Covering a Countermovement on the Verge of Defeat: The Press and the 1917 Social Movement against Woman Suffrage

Abstract

In the critical year of 1917, the suffrage movement gained the momentum it needed to secure a federal amendment granting women the right to vote. During this turning point, the mainstream local and regional press covered opponents of woman suffrage. Examination of the press portrayals of this countermovement, by means of social movement theory, reveal that most coverage situated the anti-suffrage debate in the context of World War I. News reports provided limited framing of anti-suffragist arguments that centered on negative, emotional rhetoric, while suffrage supporters were framed as providing researched arguments that emphasized their opponents’ contradictions. An emphasis on episodic rather than thematic framing diminished the complexity of the suffrage debate, creating a divide of public fear versus progressive advocacy that illustrates the challenges and shortfalls in news coverage of countermovements.

Notes

1 Anne Myra Benjamin, Women against Equality: The Anti-Suffrage Movement in the United States from 1895 to 1920, 2nd ed. (Raleigh, NC: Lulu Publishing Services, 2014); Anastasia Sims, “Beyond the Ballot: The Radical Vision of the Antisuffragists,” in Votes for Women! The Woman Suffrage Movement in Tennessee, the South, and the Nation, edited by M. S. Wheeler (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995), 105–28.

2 Elizabeth V. Burt, “The Ideology, Rhetoric, and Organizational Structure of a Countermovement Publication: The Remonstrance, 1890–1920,” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 75 no. 1 (1998): 69–83.

3 Susan E. Marshall, “Ladies against Women: Mobilization Dilemmas of Antifeminist Movements,” Social Problems 32 no. 4 (1985): 348–62.

4 “Say Women Did Not Re-Elect Wilson,” Washington Times, December 6, 1916, 12.

5 Katherine Adams and Michael Keene, Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008).

6 Jacqueline Van Voris, Carrie Chapman Catt: A Public Life (New York: Feminist Press, 1987).

7 Alan McKee, Textual Analysis: A Beginner’s Guide (London: Sage, 2003), 1.

8 Karen Celis and Sarah Childs, “The Substantive Representation of Women: What to Do with Conservative Claims?” Political Studies 60, no. 1 (2012): 213–25; Jane Jerome Camhi, Women against Women: American Anti-Suffragism, 1880–1920 (Brooklyn: Carlson Publishing, 1994); Manuela Thurner, “‘Better Citizens without the Ballot’: American Antisuffrage Women and Their Rationale during the Progressive Era,” Journal of Women’s History 5, no. 1 (1993): 33–60.

9 Melissa Blais and Francis Dupuis-Déri. “Masculinism and the Antifeminist Countermovement,” Social Movement Studies 11, no. 1 (2012): 21–39; Kristy Maddux, “When Patriots Protest: The Anti-Suffrage Discursive Transformation of 1917,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 7 no. 3 (2004): 283–310; David S. Meyer and Suzanne Staggenborg, “Movements, Countermovements, and the Structure of Political Opportunity,” American Journal of Sociology 101, no 6. (1996): 1628–60; Erin Steuter, “Women against Feminism: An Examination of Feminist Social Movements and Anti‐Feminist Countermovements,” Canadian Review of Sociology 29, no. 3 (1992): 288–306.

10 Lee Ann Banaszak and Heather L. Ondercin, “Explaining the Dynamics between the Women’s Movement and the Conservative Movement in the United States,” Social Forces 95, no. 1 (2016): 381–410, 404–05.

11 John McCarthy and Mayer Zald, The Trend of Social Movements in America: Professionalization and Resource Mobilization (Morristown, NJ: General Learning Press, 1973), 2.

12 Meyer and Staggenborg, “Movements, Countermovements.”

13 Tahi L. Mottl, “The Analysis of Countermovements,” Social Problems 27, no. 5 (1980): 620–35, 620; Blais and Dupuis-Déri, “Masculinism,” 28.

14 Mottl, “The Analysis of Countermovements.”

15 Meyer and Staggenborg, “Movements, Countermovements”; see also Janet Saltzman Chafetz and Anthony Gary Dworkin, “In the Face of Threat: Organized Antifeminism in Comparative Perspective,” Gender and Society 1, no. 1 (1987): 33–60.

16 Robert D. Benford and David A. Snow, “Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment,” Annual Review of Sociology 26, no. 1 (2000): 611–39, 626; Robert Benford, Framing Activity, Meaning, and Social-movement Participation: The Nuclear Disarmament Movement (Austin: University of Texas at Austin, 1987).

17 Meyer and Staggenborg, “Movements, Countermovements.”

18 Blais and Dupuis-Déri, “Masculinism”; Burt, “The Ideology”; Mottl, “The Analysis of Countermovements”; Ralph H. Turner and Lewis M Killian, Collective Behavior (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972).

19 Elizabeth V. Burt, “Journalism of the Suffrage Movement: 25 Years of Recent Scholarship,” American Journalism 17 no. 1 (2000): 73–86, 77.

