Legacies of Belle La Follette’s Big Tent Campaigns for Women’s Suffrage

Abstract

In countless speeches and articles in La Follette’s Magazine, Belle Case La Follette urged that women needed the vote to secure “standards of cleanliness and healthfulness in the municipal home,” and because “home, society, and government are best when men and women keep together intellectually and spiritually.” This range of often mutually exclusive arguments created an inclusive big tent. However, arguing that women were qualified to vote by their roles as wives and mothers while maintaining that gender was superfluous to suffrage also contributed to an uneasy combination that would continue the conflict over women’s true nature and hinder their activism for decades to come.

Notes

1 Belle Case La Follette (hereafter BCL), “Women as Public Housekeepers,” La Follette’s Magazine (hereafter LM) 2, no. 42, October 22, 1910, 10.

2 La Follette reprinted her testimony in the La Follette’s Magazine as “A Question of Democracy,” LM 5, no. 19, May 10, 1913, 6.

3 Although variations on the term “feminist” (feministic, feminist, feminists) appear in La Follette’s Magazine as early as 1911, La Follette never provided her own definition of the term.

4 Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 20.

5 Cott, 13, 49.

6 Dee Ann Montgomery, “An Intellectual Profile of Belle La Follette” (PhD diss, Indiana University, 1975), 225.

7 See Nancy C. Unger, Fighting Bob La Follette, 2nd ed. (Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2008).

8 “Wisconsin’s Matriarch,” New York Times, August 20, 1931, 15.

9 Belle La Follette has been the subject of considerable scholarship including two biographies: Nancy C. Unger, Belle La Follette (New York: Routledge, 2016); and Lucy Freeman, Sherry La Follette, and George Zabriskie, Belle (New York: Beaufort, 1986). Additional works on Belle La Follette by Nancy C. Unger include “The Two Worlds of Belle La Follette,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 83, no. 2 (Winter 1999–2000): 82–110; “The Unexpected Belle La Follette,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 99, no. 2 (Winter 2015–2016): 16–27; “How did Belle La Follette Resist Racial Segregation in Washington DC, 1913–1914?” in Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1775–2000, 8, no. 2. edited by Kathryn Sklar and Thomas Dublin (New York: Alexander Street Press, June 2004); “‘When Women Condemn the Whole Race’: Belle Case La Follette Attacks the Color Line,” in Women in Print, edited by James P. Danky and Wayne Wiegand (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 281–96. Works by other authors include Dee Ann Montgomery, “An Intellectual Profile of Belle Case La Follette: Progressive Editor, Political Strategist, and Feminist” (PhD dissertation, Indiana University, 1975); Bernard Weisberger, The La Follettes of Wisconsin: Love and Politics in Progressive America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), and “Changes and Choices: Two and a Half Generations of La Follette Women,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 76, no. 4 (1993): 248–70.

10 Sara Egge, “‘Strewn Knee Deep in Literature’: A Material Analysis of Print Propaganda and Woman Suffrage,” Agricultural History 88, no. 4 (Fall 2014): 591.

11 BCL, “Read the News,” LM 1, no. 32, August 14, 1909, 10.

12 BCL, “Foolishness,” LM 3, no. 44, November 4, 1911, 10–11.

13 A Page of Letters, “Wise Instruction to Youth,” LM 2, no. 13, April 2, 1910, 10.

14 Selene Armstrong Harmon, “A New Sort of Women’s Page,” reprinted in LM 6, no. 24, June 13, 1914, 6–7.

15 Cott, 29.

16 Clara Bradley Burdette, “The College Woman and Citizenship,” The Syracusan (June 15, 1917) 3, Box 125, file 1, Clara Burdette Collection, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.

17 Rheta Childe Dorr, What Eight Million Women Want (Boston: Small, Maynard, and Co., 1910), 327.

18 Susan Fitzgerald, “Women in the Home,” in One Half the People, edited by Anne Firor Scott and Andrew MacKay Scott (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 114–15.

19 Various slogans can be found at https://www.google.com/search?q=woman+suffrage+slogans&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiD2dOu15vWAhXIKWMKHWAeDdkQ_AUICigB&biw=1292&bih=678 (accessed September 17, 2017).

