by Elaine Weiss
One down. Now the governor.
Chapter 3
The Feminist Peril
JOSEPHINE PEARSON’S NIGHT in the tub had been uncomfortable but her phone calls remarkably fruitful, yielding pledges of help and funding from national and regional antisuffrage coalitions. On Sunday morning, she was reading through the flurry of overnight telegrams delivered to her door when Mrs. George Washington and the Nashville delegation of the Tennessee State Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage arrived at the hotel to greet their president. They were horrified to find her in such a cramped, sweltering room and aghast to learn she’d spent the night in the tub; they whisked her to a much larger, airy, corner room with a pleasant view, never mind the cost. No reason to sacrifice comfort, they assured her, there will be money enough for this fight.
Meanwhile, their able ally Nashville attorney John Jacob Vertrees was at his desk in his summer house in Florida, on the phone with important friends and clients. Josephine considered John Vertrees her mentor and champion. She felt he’d “discovered” her, recognizing her skills and leadership potential, molding her into the proud Anti commander she’d become.
Before he even met her, it was Josephine’s pungent antisuffrage essays, published in various Tennessee newspapers, that caught his attention. Vertrees was a respected attorney, former newspaper publisher, and state Democratic Party leader who represented liquor industry and railroad clients in his lucrative practice. Vertrees and his wife, Virginia, were both staunch opponents of woman suffrage, and they enjoyed reading Josephine’s colorful public diatribes on its many dangers (“modern Eve asks for the forbidden fruit that may give out its essence of deadly poison in the possible disruption of home . . .”) and admired her zealous defense of “the spirit of the woman of the Old South.” The Vertreeses soon began to court her to take an active role in the state’s fledgling antisuffrage movement.
Until 1913 or so, when the Tennessee Equal Franchise Association began to gain some traction, there was no need for an anti–woman suffrage movement in the state: almost everyone was safely against giving women the vote. But when suffragists such as the socially prominent Anne Dudley began to make political and popular inroads, gaining some male friends in government, and when they dared to parade through the streets in yellow-flower-bedecked cars and make speeches from flag-festooned platforms, the Vertreeses woke up to the uncomfortable realization that woman suffrage was becoming socially acceptable, even in Tennessee. They vowed to stop it.
The Vertreeses organized the Tennessee State Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, with Virginia as president and John heading the men’s contingent, bringing his lawyer friends, Nashville businessmen, and Vanderbilt University faculty into the group, while also forging ties to the loose amalgam of antisuffrage societies already established around the country.
Vertrees held strong moral and legal objections to giving women the vote, which he pronounced in his 1916 manifesto, To the Men of Tennessee on Female Suffrage. With the publication of this pamphlet, Vertrees took on the role of philosopher of the state’s Antis. He assembled all the hardy specimens of opposition: women were irrational and not intellectually equal to the responsibilities of suffrage; they were too emotional and sentimental to vote on policy matters; government was based upon force, so only those who must bear arms should be allowed to vote; and suffragists advocated free love and personified loose morals. Extending the reach of his biological claims, he reminded his readers that women’s dual physical handicaps, pregnancy and menses, rendered them unfit for public duties: “A woman’s life is one of frequent and regular periods marked by mental and nervous irritability, when sometimes even her mental equilibrium is disturbed.”
He also added the characteristic southern twist to the standard Anti thesis: if handed the ballot, not only would Tennessee women be torn from hearth and home and plunged into the depravity of politics, but the social order would be irrevocably disrupted, as equal suffrage would nominally place black women on the same political plane as white women. He quoted the “zealous suffragette, Miss Helen Keller,” who in her letter to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, urged all to “advance gladly towards our common heritage of life, liberty, and light, undivided by race or color or creed.” Encouraging this kind of dangerous racial equality would undermine southern society, he thundered.