20 Mottl, “The Analysis of Countermovements,” 628; Turner and Killian, Collective Behavior; Burt, “The Ideology.”

21 See Paula Baker, “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780–1920,” American Historical Review 89 (1984): 620–47.

22 Clarence Lo, “Countermovements and Conservative Movements in the Contemporary US,” Annual Review of Sociology 8 no. 1 (1982): 107–34, 109; Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, The Politics of Unreason: Right Wing Extremism in America, 1790–1977, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

23 Marshall, “Ladies against Women.”

24 Todd Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 2.

25 Todd Gitlin, “Media Sociology,” Theory and Society 6, no. 2 (1978): 205–53, 205.

26 John E. Richardson, Analysing Newspapers: An Approach from Critical Discourse Analysis (New York: Palgrave Macmillan Basingstoke, 2007), 37.

27 Eleanor Flexner and Ellen Frances Fitzpatrick, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).

28 Robert Fowler, Carrie Chapman Catt: Feminist Politician (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986), 105.

29 Flexner and Fitzpatrick, Century of Struggle.

30 Rebecca Mead, How the Vote Was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868–1914 (New York: New York University Press, 2004).

31 Mead, How the Vote Was Won.

32 Carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Rogers Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics: The Inner Story of the Suffrage Movement (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1923), 249.

33 Flexner and Fitzpatrick, Century of Struggle.

34 Catt and Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics.

35 Flexner and Fitzpatrick, Century of Struggle.

36 Maddux, “When Patriots Protest.”

37 Massachusetts Historical Society, “Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Further Extension of Suffrage to Women Records,” http://www.masshist.org/collection-guides/view/fa0121 (accessed June 30, 2017); Benjamin, Women against Equality; Thurner, “Better Citizens.”

38 Billie Barnes Jensen, “In the Weird and Wooly West: Anti-Suffrage Women,” Gender Issues 32 no. 3 (1993): 41–51.

39 Lee Ann Banaszak, Why Movements Succeed or Fail: Opportunity, Culture, and the Struggle for Woman Suffrage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Camhi, Women against Women; Jensen, “In the Weird”; Steuter, “Women against Feminism.”

40 Steuter, “Women against Feminism,” 292.

41 Camhi, Women against Women.

42 Library of Congress. “Woman’s Suffrage in the Progressive Era,” http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/presentationsandactivities/presentations/timeline/progress/suffrage/remonst.html (accessed June 30, 2017); Burt, “The Ideology.”

43 “A Duty to Keep Still?” Remonstrance, 1904, 2; Burt, “The Ideology.”

44 Susan Goodier, No Votes for Women: The New York State Anti-Suffrage Movement (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 5.

45 Ibid., 9.

46 “Address of Mrs. W. Winslow Crannell,” July 8, 1896. Historic Cherry Hill Collections, Albany, NY.

47 “Address of Mrs. W. Winslow Crannell,” July 16, 1896. Historic Cherry Hill Collections, Albany NY.

48 Maddux, “When Patriots Protest.”

49 Goodier, No Votes for Women, 38.

50 Marshall, Splintered Sisterhood.

51 Marshall, “Ladies against Women,” 5; Camhi, Women against Women; Goodier, No Votes for Women; Marshall, Splintered Sisterhood.

52 Thurner, “Better Citizens.”

53 Ibid.

54 Goodier, No Votes for Women, 41.

55 Belinda Southard, Militant Citizenship: Rhetorical Strategies of the National Woman’s Party, 1913–1920, Vol. 21 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2011).

56 Camhi, Women against Women.

57 Jo Freeman, A Room at a Time: How Women Entered Party Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 29.

58 Ibid.

59 Box 39, Anti-suffrage literature, National American Woman Suffrage Association Records, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

60 Benjamin, Women against Equality.

61 Marshall, Splintered Sisterhood.

62 Ibid.

63 Camhi, Women against Women.

64 Benjamin, Women against Equality.

65 Ibid.

66 Benjamin, Women against Equality; Maddux, “When Patriots Protest.”

67 Maddux, “When Patriots Protest,” 285.

68 Goodier, No Votes for Women.

69 Maddux, “When Patriots Protest”; Marshall, Splintered Sisterhood.

70 Marshall, Splintered Sisterhood.

71 Four searches were conducted based on the terms used to describe the anti-suffrage movement: antis, anti-suffrage, National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, and “antis and suffrage” within ten words of each other. “Antis” generated 35,558 results, anti-suffrage 328 results, National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage forty-five results, and “antis and suffrage” 479 results. Results were sorted by relevance, with the first 200 “antis” articles analyzed, the first 100 “anti-suffrage” results, all forty-five of the “National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage” results, and all 479 “antis and suffrage” results for a total initial sample of 824 articles. After discarding articles that were repeats, opinion pieces, ads, irrelevant, or not written in English, the final sample was 397 articles—both stories and briefs—from 36 states and Washington, DC. The researcher read each text multiple times, noting all commentary related to anti-suffragism and specifically examined the framing. Material was coded to identify themes.

