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Chapter Four: Not Bound to Any Party: The Problem of Women Voters in the Solid South
- The University of North Carolina Press
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Chapter Four Not Bound to Any Party The Problem of Women Voters in the Solid South A n absolute menace to Democratic supremacy.”1 That is how one white southerner described woman suffrage. Like the antisuffragists who warned that woman s suffrage was an affront to southern manhood and that votes for women would subvert traditional gender roles, this observer recognized the potential power of women’s ballots to transform party politics in the New South. Even small numbers of black voters and dissident white voters had long terrified southern Democratic men, spurring disfranchisement in the first place. And the Nineteenth Amendment introduced not just a few but more than a million new voters to the polls. As they eagerly embraced their new political status and worked feverishly to expand the voter rolls, newly enfranchised women not only undermined disfranchisement but also directly challenged the Democratic stranglehold in the region. On the eve of woman suffrage, white southern Democrats stood in command of a political system in which few men voted and even fewer men maintained any real influence in political life. Yet as these political elites well knew, with so few southerners voting, it would not take many disloyal votes to threaten Democratic supremacy in the region. For more than a decade, literacy tests, property requirements, poll taxes, and complicated registration and balloting procedures had prevented all but a small minority of southern men from casting ballots. Such tight control of the electorate had eliminated real partisan competition from nearly every corner of the South and depressed voter turnout even among those who could qualify for the franchise. After 1920, southern women worked to open up this closed system. As they brought new voters to the polls, these women threatened to revitalize not only partisan competition in the region but intraparty competition as well. With Democrats in many southern states 108 Women Voters in the Solid South divided by faction, the ballots of a few new voters could tip the balance in many primary elections, and with voter turnout in many states below 20 percent, Republicans needed only to win the support of a small number of new voters to cast off the yoke of Democratic Party hegemony in the region. For Democratic Party elites, then, woman suffrage posed not only a psychological challenge to their sense of manhood but a tangible threat to their control over southern politics. the nashville city elections of 1919 offered southern Democratic Party leaders perhaps the first glimpse of just how profoundly woman suffrage could challenge their control over the region’s political system. In April of that year, the Tennessee state legislature granted women the right to vote in municipal and presidential elections, and suffragists immediately set about organizing newly enfranchised women to cast their first ballots. In a pattern that would be repeated by women throughout the region after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, Tennessee suffragists in 1919 publicized their cities’ registration requirements, canvassed neighborhoods to register women voters, spoke to women’s clubs about the importance of voting, and worked tirelessly to get out the woman vote. In Nashville, however, these efforts took on special significance as white suffragists joined with African American suffragists and clubwomen to elect a slate of reform candidates to the city government. White suffragists throughout the South had long denounced corrupt machine politics, and they staked their claim to the ballot, at least in part, on the idea that women would use their votes to clean up politics.2 Thus, it is no surprise that Tennessee’s white suffragists worked fervently to elect reformers in the 1919 city elections. African Americans, however, had a more ambiguous relationship with Tennessee’s urban political machines. While white southern Progressives had long believed African Americans to be the tools of corrupt city bosses, willing to sell their votes for a few “treats,” African Americans often had compelling reasons to support the machine candidates . For example, Mayor Edward Crump of Memphis promised African American voters that he would protect them from abusive treatment by the county justices, and Mayor Hilary Howse of Nashville occasionally placed African Americans on his slate of candidates. Both men wooed African American voters with individual handouts, but they also used government resources to fund services that benefited African American neighborhoods, such as schools, libraries, and parks. Thus, for African American women to support reform candidates on the Democratic ticket meant opposing elected [44.220.131.93] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 19:54...