Introducing: The Wrong Side of History — The Women Who Fought Against the Vote

0:00Hey everyone, this is Jay, the producer for Secret Leaders, and as Dan, Chris and I have all gone on to do different things, I have been making a show that I think you're going to like. It's called Wrong Side of History, and it's all about helping you understand history's bad guys in the way they understood themselves. I'm going to explain the worldview of the people who ended up on the wrong side of history from their perspective, so you'll understand what they feared, what they valued, and why it all made sense to them. In this season, we're talking about one of the strangest movements in modern political history, the women who fought against getting the vote, and why they thought that getting the vote would be a disaster for women, children, in the nation.

0:43And if that is hard to believe and kind of doesn't make any sense, let me explain. So I'm going to play you the first episode, and if you like it, follow Wrong Side of History wherever you're listening now. Alright, let's get into it.

1:01The anti-suffragists. For decades, they stood in the way of progress. whereas these people, most of them women, did everything they could to stop themselves and other women from getting the vote. Were they fooled? Were they coerced? Were they self-hating? Maybe they just couldn't even imagine a world with rights. Over the next couple of episodes, we're going to dive into the worldview of the American anti-suffragists. What were they really fighting against? What were they really fighting for? And how did they understand the world? Hello and welcome to The Wrong Side of History. I'm Jay Singleton and this is a show where I help you understand some of history's bad guys in the way that they understood themselves.

1:44To actually understand what they feared, what they valued, and sometimes discover how things might have made sense from their perspective. No one thinks that they're the bad guy. Nobody wakes up one day and says, today I'll be on the wrong side of history. And so here's the question. If no one thinks that they're the bad guy. How do well-meaning and intelligent people end up there? If you think history is often told too simply, with clear heroes and villains, if you've ever wondered how people could genuinely see the world so differently, then this is for you. Through this show, I want to give you the opportunity to try on a new perspective.

2:31To see things from the perspective of people who history has so resoundingly rejected as backwards. But more than anything, this show is a challenge. It's an experiment in radical empathy. Over the next few episodes, I want to tell you about the women who opposed the women's suffrage movement in America. First, I want to help you understand what they feared. That is, why they thought the vote would be a disaster. And then I want to help you understand why they thought they had so little to gain by getting the vote. But before all that, I need to tell you three things from the outset that might be pretty hard to swallow.

3:09And frankly, you'd have every reason to be suspicious of, but go with me.

3:19Women got the vote in America in 1920. And up until that point, suffrage was never popular with the majority of women. Two, for many years, men were more progressive on it than women. And three, up until 1916, there were more women recorded as actively being organized against getting the vote than there were in favor of it. These women were called the antis. And if all of this sounds inconceivable, I think it makes a little bit more sense if you can see the world the way they did. You see, for them, the vote was about so much more than casting a ballot. It was a symbol of a wider rearrangement.

4:04Their role in a new republic, the status of women in society, the role of government and private life, religion, tradition, even capitalism and socialism. These women who opposed the vote, the antis, They genuinely thought that they had very little to gain and everything to lose. That defending the country against the vote was the best thing that they could do for women, children, and the nation. And by the 1900s, with the suffragist movement becoming more successful, they felt that they could no longer ignore it. But, what were they so afraid of? I want to start with a core concept that helped shape the way the anti saw getting the vote.

4:47And this doesn't just tell you what they're afraid of, but it also tells you what they sought to protect. And that is the ideology of separate spheres. Or what many people would call today, gender roles. I think you might already have an idea in your head about what gender roles are, but let me just lay it out for you and then we'll go into the elements that this worldview is based on. Because it's not what you think. Because to the people who are living it and to the people who support it, It's not a hierarchy, and it's not really about keeping people out of certain roles. So in the 19th and early 20th century Anglo-America, many people believed that men, women, and society were better off if each sex had its own sphere of authority.

5:31Men were supposed to run the public sphere of law, business, and government. Women were supposed to run the private sphere of home, children, and community. Men and women were said to have different natural aptitudes, men as providers and protectors, women as nurturers and moral guardians, and in return, men were expected to show women a certain level of charity, patronage, deference. And the supporters of separate spheres would consider these things to be the special privileges that women were entitled to and in need of. But overall, separate spheres ideology was about three things. morality, protection, and specialization.

6:16So first I want to help you understand the moral argument. What is the moral argument for separating people's roles in the world based on sex? What could be the moral argument for maintaining a social and legal arrangement that kept men and women's roles in society distinct? What did the antis see? Now I can imagine as you hear about gender roles with your modern ears to convalidate how unequal this time was, how unjust it was that women were expected to stay in the private sphere of home, children, and community. While it was expected that men could go out into business and government, shaping the world, getting all the wealth and the status, and then giving women the crumbs of chivalry and patronage and telling them that these were special privileges, when really it was because of their dependence that they would even need such special privileges.

