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Chapter Six: No Longer Treated Lightly: Southern Legislators and New Women Voters
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Chapter Six No Longer Treated Lightly Southern Legislators and New Women Voters I n 1920, an aide to South Carolina’s Governor Cooper wrote to one of his state’s most prominent women for advice. He had received a request from an organization of women, and in contrast to years past, he was unsure how to respond. Letters from women’s organizations had once been of no consequence. When women were enfranchised, however, such letters came to represent groups of constituents. Faced with the electoral uncertainties posed by woman suffrage that year, he confessed, “Letters from women’s organizations, you know, can no longer be treated lightly!”1 In the years following the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, Democratic Party leaders throughout the South looked upon the demands of organized white women with a newfound respect . Faced with a large and unpredictable bloc of new voters at the polls, nervous Democrats worked furiously to bring the region’s white women into the party fold. They addressed women’s club meetings, targeted women directly in campaign literature, and moved the locations of polling places and party meetings to accommodate the ladies’ sensibilities. They called on female political leaders for help in winning the votes of women, and they grumbled among themselves as election returns and the efforts of organized women demonstrated that white women’s partisan loyalties would not be easily won. Perhaps most important, these Democratic men were forced to consider the political implications of policy choices that contradicted the expressed wishes of organized white women. While Democratic political leaders in the South had long touted the influence of white women on the political process, white women recognized “the change of atmosphere in the politicians after [they] had got the vote.”2 As suffragists had anticipated, southern politicians responded to white women’s new electoral power with unprecedented concern for their legislative priorities . Backed by the weight of their votes, white women in Georgia found “the 166 Legislators and New Women Voters Legislature very polite and very anxious to meet the wishes of the ‘ladies.’”3 A newspaper article declared: “Nothing legislative will be done in North Carolina that arouses the active antagonism of these women . . . and nothing will be long denied which they really demand.”4 Confronted with the demands of organized white women who were keeping track of candidates’ records and going to the polls, southern politicians were forced not only to court women voters on the campaign trail but also to follow through on their promises once in office. “With those little official slips of paper right in the women’s hands,” a white Mississippi clubwoman explained, “it is not so easy for case-hardened politicians to smile and smile and be villains still.”5 even in the simplest things, like politicians’ responses to women’s correspondence , southern white women found that their enfranchisement made a tremendous difference. As the aide to Governor Cooper made clear, letters sent by unenfranchised women reformers had often gone unheeded. Once white women received the vote, however, their petitions received more deferential treatment. Faced with white women “raising sand from all parts of the state,” South Carolina legislators in 1921 heeded their demands for an increase in the age of consent.6 In a testament to the new lobbying strategy of enfranchised white women, one politician confessed that “every mail overwhelms him, he couldn’t think of answering all the letters he gets!”7 A suffragist from North Carolina explained the transformation simply when she challenged state legislators at a public hearing, “If you know many officials who pay more attention to a constituent without a vote than a constituent with one, I’d like to meet the gentlemen.”8 Like organized white women from around the region, Virginia’s newly enfranchised white women noticed a significant “change in the nature of a response receive[d] to these letters from the promises of careful consideration of the old days to a definite advocacy of plank after plank of the platform.”9 Southern politicians recognized the new power of organized white women in ways that were more than just rhetorical. After the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, politicians could for the first time imagine supporting controversial causes that white women favored with the understanding that white women would back them at the polls. In an exceptionally blatant example of this type of understanding, Congressman T. W. Harrison from Virginia’s Seventh District contacted the legislative chairman of the League of Women Voters...