Lisa Cochran Higgins - Adulterous Individualism, Socialism, and Free Love in Nineteenth-Century Anti-Suffrage Writing - Legacy 21:2 Legacy 21.2 (2004) 193-209 Adulterous Individualism, Socialism, and Free Love in Nineteenth-Century Anti-Suffrage Writing Lisa Cochran Higgins College of DuPage In an 1872 anti-suffrage essay for the Overland Monthly entitled "Woman Suffrage—Cui Bono?" (who benefits?), Mrs. Sarah Cooper, like other anti-suffrage writers of the period, contends that only women of the worst sort would deign to vote, making public elections inappropriate for true women: "Womanhood—cultured, sensitive, and refined—would instinctively shrink from encountering such an element in the body-politic; and thus the dissolute, the depraved, and the vicious, 'emballoted' and bold, would dominate the weak, the timid, and the vacillating, and thus occupy the field" (160). The author implies that enfranchisement would inappropriately sexualize women, creating a promiscuous mingling of male and female bodies in the "body-politic." Although Cooper believes that women of the "depraved" sort mostly come from the lower, immigrant classes, she claims to be even more concerned with "a lamentable increase of the Mrs. Potiphar-type of womanhood" that has women lobbying for the vote within the more "refined" classes (160). Cooper's allusion aligns women's rights advocates with Potiphar's wife, the biblical woman who failed to seduce Joseph, her husband's most...