20 See Rebecca Hazard, “Give the Ballot to the Mothers,” and Laurence Housman, “Woman This and Woman That,” circa 1911, “Songs about Women’s Rights,” Protest Song Lyrics.net, http://www.protestsonglyrics.net/index.phtml (accessed October 6, 2017).

21 BCL, “Why the Homemaker Should Vote for La Follette,” October 17, 1924, La Follette Family Papers, Library of Congress (hereafter LFP), D-42.

22 BCL, “A True Evangelist—and an Opportunity,” LM 3, no. 21, May 27, 1911, 10.

23 BCL, Untitled Speech on Conservation, n.d., LFP, D-43.

24 BCL, “Marching in a Suffrage Parade,” LM 4, no. 20, May 18, 1912, 11.

25 BCL, “Roosevelt’s Speech on Suffrage,” LM 4, no. 33, August 7, 1912, 10.

26 “Woman Suffrage Day,” Washington Post, May 2, 1915, 16.

27 BCL, “Impression of the Garment Workers Strike,” LM 2, no. 45, November 12, 1910, 11.

28 BCL, “Women’s Work,” LM 4, no. 1, January 6, 1912, 10.

29 Ibid.

30 “Mrs. La Follette is Leader,” New York Times, September 11, 1912, 6.

31 Elizabeth Gardiner Evans, “How Voters and Future Voters Braved a Storm,” LM 4, no. 39, September 28, 1912, 10.

32 Alice Paul to BCL, June 11, 1914, LFP, D-13

33 BCL, untitled speech to Suffrage School, n.d., LFP, D-40.

34 “Some Interesting Letters,” LM 7, no. 4, April 1, 1915, 12.

35 BCL, “A Woman Who Wishes to Know about Politics,” LM 3, no. 12, March 25, 1911, 10; BCL, “The Modern Town Meeting,” LM 3, no. 27, July 8, 1911, 10.

36 BCL, “A Question of Democracy.”

37 BCL, “Notes on the Suffrage Campaign in California,” LM 4, no. 33, August 17, 1912, 10.

38 Cott, 68.

39 For the pervasiveness racism among white suffrage advocates, see Louise Michele Newman, White Women’s Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). For La Follette’s extraordinary contributions to the struggle for racial equality see Unger, Belle La Follette, 88–115.

40 BCL, “The Business of Being a Woman,” LM 4, no. 35, August 31, 1912, 11.

41 BCL, “The Colored Folk of Washington,” LM 3, no. 31, August 5, 1911, 10–11.

42 BCL, “Color Line to Date,” LM 6, no. 4, January 24, 1914, 6.

43 Ibid.; BCL to Mr. Patterson, January 28, 1914, LFP, D-25.

44 BCL, “The Color Line,” LM 5, no. 34, August 23, 1913, 6; “Miss Murraye’s Dismissal,” LM 5, no. 35, August 30, 1913, 6; “The Adverse Point of View on ‘The Color Line,’” LM 5, no. 37, September 13, 1913, 6.

45 “She Defends Negroes,” Washington Post, January 5, 1914, 1.

46 BCL, “Color Line to Date,” 7.

47 James Hayes to BCL, February 18, 1914, LFP, D-13.

48 BCL, “What Standards Shall We Fix?” LM 4, no. 12, March 23, 1912, 10–11.

49 See BCL, “Thoughts about Clothes,” LM 3, no. 41, October 13, 1911, 10; H. M. Chittenden, “Women’s Part in Government,” LM 4, no. 42, October 19, 1912, 7.

50 “Notes on Miss Price’s argument before the Law Students of Western Reserve University,” circa 1914, LFP, D-36; BCL to Anna Cadogan Etz, November 9, 1914, D-25, 2.

51 BCL, Untitled Suffrage Debate, 1914, LFP, D-41, rebuttal section, 2–3.

52 See Nancy Woloch, Muller v. Oregon (Boston: Bedford, 1996).

53 BCL, Untitled Suffrage debate, 1914, LFP, D-41.

54 Ibid.

55 See Sara Egge, Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest, 1870–1920 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018).

