Anti-Suffragists Make Their Case

Not every Washingtonian favored voting rights for women. A significant percentage of men, and to a lesser degree, women objected for a number of reasons. Most believed politically active women would neglect their traditional, "sacred" roles of caring for children, husbands, and housekeeping. "When women vote it will not be only the women of leisure who vote," argued an anti-suffragist from Portland. "The artisans' wives will vote. And the artisans' wives have to wash and scrub and cook. How can they find time to vote?"

"How much time can it take to vote?" countered eastern suffragist Alice Freeman Palmer. "A ‘well-to-do' woman, who can hire domestic workers, has time for outside interests, "only let her interests be noble!" Women who do their own housework, "can find half an hour a day" to read the papers or "take ten minutes to stop on her way to the market for voting," countered the suffragist newspaper Votes for Women.

You're kidding, right?

Sometimes "anti" arguments used a strange brew of reverse psychology. "How can women say that they are dealt with unjustly?" asked one female critic. "Consider the things that men have invented just for convenience and happiness. Think of the washing machines, and the ironing machines and the carpet sweepers and the innumerable other things which they have made just to lighten our domestic burdens," argued one anti-suffragist.

Much of the opposition came from the pulpit. The Rev. Mark A. Matthews of the Seattle First Presbyterian Church, was a vocal anti-suffragist. He stated in one sermon, "No sir! This country will never adopt female suffrage. If the ballot were extended to the women, the star of America's glory would go down immediately never to rise again…"

Church objections aside, anti-women's vote arguments were difficult to justify. Pro suffragist, Judge John D. Long claimed that, "I never heard an argument against Women Suffrage that was not an insult to a ten-year-old boy."