by Elaine Weiss
Giving a modern spin to the trusty “women’s proper sphere” arguments, Rowe often belittled Mrs. Catt and other suffragists for asserting that the work of twentieth-century women had moved out of the home into the factory and office. “Some women have indeed permitted their work to go out of the home,” Rowe retorted, “as our foundling asylums, our reformatories, and our prisons testify.”
Rowe took the suffragists’ jocular, condescending “Home, Heaven, and Mother crowd” depiction of socially conservative Antis and flipped it to her advantage. Even though she wasn’t a homemaker, wasn’t a mother, and wasn’t a pious churchgoer, she embraced the epithet, wearing it like a badge of honor. “In spite of this aspersion; in spite of this contempt; in spite of this everlasting ridicule to which we are subjected, I am not ashamed . . . ,” she proclaimed proudly. “We have been called the enemies of womanhood; they say we are opposing woman’s development. They say: you are trying to crush them in the four walls called home. . . .
“But if you everlastingly preach this doctrine that home is a small, narrow place,” she scolded, “if you say to your women in your homes: ‘Do not be satisfied with this existence of your grandmother; do not be content to be a woman with four or five children; come on out and be free; come out and have a pay envelope, come on out and be independent economically, politically, and socially’—and that is what the feminists are demanding—if you do this thing, you will prostitute your civilization, you are a vandal, and you have stripped from life its most beautiful thing. . . .” Rowe’s guilt-tripping harangue seems timeless; every modern working mother has heard a version.
Keeping women at home was more vital to national security than any battleship, the Antis believed. A dramatic course correction was needed, lest the next generation be lost: “If working girls and women in colleges would study cooking and sewing and domestic science and hygiene,” Rowe insisted, “and the fine and beautiful art of home making, it would be much better for them and better for the country than if they spend their time parading up the avenue of a crowded city and praying that they may some day, somehow, become policemen or boiler makers side by side with men.”
It was folly for women to aspire to the world of men, the Antis preached, and it was not women’s minds or muscles that needed cultivation, but her heart and her spiritual attributes; this was what made women special. This was a trusty rationale often used by men to keep women in their place, but Anti women were willing to employ it, too. American and European women confronted this attitude in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as they attempted to enter the halls of higher education. They had to beat back the accepted medical wisdom that strenuous thinking harmed a woman’s reproductive organs, draining the lifeblood from her ovaries to her brain, endangering not just civilization, but the human species.
The Antis’ “biology is destiny” trope wasn’t new in 1920, but it took on a different ring in the aftermath of the recent world war, when women had been forced—or had the opportunity—to assume such profoundly different, hitherto masculine, working roles. To some, the Antis’ warnings sounded dated, but to sympathizers they seemed timely, even prescient, anticipating the arrival of shattering social change: the possible advent of not only the career woman, but the sex-crazed kid sister of the suffragist, the Flapper Girl.
Rowe’s résumé claimed to include a stint as a newspaper writer, and she was sometimes identified as a lawyer, but the paper evidence of these professions was thin. In the first years of her Anti career, she led a group called Wage Earning Women Opposed to Suffrage, allowing her to fashion arguments that the vote, and other “feminist socialist” ideas such as a minimum wage, health insurance, and an eight-hour day, would be detrimental to working women. She still stood by that position: working women “are neither whiners nor whimperers,” she’d insisted just a year ago, in spring 1919, in opposing labor reform legislation advocated by Mary Garrett Hay and New York State suffragists.
Suffragists howled, pointing out that Rowe’s wage earning was derived exclusively from her Anti staff positions, and she had no right to speak for the factory or sweatshop women who needed labor protections. She sounded more like the voice of exploitive manufacturers than a representative of working women, the Suffs protested, and they thought they knew who was paying for her supper but could never prove it. The financial backing of the Antis was always hard to trace. No matter: once the vote was “forced” upon New York women in the 1917 referendum, Rowe changed her affiliation to the oddly oxymoronic Women Voters Anti-Suffrage Party, whose mission was to use the unwanted vote to punish pro-suffrage politicians at the polls.
