Women Against Women, she says something that I think a lot of people will Struggle to hear. She says women cannot have equal rights and retain special privileges. This idea is best illustrated by Josephine Dodge again when she says she considered the vote to be the bartering of birthright for the mess of pottage. Now I'm going to pause here because if you're listening to this in 2026, you might be thinking, excuse me, what special privileges did a woman have in the early 1900s America? And this is where that radical empathy I spoke about at the beginning is going to need to kick in. The question isn't about your ideals and values. It's about understanding the world as these women saw it, why they so energetically fought to protect this arrangement of separate spheres. Okay, so what were these women thinking? It's early 1900s America. Women couldn't vote, right? They could rarely get a divorce. There weren't many jobs, and the ones that did exist were often low status and low pay. They couldn't make contracts or open bank accounts or control property. In so many ways, they were the dependents of the males in their lives. But with all of that, many of these women, the majority, considered themselves to be in the position of protection and privilege. How could anyone think that? In short, they were thinking independence is a little overrated. They would say that for all its restrictions, maybe the norm of men being socially and legally responsible to their wives and children is actually better for women than everyone only being socially and legally responsible for themselves. Now let me put this for you into the practical terms in the way that the anti might have been thinking about it. So let's take the coverture laws. These are the code of laws in America inherited from Britain. And in this old legal system it says that a married couple was treated as one legal entity and that was basically under the name of the husband. Now, of course all of that sounds pretty restrictive, but as Susan B. Anthony, godmother of suffrage herself, said in a history of women's suffrage, married women almost universally were opposed to laws that would give them control of their property. Okay, Jay, you're telling me that not only did women not want the vote, but they also didn't want to control their own property? What are you talking about? Now, Susan B. Anthony, like many of us, would chalk this up to women being manipulated or just not being able to imagine a world in which they would have individual property rights. But what if there were some other reasons that you wouldn't be all that bothered about changing the laws so you could control your own property? For starters, you probably didn't own any property. It's like when a politician goes on some campaign to lower inheritance and capital gains tax, and you're like, yeah, that sounds great, But a, uh, 2% tax reduction on zero is still zero. To many women, the idea of property rights was a class issue that had nothing to do with them. And if you happen to be a woman with family assets, there were already workarounds. You'd probably have a dower and a trust that would protect your ownership and family wealth from a reckless or abusive husband. And for most people, that would be enough. Because the idea of pushing for anything more than this sort of patchwork arrangement, it would feel threatening to the marriage. Like asking your partner for a prenup. All of a sudden they definitely have some questions about your commitment to the relationship. And the last reason that things like property rights just weren't a huge issue for the anti suffragists at the time was that ownership has its perks, but so does not owning things. It's kind of like when renting an apartment. Sure, there are a lot of things you won't be able to do around the house, and you can be at the whims of rent hikes, but also, if something goes wrong, you've got a little protection. It's not all your problem. If a boiler goes out, you can call the landlord. If there's a leak in your roof, you can call the landlord. If there's a nest of raccoons in your attic, you can, uh. Look, the point is, ownership comes with liabilities. And if, and this is crucial, if you think your husband is going to be decent and reliable, it might not feel like a problem that you aren't the owner because you trust him and you trust him to take responsibility for it. Plus, by the 1900s, a lot of places in America were moving away from these kinds of coverture laws. And I say all this to say that if you want to understand why these women, why the antis were so defensive of an arrangement in which they couldn't own property and they couldn't vote and there were very few good job opportunities for them. It's because while all of that might make us, uh, feel insecure and vulnerable today, they didn't feel vulnerable. They felt that there were workarounds and all of those things, including wage laws and divorce, they felt were already addressable without getting the vote. And so when the suffragists claim that the vote is needed so that women can secure their rights, it just doesn't resonate. But okay, I said these women consider themselves to be protected and privileged Protection from legal liabilities can't be everything. Well, to the antis, the arrangement of separate spheres had a few other benefits that they were reluctant to risk letting go, and those were the sex based exemptions. And so in the American Northeast, there were these things like tax exemptions for women, even exemptions for arrests for certain crimes. But the main one was that they were exempt from conscription to state service. That means military service, police conscription, and worst of all, jury duty. I've never been on jury duty, so I don't know how bad it is. But to the antis, not having to serve in the jury is almost worth not having the vote all on its own. So it must be pretty bad. Anyways, I want to tie this back to the vote because when I was researching this, I remember thinking, how much of this has nothing to do with voting? Actually, voting is hardly even mentioned. Sure they think that women are positive moral influence. Sure they want to keep their exemptions and their legal liabilities. But why can't you have all of those things and also have the vote? Why limit your options? And the reason is because the vote is seen as a symbol of a wider rearrangement in society. And, and if the argument is that there are no natural differences in aptitude or suitability or duties based on sex, then on what grounds can any legal or social