72 Burt, “Journalism of the Suffrage Movement.”

73 “Anti-Suffragists Decide to Keep Up Strong Fight,” Tulsa Daily World, April 27, 1917, 8.

74 “Drop Suffrage Parlay in War,” Bridgeport Evening Farmer, May 3, 1917, 12.

75 This ties into a broader study about the role of mothers in World War I and how the press aided the Wilson administration in creating the concept of the “Patriotic Mother of the Great War.” See Ana C. Garner and Karen Slattery, “Mobilizing Mother: From Good Mother to Patriotic Mother in World War I,” Journalism & Communication Monographs 14 no. 1 (2012): 5–77.

76 “Suffragists at War over Referendum,” Omaha Daily Bee, June 11, 1917, 5.

77 “350,000 Women Offer Services to President,” Evening Star, February 18, 1917, 2.

78 “Says Suffrage Amendment Would Be Menace to US,” El Paso Herald, November 23, 1917, 5.

79 “Call Suffragists Enemies of Nation,” Evening Star, November 23, 1917, 15

80 “Anti-Suffragists Open Convention,” Evening Star, December 11, 1917, 20.

81 “Victory of Suffragists in New York,” Bridgeport Evening Farmer, December 13, 1917, 11.

82 “Heads the Antis,” Democratic Banner, July 27, 1917, 2.

83 “Antis Step into Arena,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, July 3, 1917, 1.

84 “Big Slam at Pickets Is Letter,” Lake County Times, July 30, 1917, 6.

85 “Heads the Antis,” The Broad Ax, July 28, 1917, 3.

86 “Women Want Some Peace in Time of War,” Daily Ardmoreite, April 18, 1917, 3.

87 “Liquor Interests and Anti-Suffragists Are Forced into Alliance,” Bridgeport Evening Farmer, February 28, 1917, 5.

88 “Don’t Want Ballot as Price for Patriotism,” Bismarck Tribune, May 15, 1917, 8.

89 “Suffragists to Demand the Ballot,” Evening Capital News, December 9, 1917, 15.

90 Burt, “Journalism of the Suffrage Movement,” 77.

91 “Antis Say Suffs Won on Pacifism,” Sun, November 23, 1917, 7.

92 “Vote Thrust upon Them, Antis Fear,” Evening Public Ledger, November 8, 1917, 3.

93 “Senator’s Wife Heads the Foes of Suffrage,” Evening Star, June 30, 1917, 8.

94 “Anti-Suffragists Line up in Capital for Spring Drive,” Washington Times, July 2, 1917, 2; “Heads the Antis,” Democratic Banner, July 27, 1917, 2.

95 “House Votes to Create Suffrage Committee,” Evening Star, September 25, 1917, 9.

96 “Appointment Pleases Anti-Suffrage Forces,” Evening Star, October 7, 1917, 16.

97 “Root Opposes Suffrage,” East Oregonian, September 27, 1917, 8.

98 “What Prominent People Think of Woman Suffrage,” Union Times, March 16, 1917, 3.

99 Marshall, Splintered Sisterhood.

100 “Carrie Chapman Catt Writes on State Suffrage,” Omaha Daily Bee, August 21, 1917, 7.

101 “Says Claim Is Disproved,” Fulton County Tribune, June 8, 1917, 2.

102 “Anti-Suffragists Resent Innuendos,” Omaha Daily Bee, July 30, 1917, 5.

103 “Call Suffragists Enemies of Nation,” Evening Star, November 23, 1917, 15.

104 “Women Mean to Have Amendment,” Albuquerque Morning Journal, December 14, 1917, 2.

105 “Dwells on Human Side of Municipal Survey,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, November 23, 1917, 5.

106 “Vote Yes on Both Amendments,” Omaha Daily Bee, December 5, 1917, 10.

107 “Omaha Women Rejoice at Progress,” Omaha Daily Bee, April 21, 1917, 2.

108 “Dwells on Human Side of Municipal Survey,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, November 23, 1917, 5.

109 “Suffrage Discussed before the General Assembly,” Newark Post, February 21, 1917, 6.

110 “War Has Helped Woman Suffrage,” Barre Daily Times, August 31, 1917, 3.

111 “Mrs. Catt Raps US Democracy,” Sound Bend News-Times, May 14, 1917, 8.

112 “Bryan in Nashville,” Carroll County Democrat, February 2, 1917, 1.

113 “Long Debate on Brokerage Bill,” Brattleboro Daily Reformer, March 9, 1917, 1.

114 “Antis’ Pacifism Argument Ridiculous, Raker Declares,” Evening Star, December 27, 1917, 15.

115 “Woman Suffrage,” Chariton Courier, August 17, 1917, 4.