-
Chapter One: Now You Smell Perfume: The Social Drama of Politics in the 1920s
- The University of North Carolina Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Chapter One Now You Smell Perfume The Social Drama of Politics in the 1920s W hat will you be? A Man or a Jelly Bean?”1 This is the question that antisuffragists posed to southern men on the eve of ratification. For years, and at an even more fevered pitch in the last months before the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, antisuffragists made apocalyptic predictions of the doomsday that would arrive in the South if women received the vote. According to these “antis” the entire southern social order would collapse in the wake of woman suffrage, as it threatened to bring “Negro Domination” and the ruin of the white southern family. While the antis’ most dramatic claims failed to materialize, the sudden influx of women into public politics transformed the social drama of politics and challenged the supremacy of white males in ways that many antisuffragists had predicted with dread.2 As white and black women embraced their new status as voters, the Nineteenth Amendment blurred the lines of gender and race that were so central to the order of the Jim Crow South. in the years immediately preceding the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, white southern men sat atop a political system exclusively within their control. The threats from Populists, Republicans, African Americans , and even poor whites had been answered with poll taxes, understanding clauses, literacy tests, violence, and other legal and extralegal means of disfranchising disruptive voters. Voter participation rates in the South were appallingly low, even by low national standards, and on election days politically active southern white men gathered at the polls to share in the male political rituals of smoking, spitting, brawling, coarse joke-telling, drinking (despite laws to the contrary), and, not least, casting ballots, which symbolized their superiority to white women and children, all African Americans, 14 Politics in the 1920s and even other white men who lacked the means or education to share in southern political life. Determined to protect this status quo, southern antisuffragists, both male and female, used theological, “scientific,” and sociological arguments to condemn women’s demands for the ballot.3 Ministers, leading male politicians, and female antisuffragists used biblical injunctions to remind southerners of the divine inspiration for woman’s separate sphere. Moreover, they argued, women were mentally and physically unfit for the strenuousness of politics and public life. But more often, antis based their attacks on the threat that woman suffrage posed to the southern social order. Woman suffrage, they argued, would foster unhealthy competition between men and women, “discourage marriage,” and “lessen women’s attractive qualities of modesty, dependence, and delicacy.”4 While antisuffragist men were often content to let the women antis take center stage in public debates over the issue, thereby furthering their contention that southern ladies did not really want the ballot , antisuffragist broadsides reveal surprisingly frank concerns about the effects of woman suffrage on southern manhood. One broadside put it simply, “Block woman suffrage, that wrecker of the home.”5 Another pamphlet warned that “more voting women than voting men will place the Government under petticoat rule.”6 It was a cartoon published in Nashville, however, that really got to the heart of the matter. Titled “America When Femininized [sic],” it pictured a rooster left to care for a nest full of eggs as the hen departed the barn wearing a “Votes for Women” banner. This scene was supplemented by text that cautioned “Woman suffrage denatures both men and women; it masculinizes women and feminizes men.” The broadside warned that the effects of woman suffrage, this “social revolution . . . will be to make ‘sissies’ of American men—a process already well under way.”7 Another notice printed in Montgomery, Alabama, highlighted the same themes when it asked: “Shall America Collapse from Effeminacy? . . . The American man is losing hold. He is swiftly but surely surrendering to the domination of woman.”8 As these broadsides suggest, white southern men had a lot to be anxious about in 1920. In addition to the threat of woman suffrage, recurrent agricultural crises, labor unrest, a rising tide of African American activism, the Great Migration, and social changes symbolized by flappers and an increasingly independent youth culture all combined to make white southern men feel very uneasy as they entered the postwar decade.9 Historian Nancy MacLean has demonstrated that many white southerners believed that the hierarchical relations of power that provided the foundation for southern society were in danger of collapse, and hundreds of thousands turned to [34.228...