7:07And I understand that it would be seen that way at this time, but to be clear, for the women who supported separate spheres, that is not how they felt about it. In fact, many of them thought that the private sphere was actually the better deal and the higher calling, because if your sense of injustice comes from the impression that women are being excluded from the positions of power and influence, the antis would disagree. They didn't see themselves as powerless. But why? Well, in our modern context, it can be hard to separate these two things, but these women very much saw themselves, and women in general, as political actors, just not partisan ones.

7:49They didn't equate not casting a ballot to mean political powerlessness. In fact, politics without party was a key idea to how the antis saw women's unique power. This informal influence is a big part of the reason that the Antis felt that they didn't need a formal vote. They thought that they had a different kind of power. But we'll talk more about that in a later episode. You see, morality played a huge part in why the Antis didn't want to be made to be partisans by being given the vote. I'm going to read a quote from a reverend of the time. It's Reverend F.P. Lodzitz, and he's giving a sermon in a Boston cathedral.

8:29He says, Man as natural protector, father, lawgiver, warns against unsexing woman and dragging her into public life. Woman's charm and influence come from living in a sphere of heart.

8:48And this is the line I want you to remember. Woman's charm and influence come from living in a sphere of heart. now the idea of natural roles as the reverend says might feel really restrictive and overly deterministic it's the complete opposite of the liberal and individual's world that many of us have been raised in but the anti see men and women as being born with certain powers and aptitudes that come with corresponding duties and responsibilities they see it as in women's nature, or shaped by God and by their work in the home, to be pure, more selfless, and less corrupted by money and ambition.

9:33They see women's role as having a higher moral status and a special kind of authority. And all of this meant that women were supposed to stand apart from the crudeness of public life. But why? It's so that they could serve as the moral guardians of the nation, raising the next generation, setting the moral standards. But the suffragists, the people who supported getting the vote, they did have a counter-argument to this. They'd say, you know, if you think women are so much better morally, why wouldn't you want more of that good influence in party politics? Great question. Valid point. Well, in response, the Antis thought that entering politics as a partisan would actually undermine their moral influence in the world in two ways.

10:26First, there was the risk of being dragged into the mud that men were in. They worried that by entering party politics, they would become just as crude and competitive as men. All of the social ills that the suffragists and the antis would ascribe to men would appear in women just the same. So in order to keep women from being corrupted by party politics, they thought that women should stay out of the partisan world. The other way that they thought that getting the vote would undermine women's influence in the world is that it would undermine their greatest power, moral persuasion. Many of the suffragists also believe that women were morally superior to men, but in their view, that meant that if women joined the political arena, they would have the opportunity to civilize it.

11:12Which, on one level, makes perfect sense. If an institution is filled with different kinds of people, won't that institution change? If the voting public of the nation includes more moral people, won't that change the government in the right direction? Well, the Antis thought that the system really couldn't be changed from the inside, only contained and managed from the outside. To them, the idea of trying to clean up party politics by entering it would be like trying to clean up a pool of mud by entering it. It was just seen as an inherently dirty game that would compromise anyone who tried to succeed in it.

11:51It was thought of as a necessary evil, one that needed to be restrained. And so maybe you could think of it as something like the separation between church and state. The ideology of separate spheres reinforced women's moral authority through a sort of mutually beneficial separation of powers. One has the power of the secular world, and the other has the power of the soul. By separating, the church can maintain its uncompromised moral status, and it can serve as the moral standard to aspire to without having to make the real-world compromises inherent in governing. And the state can be more practical.

12:29The idea was that women were both naturally higher moral beings and corruptible by involvement in the public sphere, just as the church is corruptible. And they thought that the best way to protect the country from moral corruption was to protect women from moral corruption so that they could stand apart as a non-partisan example. The fear was that if all women joined the partisan fight, they would lose the weight of that unbiased advocacy. They would simply be treated as another voter instantly distrusted by half of the government. Basically, if everyone's playing the game, who will be the referee.

13:11I think it's important to note that the antis and the suffragists don't disagree about everything, and this might be more common than we typically acknowledge. Even when groups have dramatically different visions of the best path forward, they often recognize the same problems. You might think of the women who opposed the vote as conservative, and in some ways they were. They were trying to preserve an institution and a value system that they thought was best. But what did they think it was best for? A lot of the women leading the anti-suffrage movement were reformers in their own right. They shared many of the same goals as the suffragists.