The region’s social fabric had already been ripped apart fifty years before—first by the Civil War and then by Reconstruction; the racial rules had been shattered, societal relations disordered. Even by 1920, the South had not emotionally recovered from the trauma or reconciled itself to the concept of racial equality. For educated men such as Vertrees, who’d lived through the war and its convulsive aftermath, the threat of black women’s enfranchisement—imposed by the federal government—seemed like a bitter reprise of the disruptions Washington had wrought decades ago.
Beyond all his other arguments, Vertrees framed the suffrage discussion with blunt simplicity: “I do not believe the women of Tennessee want the ballot, but even if they do . . . it is not a question of what women want, but what they ought to have, and . . . it is a question for men alone to determine.”
Vertrees’s attitude wasn’t unusual, and it wasn’t new. Men had always taken for themselves the prerogative to decide for women, unilaterally determining what women should do, prescribing what they must not do, announcing which rights women were “entitled” to have. Men decided what was “best” for women, without their consultation or consent, then wrote laws to codify this judgment. That was the way of the world, learned men liked to say, claiming God had bestowed upon them such authority: one half of humanity held dominion over the other half, by right of a certain shape of genitalia.
Just as American men had once taken it upon themselves to decide whether their wives were their property, now they were called upon to rule on whether it was “best” for women to be granted equal citizenship. In the future this awesome sense of male responsibility would take other forms, involving other issues. Future generations of American women would continue to chafe as men in positions of power presumed to control their bodies, the training of their minds, the choice of their professions, the pursuit of their livelihoods.
Mr. Vertrees kept his eye on Miss Pearson as her letters were printed in the state newspapers and she gained a reputation for feisty advocacy of the Anti point of view. When illness forced Virginia Vertrees to retire from the presidency of the Tennessee Anti organization in early 1917, Pearson was the obvious choice to replace her. The Vertreeses had to convince Pearson to accept the position, but once they did, she jumped into her new role with gusto, taking on the suffragists as the legislature debated a limited woman suffrage bill. Pearson became the public face of the Anti campaign to defeat the 1917 suffrage measure, but Mr. Vertrees was always close behind. “It seemed never necessary for our Anti-Suffrage women to even climb the capitol steps,” Pearson recalled, and Vertrees did not want them to climb those steps, giving her strict instructions to keep the Anti women away from the statehouse. He would handle the lobbying. Josephine shared Vertrees’s disapproval of women lowering themselves into the muck of politics, especially when the honor of Tennessee women was at stake.
The Antis won that fight, thanks in no small part to Mr. Vertrees’s manifesto, which meshed so well with the thinking of many legislators. And they won despite William Jennings Bryan’s big pro-suffrage speech in the Capitol building, which was high on florid oratory but didn’t swing many votes. But by 1919, the situation had changed. John Vertrees was still smarting from that humiliating defeat last year, when the suffrage people bamboozled the Tennessee legislature into giving women some voting rights—not full rights, very limited, but even a little was too much as far as he was concerned. They claimed the time had come, the world had changed, the women had earned it by their war work, all such specious arguments. The legislature hadn’t been manly enough to stand firm; the gov
ernor caved in and signed.
Vertrees flew into court, attempting to nullify the new law, have it ruled unconstitutional because it didn’t provide for women voters to pay a poll tax, as men were required to do. The lower court sided with Vertrees, declaring the law unconstitutional because the state constitution did not provide for woman suffrage and the legislature didn’t have the power to change that. But then the Tennessee Supreme Court slammed him down, reversing the lower court’s decision, holding that the legislature did have the power to enact presidential and municipal suffrage. The suffrage law was amended to include a poll tax for women and was declared valid. Women were at the polls in last fall’s city elections in Nashville; he saw them—white and black women. John Vertrees wasn’t going to let that happen again.
So this Sunday morning he was on the phone with his colleagues in the American Constitutional League, the men’s legal arm of the Antis, who were eager to help him fend off ratification in Tennessee. The Constitutional League lawyers were already contesting several of the completed state ratifications—in Ohio, West Virginia, and a few others—claiming the ratifications were illegitimate. Should the Tennessee legislature take up ratification, a contingent of league lawyers, armed with motions and maneuvers, was ready to take the train to Nashville as soon as Vertrees gave the signal.
