White Southern Activists and Anti-Suffrage

Nashville, Tennessee, was suffrage’s final battleground in August 1920. Thirty-six states needed to ratify the Susan B. Anthony Amendment (aka the woman suffrage amendment) to make it official, and thirty-five states had approved ratification as the Tennessee legislature began its debates. Suffragists and anti-suffragists from across the nation poured into the city. As legislators returned to the state capital after summer vacation, they were met in the train station, their offices, and other public places by women activists on both sides of the debate.

Anti-suffragists had reason to hope. Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia had all rejected ratification. For years, anti-suffrage had been closely tied to the ideology of the Confederacy, and the mythology of the Lost Cause placed significant emphasis on woman’s privileged role. White Southerners believed changes to womanhood threatened the Southern way of life and that empowering women through the vote—particularly Black and poor white women—was dangerous.

Suffragists were optimistic that Tennessee legislators would respond to the growing national momentum toward suffrage. They were right, but just barely. Tennessee approved ratification by just one vote. The Nineteenth Amendment passed.

Josephine Pearson and Nina Pinckard led the anti-suffrage battle in Tennessee and posed for this photo outside their headquarters. The symbolism in this image ties anti-suffrage to the supposed honor and glory of the Old South. The women stand on either side of an elderly Civil War veteran. Nina holds a Confederate flag. Along the flagpole is a banner honoring Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest. Behind the women are portraits of Tennessean Andrew Jackson and his wife, Rachel.

Josephine Pearson included this photograph in a scrapbook and wrote the caption.

• anti-suffrage: Opposing the expansion of the right to vote.
• Confederate Army: The army of the Southern Confederate states during the American Civil War.
• Ku Klux Klan: A white supremacy group formed by ex-Confederates after the Civil War that terrorized Black citizens and their supporters.
• Nineteenth Amendment: The constitutional amendment that declared the right to vote could not be denied on the basis of sex; it was ratified in 1920.
• ratification: The process by which an amendment to the federal Constitution is approved or rejected by states.
• suffrage: The right of voting; in this era, suffrage often referred specifically to woman suffrage, or the right of women to vote.
• Susan B. Anthony Amendment: The name of the Nineteenth Amendment before it was ratified.
• The Lost Cause: A false view of the Civil War that argues the war was fought over states’ rights, not slavery, and that the Confederate cause was about protecting the honor of the South.

• AP Government Connection: 4.4: Influence of Political Events on Ideology
• Learn more about the Lost Cause mythology and the particular role women played in promoting this white Southern ideology by analyzing this photograph in tandem with images of the Jefferson Davis Memorial, the life story of Janet Randolph, and additional resources in the curriculum Black Citizenship in the Age of Jim Crow.
• Consider this photograph in juxtaposition to the many Black suffragists within this unit, including Adella Hunt Logan, Fannie Barrier Williams, Ida B. Wells, and Mary Church Terrell.

POWER AND POLITICS

• For more about Jim Crow racism and the Lost Cause mythology, see Black Citizenship in the Age of Jim Crow.