56 BCL, Boston Peace Day Speech, 18 May 1915, LFP, D-44, 11.

57 Ibid., 1.

58 Ibid., 3, 13.

59 Bernadette Cahill, Alice Paul, the National Woman’s Party, and the Vote (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015), 156.

60 Woodrow Wilson: “Address to the Senate on the Nineteenth Amendment,” September 30, 1918. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=126468 (accessed January 6, 2018).

61 BCL to family, February 16, 1919, LFP, A-24.

62 Cott, 101.

63 BCL, Untitled suffrage speech, 4.

64 BCL, “Women Voters and the Packers,” LM 12, no. 3, March 1, 1920, 45.

65 BCL, “An Inspiring Campaign”; “Wisconsin League of Progressive Women,” LM 12, no. 11, November 1, 1920, 168.

66 BCL, “Woman Suffrage a Success,” LM 16, no. 9, September 1924, 138.

67 BCL, “Women and War,” undated, LFP, D-41, 14.

68 Ibid., 21.

69 BCL, “Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom,” LM 12, no. 10, October 1, 1920, 155; “Mrs. La Follette Urges US Women to Fight Armaments,” [Madison, WI] Capital Times, December 27, 1920, 1.

70 “Mrs. La Follette Urges.”

71 See “Unite to Fight War,” LM 12, no. 12, December 1, 1920, 184; BCL, untitled article, LM 12, no. 5, May 1, 1920, 81; “Start a Peace Circle,” LM 7, no. 5, May 1, 1915, 10; BCL to Anita Koenen, August 30, 1921, LFP, D-26.

72 BCL, “A Week in Wisconsin,” LM 13, no. 11, November 1, 1921, 170.

73 BCL to Gwyneth Roe, December1, 1927, LFP, D-27; BCL, “W.I.L. Congress,” LM 16, no. 5, May 1, 1924, 74.

74 BCL, “National Convention of the National Woman’s Party,” LM 13, no. 3, March 1, 1921, 42–43.

75 Alice Paul, quoted in Christine Lunardini, Alice Paul (Boulder, CO: Westview Press), 154.

76 Ibid., 127.

77 Alice Paul, quoted in Cott, 122.

78 Cott, 125.

79 The Woman’s Bulletin, “Some of the Results of Two Years of Equal Suffrage in California,” LM 6, no. 10, March 7, 1914, 6.

80 Jason T. English and Gary S. Nelson, “Manual Lifting: Historical Sources of Current Standards Regarding Acceptable Weights of Lift,” Nelson & Associates, http://www.hazardcontrol.com/factsheets/ml-mh/evolution-of-manual-lifting-standards (accessed October 8, 2017).

81 Cott, 282.

82 Linda Kerber, No Constitutional Right to be Ladies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999) 181, 357.

83 “Working Women in the 1930s,” American Decades vol. 4: 1930–1939, Judith S. Baughman et al., eds., Gale, 2001. US History in Context, link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/CX3468301237/UHIC?u = sand55832&xid = 4a83ab53 (accessed October 3, 2017).

84 Susan M. Hartmann, The Home Front and Beyond (Boston: Twayne, 1982), cited in “Women Workers in World War II,” Metropolitan State University of Denver, https://msudenver.edu/camphale/thewomensarmycorps/womenwwii/ (accessed October 5, 2017).

85 Hartmann, The Home Front and Beyond.

86 Ibid.

87 Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947), 232–41.

88 Joan Williams, Unbending Gender (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 147.

89 See Jane Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Marjorie J. Spruill, Divided We Stand (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017); Jessica Neuwirth, Equal Means Equal (New York: New Press, 2015); Robert O. Self, All in the Family (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012).

90 Mary Anderson, quoted in Cott, 135.

91 See Nancy C. Unger, Beyond Nature’s Housekeepers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 169–70.

92 See Miriam Peskowitz, The Truth behind the Mommy Wars (Berkeley: Seal Press 2005); Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels, The Mommy Myth (Berkeley: Free Press, 2005).

93 See This Bridge Called My Back, edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, 4th ed. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015).