sex based distinctions be made? To take the vote would be the beginning of eroding all sex based distinctions. And then what would be next? Women sent to the front lines. Here's a quote from Frederick Douglass. He says, American freedom depends on the ballot box, the jury box and the cartridge box. The advocates of women's suffrage demand complete use of the first, partial use of the second, the jury box, and entire exemption from the third, the cartridge box. On, um, which both of the others rely for their existence. And they do this in the name of equal rights to all and special privileges to none. The request would be ludicrous if it were not dangerous. End quote. Mind you, this is Frederick Douglass, the slave abolitionist and, uh, one of the first supporters of Elizabeth Cady Stanton from 1848. He was a strong supporter of suffrage, but he was saying that full inclusion has to mean no exemptions. The argument that the antis were responding to was that not having the vote would mean not being called up for fire service or military service, or worse, jury duty. And put in that extreme way, it was incredibly persuasive to the women who didn't want to go that far. Because if getting the vote is an all or nothing decision about Being seen as indistinguishable from men, legally and socially, then for many women, it just wasn't worth it. But it wasn't just their moral status and their exemptions that they were afraid of losing. They also wanted to protect something. The family as the basic unit of society. So while all this talk about easier divorce, separate bank accounts, separate property, separate votes, sounds like liberation to the suffragists, to the antis, it sounded like more divorce, more individualism, more conflict, women being conscripted. And in the minds of the antis, it all started with the slippery slope of putting women into partisan politics. And as with all slippery slope arguments, it's this sense of foreboding that once you start on this path, there's really no logical stopping point. And to the antis, they saw the end of that slippery slope as catastrophic. They believed that the family unit was the absolute bedrock of the nation, and a threat to that was existential. And core to that unity and stability is the idea that men and women need each other. I mean, really need each other. Not just that they choose to be together, but are interdependent. And so they have socially and legally reinforced duties to each other. And the thought of untangling that interdependent and reinforced sense of duty felt like a very serious risk. And to the antis, the societal and legal expectation for interdependence and duty was a cultural advancement that favored women. Because while the suffragists would claim all the benefits of individualism, the antis were worried about what would happen if men no longer felt obliged to be chivalrous. Who would that help? Would all of this result in women's liberation or them all having the same burdens as ever, but now with no expectation of men to aid them? Look, many of the suffragists would hear those worries from the antis and say, I understand, and you're totally right. Simply eroding all the societal and legally enforced duties between men and women won't solve all of women's grievances and might even cause some additional ones. But a larger societal transformation is required to achieve true equality. And this is just the first step. And the antis would say, I'm not sure that I want a larger societal transformation, and I'm not sure that we will ever make the next step. What if we just end up with more responsibility and less support? So that's the first two elements of the separate spheres, Morality and protection. The antis feel that their moral authority and separateness is the most effective tool they have for shaping society. They feel that women are better off maintaining the social contract with men because for all its compromises, they think that they'd be worse off without it. In the next episode, we're going to talk about the last part of the separate spheres. Specialization. The belief in this gave women a sense of status and purpose that relied on their roles being distinct and them being seen as uniquely suited to fulfill them. But we're going to take a closer look at, uh, why they felt that this work was so important, why they felt that it was so crucial to protect the private sphere and their place within it. And this is a big one because it stems from a new and uniquely American framework. I'm going to tell you about an idea called Republican Motherhood and how this idea shaped the political identity of many American women and their anxieties about what would happen if it disappeared. We'll talk about all of that in the next episode, but right now, I want to do a final recap of the key ideas in this episode. To the antisocial, the vote is not just about casting a ballot. It's not a matter of personal choice whether another woman votes or not. Whether women can vote is a statement about their position in the nation as a class. To the antis, voting is not the same thing as being involved in politics. It wasn't the same thing as being civically engaged in shaping your society. They believed that they were already doing that. They thought to accept the vote and enter into party politics would lead to their own moral corruption. And even if it didn't, they would lose the power of their moral authority. All the same, I make this show because I've always found something unsatisfying about seeing history as simple heroes and villains, or seeing all the good in the world on one side of a political divide and all the ills on the other side. I don't know where I heard this, but it resonated with me. It's an idea. If you can't communicate someone else's worldview to them, with them nodding along and agreeing with you, you don't understand them. And no meaningful conversation can happen between people who don't feel understood. When people don't recognize how you describe them and their perspective, they don't feel like you're talking to them. They feel like you're talking about them. And so hopefully, this show helps us practice the muscle of understanding people that we might disagree with as they do themselves. We might still disagree, but we'll disagree better. And if that sounds like something you want to support. Please rate the show five stars and share this episode with somebody. Every bit counts. All the social links will be in the description and sources are on substack. Thank you for listening to the Wrong side of History.