Vertrees also rang up his longtime legal clients in the railroad and liquor industries. They had their own reasons for helping him fight suffrage. The whiskey boys were hoping that damned Eighteenth Amendment, Prohibition, would not be enforced; that was certainly the plan in Tennessee. But if women were allowed to get mixed up in voting and politics, especially the strident “dry” ladies, they might insist on enforcement.
The textile manufacturers didn’t want women having a say in government, especially those labor reform types; after labor reform, they’d move swiftly to child labor laws and wage and health protections for women workers: it could get expensive. And the railroads were dead set against women voting. The Louisville and Nashville and the other railroad lines had bought the Tennessee legislature long ago, keeping it in its pocket with free passes and cushy jobs, with the understanding that the legislature would be friendly to railroad interests and take a hands-off approach to railroad regulation. This comfortable equation could be easily upset by unpredictable women voters.
Anti activists such as Vertrees and Pearson would have to admit that their work had grown more difficult in the past few years. The swing toward public acceptance of women’s right to vote, once so slow and hesitant, with successful surges punctuated by reversals, had lately speeded up. There were no public opinion polls to statistically chart the attitudinal shifts that create pressure for political change, but there’d been some signals: encouraging for the Suffs, dismaying for the Antis.
Since 1910, eleven states had granted women full suffrage, though the Antis had managed to temper those victories with a long string of suffrage campaign defeats. (Antis managed to thwart suffrage in Oregon five times before it passed in 1912.) But win or lose, the state referenda proved that millions of American men approved of granting women the vote. Also telling was that in some contests—notably Michigan in 1912—only outright electoral fraud had kept the suffragists from winning, a sure sign that their success was scaring the political powers and stimulating concerted opposition. Congress and other elected officials took notice. The Antis were also forced to take notice and began to seriously organize around 1911, after California had granted its women the vote. They kept suffrage at bay in New York in 1915, but it triumphed in 1917, a pivotal loss that spurred new levels of effort.
Since America’s entry into the world war in 1917—when American women took on new, unorthodox roles—the pace of change had accelerated: between 1917 and 1920, eleven more states (including Tennessee) had given their women some type of voting rights, perhaps restricted but still significant. Yet the Antis were in no way discouraged: they’d scored impressive victories by halting ratification in eight states already, stymied legislative action in Vermont and Connecticut, and had several more rejections—North Carolina, Florida, and Tennessee—within sight. They were ready for the challenge in Nashville.
On the seventh floor of the Hermitage, Josephine Pearson and her Nashville Anti colleague, Queenie (Mrs. George) Washington were writing to-do lists. Pearson had already reserved the mezzanine and first-floor spaces for the Antis’ headquarters and reception rooms. They must arrange rallies and receptions, dinners and teas—social functions were very important, Mrs. Washington insisted. The top officers of the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage would be coming to Nashville, as would the leaders of the Southern Women’s Rejection League, bringing troops of volunteers. Every Anti in Tennessee must be mobilized. Orders must be placed for banners, Confederate flags, and the Anti emblem, red roses, from the best florists.
Two former NAWSA suffrage officers turned Antis, Kate Gordon and Laura Clay, promised to come, bringing their inside knowledge of Mrs. Catt and the suffragists’ playbook, as well as their own powerful arguments against the federal amendment. They had proved so helpful in stopping ratification in the other southern states. Miss Charlotte Rowe, the Antis’ national field secretary and fiery orator, was already on her way to Nashville. Pearson hoped that perhaps Ida Tarbell, the famous muckraking journalist who wrote wonderful essays opposing woman suffrage, might be persuaded to make a surprise appearance, too.