13:53They just disagreed about the method of achieving them. Here are some examples of these reformist anti-suffragists. One is Josephine Dodge in New York. She was building child care for working mothers. She founded a day nursery. She pushed a whole network of day nursery reforms. There's Kate Wells. She was on the Board of Education in Massachusetts. She advocated for public health reforms and civic reforms. There's Ida Tarbell, one of the most impactful investigative journalists maybe of all time. Her investigations helped break apart the standard oil monopoly with Rockefeller. And so all of these reformists, politically engaged, sometimes careerist women also opposed women's suffrage.

14:34Because their argument wasn't that women shouldn't shape society. They were arguing that they already do. Through institutions, through moral authority, through non-partisan civic power. And getting the vote will put them into the mud of party politics and weaken their ability to actually get those reforms. Think about it this way. You might trust a charity more than a for-profit business. There's something about knowing that somebody has no team to root for, nothing personal to gain, no profile to raise that just makes you trust them more. And if getting the vote means diminishing the value of your opinion, well, for some people, that just wasn't worth it.

15:21And it was this impartiality and the pure intention of women's politics that the antis were afraid of losing. I think the charity idea is a really good example because you might want to do good in the world and be faced with this conflict that, on one hand, And if you do it as a charity, you spend the entire time sort of begging and asking and putting your hand out and trying to persuade people with resources to support you. And you might be tempted, if you're a charity, to be for profit. To say, you know, I don't want to beg people anymore. I don't want to have to ask the public. I don't want to have to justify everything on somebody else's terms.

16:01Why don't I just make profit and then I can do what I want and I can do good on my own terms? But there's a cost to going for profit. That is the cost of having the uncompromised mission. And there are benefits to going for profit. And that is, you have money, you can do what you want. Anyways, I was just recording. I thought of that as a good analogy of why the soft power of moral authority might be desired over the hard power of the vote. So the idea that women could play a moralizing and civilizing influence in the world was a strong belief on both sides. But the Antis thought that their influence was best kept separate.

16:43Having the vote would decrease their power as women rather than increase it. But this whole morality thing about women not being corrupted by the public sphere and keeping the power of separate moral influence was only one part of the separate sphere's ideology. Another part was the sense of protection that this arrangement and gender roles gave women. In Jane Kamee's book, Women Against Women, she says something that I think a lot of people will struggle to hear. She says, women cannot have equal rights and retain special privileges. This idea is best illustrated by Josephine Dodge again, when she says, she considered the vote to be the bartering of birthright for the mess of pottage.

17:26Now, I'm going to pause here. Because if you're listening to this in 2026, you might be thinking, Excuse me? What special privileges did a woman have in the early 1900s America? And this is where that radical empathy I spoke about at the beginning is going to need to kick in. The question isn't about your ideals and values. It's about understanding the world as these women saw it. why they so energetically fought to protect this arrangement of separate spheres. Okay, so what were these women thinking? It's early 1900s America. Women couldn't vote, right? They could rarely get a divorce. There weren't many jobs, and the ones that did exist were often low status and low pay.

18:17They couldn't make contracts or open bank accounts or control property. In so many ways, they were the dependents of the males in their lives. But with all of that, many of these women, the majority, considered themselves to be in the position of protection and privilege. How could anyone think that? In short, they were thinking, independence is a little overrated. they would say that for all its restrictions maybe the norm of men being socially and legally responsible to their wives and children is actually better for women than everyone only being socially and legally responsible for themselves now let me put this for you into the practical terms in the way that the anti might have been thinking about it so let's take the coverture laws these are the code of laws in america inherited from britain And in this old legal system, it says that a married couple was treated as one legal entity, and that was basically under the name of the husband.

19:25Now, of course, all of that sounds pretty restrictive, but as Susan B. Anthony, godmother of suffrage herself, said in the history of women's suffrage, quote,

19:41Unquote. Okay, Jay, you're telling me that not only did women not want the vote, but they also didn't want to control their own property. What. Are. You. Talking. About. Now, Susan B. Anthony, like many of us, would chalk this up to women being manipulated, or just not being able to imagine a world in which they would have individual property rights. But what if there were some other reasons that you wouldn't be all that bothered about changing the laws, so you could control your own property. For starters, you probably didn't own any property. It's like when a politician goes on some campaign to lower inheritance and capital gains tax and you're like, yeah, that sounds great, but a 2 % tax reduction on zero is still zero.

20:33To many women, the idea of property rights was a class issue that had nothing to do with them. And if you happen to be a woman with family assets, there are already workarounds. You'd probably have a dower and a trust that would protect your ownership and family wealth from a reckless or abusive husband. And for most people, that would be enough. Because the idea of pushing for anything more than this sort of patchwork arrangement, it would feel threatening to the marriage, like asking your partner for a prenup all of a sudden. They'd definitely have some questions about your commitment to the relationship.

