Southern Anti-Suffrage

Thirty-six states needed to ratify the women’s suffrage amendment to make it the law of the land. Thirty-five states had ratified it by August 1920, when the Tennessee state legislature opened debate on the amendment. The remaining states were unlikely to pass it. This turned Nashville, Tennessee, into the final battleground for the women’s suffrage movement.

Suffragists and anti-suffragists from across the nation poured into the city. State legislators returning from their summer vacations were confronted in the train station by women activists on both sides of the debate. Women also visited their offices and approached them in public spaces to make their case. This level of women’s political engagement was unprecedented in Nashville. The pressure was on. 

Anti-suffragists had reason to hope. Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia had all rejected ratification. Many white Southerners believed changes to womanhood threatened the Southern way of life. Some felt that empowering Black and poor white women was dangerous. Some worried that any new federal laws would lead to the enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. For these reasons, some Southern suffragists had focused on state amendments rather than federal ones.

Despite all this, 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, and the Nineteenth Amendment became the law of the land.

This photograph shows two leaders of the anti-suffrage movement in Tennessee outside their headquarters. They are posing with an elderly Confederate Army veteran. Nina Pinckard holds a Confederate flag with a banner honoring Nathan Bedford Forrest. Nathan Bedford Forrest was a Confederate general and founder of the Ku Klux Klan. In the background are portraits of President Andrew Jackson and his wife, Rachel. 

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

• anti-suffragist: A person who campaigned against granting women the right to vote.
• Confederate Army: The army representing the Southern states who seceded from the United States during the 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 action of signing or giving formal consent to a law, making it officially valid.  
• suffrage: The right of voting; in this era, suffrage often referred specifically to women’s suffrage, or the right of women to vote.
• suffragist: A person who campaigned to win women the right to vote. 

• AP Government Connection: 4.4: Influence of Political Events on Ideology
• To learn more about women’s role in upholding white supremacy in the early 1900s, see the story 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. How do you think Black suffragists would respond to this image? What does this reveal about Black women’s decision to support the women’s suffrage amendment?

POWER AND POLITICS

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