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Chapter Seven To Hold the Lady Votes Southern Politics Ten Years after Suffrage I n June 1930, the candidates for state office appeared before the voters in Edgefield, South Carolina. There, one of the office-seekers announced his support for women jurors. Just ten years before, “candidates would have preferred the guillotine to a suspicion that they favored” jury service for women. On that hot summer afternoon, however, the candidate’s announcement received little attention from the assembled voters, who were more focused on the issues of prohibition and taxes. In fact, only one unusual thing happened at the rally that day. In his speech to the crowd, another candidate “forgot the ‘ladies,’” failing to acknowledge these important voters or to mention their concerns. The activist who recounted this event in the newspaper assured her readers that she “took note of it, and shall forget him when my time comes.”1 Ten years after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, southern politicians had grown accustomed to white women’s participation in formal politics. They knew that they needed the votes of white women at election time, and they generally did not have to be reminded to pay attention to the concerns of these constituents. The candidate meetings that had been pioneered by newly enfranchised white women were no longer considered “novel stunts.”2 Candidates recognized the opportunity that these rallies offered, and office-seekers routinely pledged their support for issues of concern to women. Nevertheless, scholars have since concluded that the threat women voters posed to policy-makers was fleeting. According to historian Alan Lichtman, “By the late 1920s, male politicians surely realized that the female voter posed no threat to business as usual and need not be granted any special concessions.”3 “Putative leaders of the rank and file of American women,” Lichtman contended, “could not use the political clout of their sisters as a bargaining chip in support of their demands.”4 Over time, scholars have shifted the “blame” for the ultimate failure of women’s policy demands, 190 Ten Years after Suffrage but nearly all agree that the ability of women reformers to extract policy concessions waned as the 1920s wore on.5 Far from the legislative “reign of terror ” that antisuffragists had feared, enfranchised women “became neither an independent force in American politics nor an interest group within the parties whose loyalty had to be preserved.”6 Yet in the face of ongoing efforts of women, both white and black, to undermine the system that southern Democrats had set in place, party leaders continued to express concern about the electoral threat posed by woman suffrage long after the region’s women had cast their first ballots. It is true that by 1930 newspapers took little note of the presence of white women at the polls, but the seismic expansion of the electorate that began in 1920 reverberated throughout the decade. As figure 4 demonstrates, the hundreds of thousands of voters who had rocked the region’s political system in 1920 continued to go to the polls in the years that followed.7 In Kentucky and North Carolina, the dramatic increase in presidential election voters that began in 1920 was sustained throughout the decade. In Alabama, 79 percent more voters crowded the polls after woman suffrage, and by 1928 that figure had climbed to 91 percent, despite the imposition of the poll tax on women after 1920. In Texas, the number of voters participating in presidential elections steadily increased after women became eligible to vote; by 1928 the number of Texans at the polls was nearly double that in 1916. In Louisiana and Virginia, the upsurge in new voters after woman suffrage was sustained through 1924, and by 1928 more than twice as many voters cast ballots in those states than had done so in 1916. While it is true that these states experienced substantial population growth during the 1920s, in nearly every state the proportional increase in voters from 1920 to 1932 exceeded the percentage increase in state population.8 In short, the increase in voters during the 1920s was not simply attributable to population growth. Instead, registration figures from Louisiana suggest that the South’s new voters were predominantly white women. Louisiana was the only southern state to keep registration data by race and gender in the 1920s, and those figures show a steady increase in white women’s voter registration, both as a raw number and as a percentage of the total.9 In...

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