21:07And the last reason that things like property rights just weren't a huge issue for the anti-suffragists at the time was that ownership has its perks, but so does not owning things. It's kind of like when renting an apartment. Sure, there are a lot of things you won't be able to do around the house, and you can be at the whims of rent hikes, but also, if something goes wrong, you've got a little protection. It's not all your problem. If a boiler goes out, you can call the landlord. If there's a leak in your roof, you can call the landlord. If there's a nest of raccoons in your attic, you can...

21:40Look, the point is, ownership comes with liabilities. And if, and this is crucial, if you think your husband is going to be decent and reliable, it might not feel like a problem that you aren't the owner. Because you trust him, and you trust him to take responsibility for it. Plus, by the 1900s, a lot of places in America were moving away from these kinds of coverture laws. And I say all this to say that if you want to understand why these women, why the antis, were so defensive of an arrangement in which they couldn't own property and they couldn't vote and there were very few good job opportunities for them, it's because while all of that might make us feel insecure and vulnerable today, they didn't feel vulnerable.

22:28They felt that there were workarounds and all of those things, including wage laws and divorce, they felt were already addressable without getting the vote. And so when the suffragists claim that the vote is needed so that women can secure their rights, it just doesn't resonate. But okay, I said these women consider themselves to be protected and privileged. Protection from legal liabilities, it can't be everything. well to the antis the arrangement of separate spheres had a few other benefits that they were reluctant to risk letting go and those were the sex-based exemptions and so in the american northeast there were these things like tax exemptions for women even exemptions for arrests for certain crimes but the main one was that they were exempt from conscription to state service that means military service police conscription and worst of all jury duty i've never been on jury duty, so I don't know how bad it is, but to the antis not having to serve in the jury, it's almost worth not having the vote all on its own.

23:32So it must be pretty bad. Anyways, I want to tie this back to the vote, because when I was researching this, I remember thinking, how much of this has nothing to do with voting? Actually, voting is hardly even mentioned. Sure, they think that women are positive moral influence. Sure, they want to keep their exemptions and their legal liabilities. But why can't you have all of those things and also have the vote? Why limit your options? And the reason is because the vote is seen as a symbol of a wider rearrangement in society. And if the argument is that there are no natural differences in aptitude or suitability or duties based on sex, then on what grounds could any legal or social sex-based distinctions be made?

24:19to take the vote would be the beginning of eroding all sex-based distinctions. And then what would be next? Women sent to the front lines? Here's a quote from Frederick Douglass. He says, American freedom depends on the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box. The advocates of women's suffrage demand complete use of the first, the ballot box, partial use of the second, the jury box, and entire exemption from the third, the cartridge box. on which both of the others rely for their existence. And they do this in the name of equal rights to all and special privileges to none. Their requests would be ludicrous if it were not dangerous.

25:02End quote. Mind you, this is Frederick Douglass, the slave abolitionist and one of the first supporters of Elizabeth Cady Stanton from 1848. He was a strong supporter of suffrage. But he was saying that full inclusion has to mean no exemptions. The argument that the antis were responding to was that not having the vote would mean not being called up for fire service or military service or worse, jury duty. And put in that extreme way, it was incredibly persuasive to the women who didn't want to go that far. Because if getting the vote is an all-or-nothing decision about being seen as indistinguishable from men legally and socially, then for many women, it just wasn't worth it.

25:53But it wasn't just their moral status and their exemptions that they were afraid of losing. They also wanted to protect something. The family as the basic unit of society. So while all this talk about easier divorce, separate bank accounts, separate properties, separate votes, sounds like liberation to the suffragists, to the antis, it sounded like more divorce, more individualism, more conflict, women being conscripted. And in the minds of the antis, it all started with the slippery slope of putting women into partisan politics. And as with all slippery slope arguments, it's this sense of foreboding that once you start on this path, there's really no logical stopping point.

26:38And to the antis, they saw the end of that slippery slope as catastrophic. They believed that the family unit was the absolute bedrock of the nation, and a threat to that was existential. And core to that unity and stability is the idea that men and women need each other. I mean, really need each other, not just that they choose to be together, but are interdependent. And so they have socially and legally reinforced duties to each other. And the thought of untangling that interdependent and reinforced sense of duty felt like a very serious risk. And to the antis, the societal and legal expectation for interdependence and duty was a cultural advancement that favored women.

27:26because while the suffragists would claim all the benefits of individualism, the antis were worried about what would happen if men no longer felt obliged to be chivalrous. Who would that help? Would all of this result in women's liberation or them all having the same burdens as ever, but now with no expectation of men to aid them? Look, many of the suffragists would hear those worries from the antis and say, I understand, and you're totally right. Simply eroding all the societal and legally enforced duties between men and women won't solve all of women's grievances, and might even cause some additional ones.