But Rowe really was, in many respects, the model of modern American womanhood: independent, self-supporting, opinionated, accomplished. She was out in the world making a very public career, not sitting at home making and caring for babies. She spoke her mind, without false modesty or apology, to both rapt audiences and raucous crowds, to governors and legislators, and to any reporter within earshot. She was famous for sarcastically cutting to ribbons those who disagreed with her. Suffragists likened her tongue to a rasp. She delighted in calling them moral degenerates, and she ridiculed male suffrage supporters as emasculated, effeminate “Gwendolyns” or “Mabels.” Real men and women, she insisted, would have no patience with equal suffrage, that precursor to a perverse mix-up of gender identities and roles. Suffrage would bring about a “sex war” between husbands and wives as traditional roles were distorted and arguments about politics tore couples apart.
Rowe was what could fairly be called an Anti militant, wielding incendiary words and lobbing explosive accusations into the public square. Like Mrs. Pankhurst, and more than Alice Paul, she relished the power of shock to mold public opinion. Even though public opinion had slowly, in the last few years, swung against her, with more Americans accepting woman suffrage as either right or inevitable, her apocalyptic visions of civilization on the brink of collapse—should the federal amendment be forced upon the nation—still sold well in certain circles. Especially in these postwar days, when anarchy seemed to be in triumphant ascent around the world.
This was Rowe’s timely message: Woman suffrage was an insidious front for feminism and socialism, the door through which bolshevism could invade America: “The ultimate aim of suffrage is feminism,” she insisted. “Feminism is intimately and inextricably allied with Socialism and belongs to the same distorted school of thought, the same ungodly dream of irresponsible power. Feminism is not an imaginary evil; it is a definite and logical doctrine, promulgated by the enemies of Christian civilization.” The popular Anti theme of “the Red Behind the Yellow,” bolshevism lurking under the skirts of suffragism, was echoed in all of Rowe’s talks and writings. The letterhead of the national Anti association’s stationery, and the masthead of their journal, The Woman Patriot, which Rowe coedited, spelled out their civil creed: “For Home and National Defense, Against Woman Suffrage, Feminism and Socialism.”
Anarchists’ bombs were exploding in the streets of American cities, in the home of U.S. Attorney General Palmer, and in the mailboxes of mayors, bankers, and judges. Was it a coincidence that such appalling events were occurring just as more states capitulated to the suffragists and the federal amendment reared its ugly head? No, it was not! Rowe insisted. Or that Great Britain, having succumbed to its suffragists’ shrill demands, was now in a state of economic ruin, social turmoil, and national spiritual depression? (Never mind the ravages of the war.) Or that the first thing the Bolsheviks did when they came to power in Russia was to give their women the vote? No, it was not simple coincidence! Rowe claimed. And there was frightening historical precedent as well: “Unless America prevents itself from getting on the [suffrage] band wagon,” she warned, “we will surely pay the bitter price of destruction which befell feminist-ridden Rome and feminist-ridden Greece.”
If Rowe’s reasoning often skipped a logical beat, she was so adept at spinning such spellbindin
g scenarios that for her eager audiences, all such quibbles melted away. Suffragists refused to debate her; Carrie Catt and, before her, Anna Shaw ignored her challenges. They didn’t want to give Rowe an elevated platform on which to perform her sleight-of-hand reasoning, and they didn’t want to give her any more publicity; it was enough that they had to contend with her at legislative hearings and joust with her in the press. Shaw used to snidely say that the Antis and their arguments, particularly Rowe’s, were like jellyfish: no head, no heart, just a quivering mass of emotion, fears, and prejudices. Squishy, hard to handle, and venomous.
