Document HS II-13: “A Female Suffrage Fancy,” Cartoon by Joseph Veppler, published in Puck, July 1880.

Text included in the pictures, beginning with top left corner and moving clockwise:

caption: “Nevermore—Nevermore!”

Ballot Box; Political Machine; Sewing Machines for SALE Cheap;

caption: The Sewing Machine is Superceded

caption: Wife out Electioneering

caption: Ugly-Looking Man Driven from the Polls

Our Candidate; The Ladies PET, Demure and Simple;

caption: A Handsome Fool gets the Office

[large image in center] caption: Lovely Woman having Removed her “political Disablities” is Prepared to Vote;

[books on the floor]: Cook Book, Female Deportment, Modesty; [on left, label on the bottle]: beard grease; [words on paper]: Whiskers Forced to Grow; [individual’s hand rests on box labeled] Cigars

caption: Treats like a Male Politician and has it “Chalked Up” like one

caption: Good Looking Ones Caressed

Document HS II-15: The Anti’s Say No: Excerpts from “Why We Do Not Approve,” 1914.

Why We Do Not Approve Of WOMAN SUFFRAGE

Because: We feel that the ballot makes absolutely no difference in the economic status of woman. Whether she votes or not, her charities, great and small, will continue, professions will extend diplomas to her intelligence, and trade will grant recompense to her ability. As for the protection of the ballot to working women, it will protect them no farther than it protects men who, in spite of their voting power, find themselves unable to cope with labor conditions by legislation and form themselves into unions outside of law and law making.

Because: Our hospital Boards, our social and civic service work, our child welfare committees and countless other clubs and industries for the general welfare and uplift need women who can give nonpartisan and unselfish service, the worth of which service would be greatly lessened by political affiliations.

Because: Behind law there must always be force to make it effective. If legislation was shaped by a majority of women over men we should soon have, not government, but chaos.

Because: It is an attested fact that politics degrade women more than women purify politics.

Because: We believe the interests of all women are as safe in the hands of men as in those of other women.

Because: Thorough investigation of the laws of suffrage states shows that non-suffrage states have by far the better and more humane laws, and that all laws are more strictly enforced than in suffrage states.

Because: Women make little use of suffrage when it is given them. school suffrage has been a lamentable failure, the women vote averaging scarcely two per cent in any state.

Because: The energies of women are engrossed by their present duties and interests, from which men cannot relieve them, and there is great need of better performance of their present work rather than diversion to new fields of activity.

Because: The suffrage movement develops sex hatred which is a menace to society.

Anti-Suffrage Leaflet, c. 1914, from the collection of Denison Library, Scripps College.

Document HS II-16: The Struggle for Suffrage: Excerpts from Florence Luscomb’s Oral History.

In the late 1960s, two historians interviewed Florence Luscomb about her activities in the campaign to gain the right for women to vote.

In 1915, we had a referendum in Massachusetts for an amendment to the state constitution. By that time, we had organizations in all the big cities and the important towns. But in the small towns we didn't have any contacts. So we got two little automobiles of four workers in each one, and between them, they covered the state spending a day in each community. We'd go there in the morning, and we'd canvass the whole town with leaflets, talking to any of the men that we could catch. If there was a farmer in the field, we'd run out and talk to him, or if he wasn't home, we'd talk to his wife, and leave leaflets for him. We had all these leaflets: "Why the mother needs to vote so she can control the conditions of the education and health that affect her children." "Why the working woman needs to vote so that she can have something to say about the laws."... If there was a little local industry in town, perhaps a little sawmill or something, we'd go there at noon and hand out leaflets.... If there was an East Podunck and a West Podunck, we'd have one meeting at seven and the other at eight. I was in charge of one of those little automobile parties….

We had a young man who was hired as the chauffeur for our party. Here I was spending all these weeks driving around over the backroads of the state, so when we were going from one town to another, he showed me how to drive. I learned to drive over the worst roads, and the result was I had perfect control of the car. And at that time the only thing you had to do was to send in a sworn statement that you had driven one hundred miles. So I drove one hundred miles, and I sent it in, and I got my driving license.

Two of the most effective bits of propaganda of the referendum campaign were the two great parades held in Boston in 1914 and '15. We made a great effort to have a contingent in the parade of working women. My own special job was to get women laundry workers as one section in that parade… I visited practically all the women's laundries in Boston at noontime, and spoke to the women, and urged them to come out and march in this suffrage parade… We had a working woman's section in our parade. Just why seeing women walk down the street in parade should convince men to vote for suffrage is a mystery, but they did so by the thousands. Probably because it gave them visual proof that the women who wanted the suffrage were ordinary representative women – homemakers, mothers, daughters, teachers, working women – and not the unsexed freaks the antis declared they were.

Quoted in Moving the Mountain: Women Working for Social Change, ed. by Ellen Cantarow (Feminist Press, 1969).