Pearson saw the looming fight in Nashville as a chance to display her leadership talents, show them what a true small-town daughter of Tennessee could do. The world was going to hell in a handbasket, Pearson believed, and she felt compelled to sound the alarm. The world war had changed things for women, and not for the better, she was convinced. Women had borne the traditional wartime burdens, as sorrowful mothers and bereft widows, and they’d rolled bandages and knitted socks for the boys over there, but in this last war they’d also been unsexed, thrust into the brutish man’s world in the name of patriotism. They’d been called upon to take up men’s work, in the coal mines, in the fields, in the munitions plants, in the streetcars and elevators. They’d donned men’s clothes and been paid men’s salaries, and the worst part of it was—the women seemed to enjoy it! Some of them wanted to stay, even now, after the war, after the men had come home. They’d rather toil in a truck or a factory than tend the hearth, and that’s how feminism was going to destroy civilization, she was certain.
These “new women” and “modern women” weren’t content with the sacred tasks of helpmate and motherhood; they lusted for things not meant for them, and it frightened her. Look at the suffragists right here in Nashville, especially the young ones, in short, clinging skirts, their legs almost bare, their corsets thrown away, flaunting their almost naked bodies on the street, their hair bobbed short and mannish, a cigarette in their painted fingers. It was disgusting and it was dangerous. The ranks of the suffragists were teeming with, as she liked to call them, “short-haired women and long-haired men,” the kinds of moral degenerates who could hasten America’s downfall. How much worse it would be if they were allowed to plunge into the muck of politics, too. Pearson was an educator of women; she’d devoted most of her life to shaping their minds and, teaching by example, their morals. When she was called to answer to her God, she wanted to be able to say that she’d done all in her power to prevent American women from tumbling down the road to disaster.
Huddled around a table in her Hermitage room, Pearson, Mrs. Washington, and the other planners all agreed on what to emphasize: the dangers the Nineteenth Amendment posed to the American family, white supremacy, states’ rights, and cherished southern traditions. They would focus on making Mrs. Catt the living symbol of all that was alien and evil, ungodly and un-American, Bolshevik, and detestably Yankee.
Chapter 4
The Woman Question
MOTHER PEARSON WAS RIGHT about one thing: abolition and woman suffrage did sprout from the same root, nou
rished by the rich loam of early-nineteenth-century religious zeal and moral reform. She taught her daughter, Josephine, that the causes were intertwined, and both were dangerous.
The early advocates of legal rights for American women all began their activist careers as fervent abolitionists. They believed slavery was a grievous wrong and they were obliged to confront and stop it. But even as they devoted their intellect and energy to this urgent moral campaign, often placing themselves in physical danger to do so, they encountered a striking hypocrisy among their male colleagues so devoted to “universal liberty.”
“Many a man who advocated equality most eloquently for a Southern plantation could not tolerate it at his own fireside,” was the way they described it.
In the 1830s and 1840s, the South Carolinian Grimké sisters left their slaveholding home and risked their lives to speak out publicly against the evils of the slavery system, awakening the conscience of large audiences in the North with their tongues and their pens. As they drew greater numbers to their lectures, both women and men filling the seats, the Grimkés found themselves vilified by distinguished northern clergymen and other high-minded abolitionists—not for their antislavery sentiments, but for their willingness to defy church teachings and speak in public. The clergy denounced the sisters for trespassing out of “women’s sphere” of home and hearth and spearheading these “promiscuous gatherings.” The sisters gave sharp reply to the men of the cloth and kept on speaking out.
Lucretia Mott, a devout Quaker, bore eloquent witness against slavery in her Philadelphia meetinghouse and in the national American Anti-Slavery Society, where she became a leader of the movement beginning in the early 1830s. Susan B. Anthony began as a professional organizer for the American Anti-Slavery Society; the sweet-voiced Lucy Stone was in high demand as a gifted abolitionist speaker; and Elizabeth Cady, already sympathetic to the abolitionist cause, also married into the movement.