Rowe was proud to consider herself a kindred spirit of the famous muckraking journalist Ida Tarbell, whose open antagonism toward women’s enfranchisement seemed so paradoxical and yet all the more potent for the contradiction. Tarbell was the epitome of the educated, independent career woman: reared in a liberal home where woman suffrage pioneers were welcome dinner guests; a college-educated woman who’d lived in Paris, studied at the Sorbonne, and made her own living as a correspondent for the top magazines. She was a forceful writer and fearless investigator who made her name by exposing the machinations of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil monopoly in a blistering series of articles for McClure’s magazine. Along with Lincoln Steffens and Upton Sinclair, she practiced a new type of deeply probing and powerful investigative journalism, and her pen could bring captains of industry to their knees. Her pen could also bring Suffs to their wits’ end, so incongruent seemed Tarbell’s writings about women’s societal role with the spirit of her own life.
In articles, speeches, and books, such as The Business of Being a Woman and The Ways of Woman, Tarbell railed against the feminist worldview of equality: “The idea that there is a kind of inequality for a woman in minding her own business and letting man do the same, comes from our confused and rather stupid notion of the meaning of equality,” she maintained. “Insisting that women do the same things that men do, may make the two exteriorly more alike—it does not make them more equal. Men and women are widely apart in functions and in possibilities. They cannot be made equal by exterior devices like trousers, ballots, the study of Greek.”
Here was a woman who’d proven her intellect and nerve, risen to the highest levels of the male-dominated profession of journalism, and won the admiration of men such as Theodore Roosevelt, advising other women that they couldn’t—or shouldn’t—make their way into the wider world. Stay at home, she warned them, for your own happiness and for the sake of society. It was the old “woman’s sphere” concept, the backbone of the Anti stand, spoken by one of the most famous and respected journalists in America.
“Women have a business assigned by nature and society which is of more importance than public life,” she told her readers and audiences. That natural assignment was to find a mate, build a nest, nurture a family: all the things Ida Minerva Tarbell had not done in her life. Was she simply being a hypocrite, or did she so regret her life choices that she felt it her duty to warn other women away from that path?
Suffragists shook their heads. Anna Shaw and Carrie Catt made many attempts to convince Tarbell to use her prodigious talents for the good of her American sisters, for the suffrage cause; she repeatedly refused. It became rather awkward when Tarbell, Catt, and Shaw were all appointed by President Wilson to the Woman’s Committee of the Council of National Defense during the war; sitting around a conference table in Washington, discussing women’s enhanced wartime roles, was painful for Tarbell. Jane Addams expressed her disgust with Tarbell’s stance: “There is some limitation to Ida Tarbell’s mind.” The Antis simply rejoiced; they took Tarbell at her word and welcomed her into their fold.
Charlotte Rowe was also delighted to frequently share the stage at Anti events with another unlikely ally, the women’s education champion Annie Nathan Meyer. As a young woman in the 1880s, Meyer wanted a college education and was frustrated by the only option available to her in New York City, the “collegiate course for women” at Columbia University, a watered-down curriculum intended to produce clever wives for the city’s elite men. Meyer hopped on her bicycle—she was one of the first women in New York to dare to cycle in public—knocking on the doors of wealthy women and influential men to sell her idea of building a woman’s college in the city, a sister college to Columbia, with equally rigorous standards. In little more than two years, she’d raised the funds and steered the proposition through the very reluctant Columbia Board of Trustees, and Barnard College was established; Meyer was just twenty-two years old.
Meyer was known as an advocate for training and cultivating women’s minds, allowing them to enter the professions, business, arts, and all other aspects of worldly accomplishment. In addition to her constant fund-raising for Barnard, she began publishing essays, novels, and plays. She was ahead of her time in her exploration of racial issues in her works of fiction and in her promotion of racial equality. Wife of a prominent and supportive physician, she wasn’t of the Home, Heaven, and Mother crowd at all. But Meyer possessed an analytic, unsparing eye; she could spot hypocrisy and opportunistic inconsistencies, and she felt the suffrage movement was guilty of both.
