Revelation & Revolt

A list of quotes from anti-feminists, from the women, themselves.

“The head of each family was its sole link to the outside world and its spokesman in the state. The family’s leader within each home was the wife and mother. To endow that wife and mother with the franchise, therefore, would dissolve society into a heterogeneous mass of separate persons, whose individual rather than family interests would thenceforth receive political representation. For this reason, the vote would not be merely a quantitative addition to all the other rights women had acquired in the preceding two generations. The franchise was not just another new right to add to higher education, equal guardianship of children, and ownership of one’s own earnings in the march of women toward full equality with men. Suffrage meant a qualitative change in the social and familial role of women, antis believed, and the demand for it consequently met with more determined resistance than did women’s struggles for other rights.”

– Aileen Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement

“It is much to be deplored that the trend of some modern young women is more towards the commercial life in which her success is doubtful, rather than toward the home-keeping, child-bearing, social, religious, and philanthropic life for which she was physically and mentally designed. These latter duties women faithfully and successfully perform as their natural function, and through them they may rise to the greatest distinction. Femininity should be cherished by the woman whom circumstance or necessity drives into the wage-earning world, and she can cherish it by retaining her hold on social, religious, and charitable interests; but she cannot hope to do so if she attends political meetings, serves on political committees, canvasses districts for votes, watches at the polls, serves on juries, and debates political questions or records and promises of political candidates. We have seen the loss of femininity produced by the constant campaigning for suffrage.”

–Edith Melvin, A Business Woman’s View of Suffragism

With Christianity there came into the world a new example and a new thought. To woman’s whole nature appealed that life of self-sacrifice, of love, and of willing service that has created a new Heaven and a new earth. From the foot of the Cross there arose and went out into the world a womanhood that did not demand, or claim, or threaten, or arrogate; a womanhood renouncing, yielding, loving, and, therefore, conquering. For twenty centuries that has been the law of woman’s life. It is sneered at and rejected today by the clamorous, but it has made of woman what we now find her. You see it in your mothers, your daughters, your wives. Do you wish to have that ideal changed? Woman has become to man not only a companion, but an inspiration. Out of the crucible of the centuries has come what we not only love but adore; before which, in certain hours, we bow with a reverence that links us unconsciously with the Divine. It is Christian civilization that is in the balance.

– Mrs. Thomas Allen, Woman Suffrage vs. Womanliness

…So, in claiming for women the right to take a part in the man’s half of life, the suffragists, I think, lose sight of what the woman’s half is. In urging that they must have a hand in law-making and government and public life generally, they do not see that woman’s peculiar work is pretty independent of laws and of government, is rather in private life. For it is just where the law cannot reach that woman is supreme. It is just in the finer, more personal and intimate relationships of life, which government cannot include, that woman finds her work waiting for her, which she alone can do—what Octavia Hill calls “the out-of-sight, silent work

—Mrs. Horace Davis, The True Function of the Normal Woman

…the women who rebel against the idea that home is the place for woman are largely those who misunderstand the duties of home, who think only of the drudgery, and forget to think of the happiness that comes with watching our families develop under our care. Although the mother must do all the work in the average family, it is not from these homes where in most cases the women are happily busy with their home duties that most of the agitation about abandoning the home comes, but from among those people who have too much leisure on their hands, and who, unfortunately, do not find sufficiently exciting the duties of training good citizens. Whatever our work in life, whatever our occupation, we cannot rid ourselves of drudgery. Is there not more deadening, unvarying monotony for the business woman, the shop girl, the factory hand, than for the woman in the home who is her own mistress and can in some degree regulate and vary her work to suit her own pleasure? It is only because such work is new and untried by them that many women think it preferable to home duties; but the fact that so many girls in industry marry young to get away from this uncongenial work proves that when tried it is not found either so exciting or so interesting as these advocates of woman in industry and out of the home imagine.

–Mrs. Charles Burton Gulick, The Imperative Demand Upon Women in the Home

“To choose the work in which she finds the most pleasure”—there is the real individualistic note, sounded so often by the radical suffragists. It is struck still more clearly when to the reporter’s question: “What about the argument that the wife with a business career is apt to deprive her husband of the joys of fatherhood?” Mrs. Dorr replies: “No one but the individual woman herself has any right to decide whether or not she shall have children. That is a question which she alone is entitled to settle…”

–Lily Rice Foxcroft, Suffrage A Step Toward Feminism

Its advocacy of equal industrial rights, its determined attempts to obliterate all differences between the sexes in matters of education and employment, and its frantic setting up of the standards of independence between men and women, in place of that mutual dependence upon each other which is the only possible status in the marriage relation, and the corner stone of the home, all distinctly identify it with its Communistic source.

– Caroline Fairfield Corbin

At a meeting of the Woman’s Council held in Washington, in 1888, Mrs. Stanton said: “I have often said to men of the present day that the next generation of women will not stand arguing with you as patiently as we have for half a century. The organization of labor all over the country are holding out their hands to women. The time is not far distant when, if men do not do justice to women, the women will strike hands with labor, with socialists, with anarchists, and you will have scenes of the Revolution of France acted over again in this republic.”

– Helen Kendrick Johnson, Woman and the Republic