“Whores” and “Hottentots”: Protection of (white) women and white supremacy in anti-suffrage rhetoric

ABSTRACT

Through an analysis of anti-suffrage arguments, I identify white supremacist tropes as an important strand in woman suffrage debates. I argue that sexualization and themes of home were signals to racial bias, and American womanhood was used as a rhetorical resource in struggles over race and national identity. As we celebrate the centennial of woman suffrage, it is vital to recognize how debates over women in national space participate in white supremacist logics.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-suffrage
• race
• women’s rights
• home
• sexualization

Notes

1 For example: Belinda A. Stillion Southard, Militant Citizenship: Rhetorical Strategies of the National Woman’s Party, 1913–1920 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2011), 57–9; Catherine H. Palczewski, “The 1919 Prison Special: Constituting White Women’s Citizenship,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 102, no. 2 (2016): 107–32, doi:10.1080/00335630.2016.1154185; Kristan Poirot, “(Un)Making Sex, Making Race: Nineteenth-Century Liberalism, Difference, and the Rhetoric of Elizabeth Cady Stanton,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 96, no. 2 (2010): 185–208, doi:10.1080/00335631003796677; Marjorie Julian Spruill, “Race, Reform, and Reaction at the Turn of the Century: Southern Suffragists, the NAWSA, and the ‘Southern Strategy’ in Context,” in Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited, ed., Jean H. Baker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 111.

2 History of Woman Suffrage: 1900–1920, Vol. 5. ed. Ida Husted Harper (New York: National American Woman Suffrage Association, 1922), 269, 273–4.

3 “Women Hiss Taft; Angry at Speech,” Chicago Daily Tribune, April 15, 1910; “Regret for Hisses,” Washington Post, April 16, 1910; “Taft is Hissed by Suffragists,” Washington Post. April 15, 1910. “Women Hissed Taft,” Baltimore [MD] Sun, April 15, 1910. “Women Expiate Hissing of Taft,” Gettysburg Times, April 16, 1910; “Women Praise Taft For Suffrage Talk,” Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, April 15, 1910. The article from Gettysburg Times was also published in other newspapers including: Frederick News, April 16, 1910 (Maryland); Tyrone Daily Herald, April 16, 1910 (Pennsylvania).

4 History of Woman Suffrage, 270.

5 Sheila Lloyd, “Sara Baartman and the ‘Inclusive Exclusions’ of Neoliberalism,” Meridians 11, no. 2 (2011): 214, https//doi.org/10.2979/meridians.11.2.212; Pamela Scully and Clifton C. Crais, “Race and Erasure: Sara Baartman and Hendrik Cesars in Cape Town and London,” Journal of British Studies 47, no. 2 (2008): 301–23, doi:10.1086/526552; Carlos A. Miranda and Suzette A. Spencer, “Omnipresent Negation: ‘Hottentot Venus’ and ‘Africa Rising,’” Callaloo 32, no. 3 (2009): 912; Yvette Abrahams, “Dysfunction and Disjuncture: Sarah Bartmann’s Resistance (Remix),” Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender Equity 58 (2003): 12–26, doi:10.1080/10130950.2003.9674488; Zine Magubane, “Which Bodies Matter? Feminism, Poststructuralism, Race, and the Curious Theoretical Odyssey of the ‘Hottentot Venus,’” Gender and Society 15, no. 6 (2001): 816–34, doi:10.1177/089124301015006003.

6 Scully and Crais, “Race and Erasure,” 311.

7 Abrahams, “Dysfunction and Disjuncture,” 13; Scully and Crais, “Race and Erasure,” 302.

8 Palczewski, “The 1919 Prison Special,” 120.

9 Priscilla Leonard, “The Ideal of Equality for Men and Women: An Anti-Suffrage View-Point The Vote and Equality President Roosevelt’s View A Woman Worker’s View Suffrage Here and Abroad,” Harper’s Bazaar 43, no. 5 (May 1909): 526.

10 Edward Marshall, “Our Suffrage Movement Is a Flirtation on a Big Scale,” New York Times, May 25, 1913.

11 Marshall, “Our Suffrage Movement.”

12 M. E. Simkins, “Suffrage and Anti-Suffrage,” The Living Age 260, no. 3370 (February 6, 1909): 325.

13 Leslie J. Harris, “Home-Making, Nation-Making,” in Reading the Presidency: Advances in Presidential Rhetoric, ed. Stephen J. Heidt and Mary E. Stuckey (New York: Peter Lang, 2019), 288.

14 Lisa A. Flores, “Towards an Insistent and Transformative Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (2018): 355, doi:10.1080/14791420.2018.1526387.