No Votes for Women: The New York State Anti-Suffrage Movement

6. Antis Adjust to Enfranchisement, 1917–1932

6. Antis Adjust to Enfranchisement, 1917–1932 After spending twenty-five years opposing woman suffrage, Annie Nathan Meyer had some difficulty adjusting to her changed political status. Meyer, an intellectual maverick and one who never backed down from criticism or an argument, fired off an editorial to the New York Times ordering anti-suffrage women not to vote.1 Antis, Meyer declared, should let socialist and radical factions win “just once” to show governmental leaders how widespread radicalism had become. Public censure was swift and brutal.2 An editor for the Chicago Herald wrote that because Meyer believed that “the grant of woman’s suffrage having put the country in a bad mess, the anti should see that the country suffers as much as possible.” Meyer was, in the editor’s words, “acting like a child who has been spanked.”3 An editor for the socialist New York Call condemned Meyer as well, contending that “she would rather see this ruin effected, so as to be able to say ‘I told you so!’ than have the noble patriots like herself step into the breach and by working and voting perhaps save the country she sees so desperately threatened.”4 Obviously stung by the responses to her idea, a contrite Meyer sought understanding through a more carefully crafted article in the New Republic. She wrotethatafterrecommendingtheschemeintheNewYorkTimes,shehadalso suggested the idea at an anti-suffrage meeting. The former National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage president Josephine Dodge “immediately rebuked” her by saying, “You and I place our country above any controversy; at such a time a question of suffrage or non-suffrage must be of relative unim- Antis Adjust to Enfranchisement 143 portance.” Meyer admitted that she could see the sense in her friend’s words. Regretting her rash decision to dash off her thoughts to a newspaper before privately testing the idea on her anti-suffragist friends, Meyer was as close to a publicapologyasshewouldeverget.Sheconcludedthearticlebyassertingthat the act of voting contributed to the greater good of the country and promised thatshe,too,hadupheldherdutytoregisterandvote.5 AlthoughMeyerapparently collected every article, critical or laudatory, for her scrapbooks, she does not mention this specific incident in her 1951 autobiography. In fact, there she assessed women’s enfranchisement by writing only, “How could we possibly refuse to vote but permit women whose whole outlook on life differed from ours to have their say, unopposed?” Meyer’s question could have just as easily referred to suffragists as it could have to uneducated immigrants. Either way, by the time Meyer wrote her autobiography she was ostensibly reconciled to women voting.6 While some women persisted in anti-suffrage activities after 1917, as we saw in the previous chapter, the more typical former anti-suffragists in New York State put aside their old animosities and tried to work with former suffragists in an attempt to create the better world Lucy Price had foreseen through women’s participation in politics.7 Political expectations for women were very high, but whether or not women fulfilled these expectations is far less important than trying to understand the process of politicization for newly enfranchised women. Faced with civic adjustments and new responsibilities, many women—even those who had been anti-suffragists—found it a politically exciting decade. Once most people realized that women’s enfranchisement would not significantly alter traditional gender roles (a fear anti-suffragists had long expressed) even anti-suffragists became a part of changing the relationship between women and politics.8 Just as former suffragists devoted energy to “revitalizing American politics,” so too did former anti-suffragists assist in that revitalization in the 1920s.9 To date, all of the full-length studies of the women’s anti-suffrage movement end in 1920, leaving virtually untold the impact enfranchisement had on the women who had formerly worked to opposethevote.10 Knowingwhatformeranti-suffragistsdidinthefirstdecade of enfranchisement enhances our understanding of the political gains and experiences of all women as they moved from disenfranchisement to a fuller participation in politics. Newlyenfranchisedwomenenteredthedecadewithveryhighexpectations forthemselves.Theiradjustmentdifficultieswerecompoundedbytheexpecta- 144 Chapter six tions politicians and critics had for them. For decades, suffrage activists had encouragedthesehighexpectationswhileanti-suffragistshaddenigratedthem. Although women faced heavy “burdens of culture, the family, and history” when they entered politics, commentators and political pundits somehow expected women to radically change the political system, rising above those burdens, all in a few short years.11 Many women were unsure of how to handle theirnewstateofenfranchisement.Itwastoouncomfortableforsomewomen and would take time...