Meyer didn’t subscribe to the Antis’ usual screed about women being defiled by their entry into a voting booth or sullied by political activity. But neither did she buy the Suffs’ claim that women’s entrance into the political world would purify politics, that women’s finer instincts would lift politics out of the realm of self-interest, greed, ego, and corruption. Or that they would make governmental bodies more accountable and more humane. She certainly did not share Carrie Catt’s faith in enfranchised women’s ability to bring about world peace. All those suffragist promises of some sort of highly moral, pink political heaven were utter nonsense, Meyer insisted.
And in line with other reform-inclined Antis, those who were involved in municipal improvement and social betterment projects, Meyer also believed that by accepting the franchise, women would compromise their “soft power” of persuasion, their ability to influence male decision making and legislation free from the taint of political favor. This above-the-fray moral suasion was more powerful than any ballot, she claimed. Meyer delighted in the role of squinty suffrage skeptic and embraced the duties of an Anti leader, debating Carrie Catt in the pages of The New York Times and clashing publicly with her own sister, the civic reformer Maud Nathan, who was an ardent Suff. The sisters did not speak to each other.
Charlotte Rowe used Meyer’s and Tarbell’s arguments to good advantage, while adjusting her arsenal of antisuffrage weapons to changing circumstances. Since the war, Rowe had added a new arrow to her quiver, claiming that the suffragists, led by pacifists the likes of Carrie Catt, Jane Addams, and Alice Paul, were unpatriotic and even treasonous.
Rowe contended that at the outset of the war in Europe, Catt and Addams had tried to appease the kaiser with their Woman’s Peace Party, then covered their traitorous tracks by taking on high-level women’s war work committee assignments, all the while continuing their selfish suffrage work. Paul had called the president of the United States “Kaiser Wilson,” burned him in effigy, and proclaimed that America was no democracy, while American boys were dying overseas to save democracy. That’s what happens when women enter politics, Rowe asserted. Even this spring, Mrs. Catt went abroad to summon her international cabal of suffragists and socialists in Geneva, blaspheming the good name of America with her accusations that liberty was being withheld from American women by sinister forces. It was all baloney to Charlotte Rowe; it was bolshevism knocking at the door.
Rowe and the national Antis altered their strategy as the specter of the Nineteenth Amendment loomed closer. They toned down their opposition to state-granted woman suffrage (though they still didn’t approve of it) and focused their objections on the tyranny of the federal amendment (the “Sex Amendment to the Constitution,” as they liked to call it) forcing suffrage upon the states, whether they wanted it or not. Almost 20 p
ercent of all the state legislatures had already rejected the amendment—with more on the way, the Antis predicted—and quite a few more had only narrowly approved it. Let New York and California and Illinois and Wyoming and all the other misguided states have their woman suffrage, the Antis now argued, but leave be all those states that didn’t wish to force the vote upon their good women. States’ rights became the Antis’ new rallying cry, and it resonated especially loudly in the South, where it appealed to not only those fundamentally opposed to woman suffrage, but also to men and women who supported women’s rights but cherished states’ rights even more.
The Antis’ core belief that women were inevitably disturbed and degraded by political endeavors had taken shape before Rowe’s own eyes this summer when she watched how the Democratic Party suffrage women acted at the San Francisco convention. Celebrating their successful maneuver to place a pro-ratification plank into the party platform, they jumped upon desks, permitted men to hoist them onto their shoulders, screamed war whoops, and did a mock Indian dance in front of the Speaker’s stand. She found it disgusting. It was enough to convince anyone that woman suffrage was a menace to true womanhood, she told the Chattanooga reporters.
Rowe settled into the whites-only section of her train car bound for Nashville, looking forward to a historic offensive. Being on the offense suited her natural, but still feminine, inclinations. When she reached Nashville she’d assess the situation, align her strategies with the local culture, and adopt the native Tennessee political dialect. She expected to be quickly fluent in that particular patois.
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