Mary Walton: Ups and Downs in the History of American Women's Suffrage
[Mary Walton is the author of "A Woman's Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle for the Ballot."]
Leaders of the National American Woman Suffrage Assn. were thrilled when William Howard Taft agreed to address their convention in 1910, the first U.S. president to do so.
They were less thrilled, though, when he proceeded to compare women to Hottentots, and not in a good way. "The theory that Hottentots or any other uneducated, altogether unintelligent class is fitted for self-government at once or to take part in government is a theory that I wholly dissent from," the president said.
Hottentots! His words were greeted with hisses. Taft, however, saw no need to apologize. In April 1910, women could vote in only four sparsely populated Western states, and the political risk to a president who insulted the distaff half of the nation's population was negligible....
Today's sorry state of political discourse, where even female candidates rip into each other like pit bulls, would doubtless dismay the suffragists of a century ago. But years after the suffrage victory, when she was focused on passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, Alice Paul mused that "if we get freedom for women, then they probably are going to do a lot of things that I would wish they wouldn't do; but it seems to me that isn't our business to say what they should do with it. It is our business to see that they are free."
Read entire article at LA Times
Leaders of the National American Woman Suffrage Assn. were thrilled when William Howard Taft agreed to address their convention in 1910, the first U.S. president to do so.
They were less thrilled, though, when he proceeded to compare women to Hottentots, and not in a good way. "The theory that Hottentots or any other uneducated, altogether unintelligent class is fitted for self-government at once or to take part in government is a theory that I wholly dissent from," the president said.
Hottentots! His words were greeted with hisses. Taft, however, saw no need to apologize. In April 1910, women could vote in only four sparsely populated Western states, and the political risk to a president who insulted the distaff half of the nation's population was negligible....
Today's sorry state of political discourse, where even female candidates rip into each other like pit bulls, would doubtless dismay the suffragists of a century ago. But years after the suffrage victory, when she was focused on passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, Alice Paul mused that "if we get freedom for women, then they probably are going to do a lot of things that I would wish they wouldn't do; but it seems to me that isn't our business to say what they should do with it. It is our business to see that they are free."