What it said
This is a case where both camps printed, marched and lobbied, and both signed their work. That alone makes it unusual on a site about propaganda. The best way in is to read the two sides in their own words, then ask what each sentence was doing.
The National Woman's Party held a banner at the White House gates in 1917, while the country was at war with Germany:
KAISER WILSON. HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN YOUR SYMPATHY WITH THE POOR GERMANS BECAUSE THEY WERE NOT SELF-GOVERNED? 20,000,000 AMERICAN WOMEN ARE NOT SELF-GOVERNED. TAKE THE BEAM OUT OF YOUR OWN EYE.
From Macon, the Georgia Association Opposed to Woman's Suffrage put out a card of seven reasons, each starting with "BECAUSE." The first claimed to speak for a whole state's women without a count behind it. The last was plain:
BECAUSE the women of Georgia do not want the vote. [...] BECAUSE of the danger to farmers' families if negro men vote in addition to 2,000,000 negro women. [...] BECAUSE White Supremacy must be maintained.
Virginia's anti-suffrage association headed a broadside "DANGER!" and tied the cause to socialism, on the ground that suffragists and socialists had walked in the same New York parade. In 1920, as ratification reached the states, a Montgomery group called the Southern Woman's League for Rejection of the Susan B. Anthony Amendment printed "America When Feminized." It opened with a quotation credited to "Dr. William J. Hichson, Chicago University" forecasting "a nation of degeneration," and said woman suffrage masculinizes women and feminizes men
.
On the pro-suffrage side, a 1915 Puck cartoon titled I did not raise my girl to be a voter
stood an "Anti" soloist in front of a male chorus tagged procurer, dive keeper, child labor employer, grafter, cadet and sweat shop owner, with a "Political Boss" conducting. That is guilt by association, aimed the other way.
Who made it and why
The suffrage side had two national bodies by the 1910s. The National American Woman Suffrage Association, formed by a merger in 1890, ran the broad campaign. The National Woman's Party, with Alice Paul, took the sharper line: Paul had worked with British militants, had been jailed and force-fed in England, and brought the habit of direct confrontation home.
The opposition was organized by state, and much of it was run by women. Alice Hill Chittenden presided over the New York State Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage. The Massachusetts association published a quarterly, The Remonstrance. In 1917 the Women Voters Anti-Suffrage Party of New York petitioned the Senate against a federal amendment. On Decoration Day 1913 anti-suffrage leaders took some 1,200 people up the Hudson for a picnic. These were citizens using the same tools as the other side.
The famous set piece came on 3 March 1913, the eve of Woodrow Wilson's inauguration. Paul's committee organized a Washington procession for NAWSA: more than 5,000 marchers, nine bands, about two dozen floats, and Inez Milholland in front on a white horse. A tableau with Columbia played out on the Treasury steps. The marchers stated their purpose as a protest against a political order from which women are excluded
.
What it got right or wrong
Start with what is admirable. Petitions, hearings, parades, picnics, quarterlies and signed banners are how a free people argues about the franchise. Most of this record, on both sides, is that kind of argument. Calling all of it propaganda in the sinister sense would be wrong.
Now the faults. The Georgia card's case rested in part on keeping Black citizens from voting, and it said so in capital letters. That was wrong, and the card is the evidence. The suffrage side was not clean on race either. For the 1913 procession, Paul and her committee asked Black women to march at the rear rather than with their states. Paul wrote to Alice Stone Blackwell that it would be unfortunate if we had any large number of negroes in our Suffrage Procession
. Ida B. Wells-Barnett refused the back of the line and marched with Illinois. She was right, and the organizers were wrong.
Both sides also borrowed stigma. "Kaiser Wilson" hung the enemy's title on the President; "vanguard of socialism" and the Puck chorus of vice figures did the same trick. One difference is worth stating: the banner also made a factual claim a reader could check, twenty million women without a vote, while the "do not want the vote" line offered a majority it never counted.
Some honest gaps remain. FRAME's page says it could not verify, from a source, either the racial arguments some white southern suffragists made or any liquor-industry money behind the opposition. This page does not describe either.
Look at where the force fell
Look at where the force fell. On 3 March 1913 the crowd, largely men in town for the inauguration, closed in on the route. The Library of Congress record says marchers were jeered, tripped, grabbed, shoved
. Around a hundred went to hospital, cavalry came from Fort Myer, a Senate subcommittee took testimony from more than a hundred witnesses, and the District's police chief was out by 1915.
Then the pickets. From 10 January 1917 the Woman's Party stood at the White House gates, the first organized protest there. Between June and November that year 218 were arrested on a charge of obstructing sidewalk traffic
. In jail some refused food and were force-fed. On 4 March 1918 the District of Columbia Court of Appeals reversed the convictions in Hunter et al. v. District of Columbia.
That sequence is the liberty lesson. Peaceable assembly and petition are named rights. A thin traffic charge used to clear women holding signed banners from a public sidewalk, during a war that the same government described as a fight for self-government, was an abuse of power, and a court said the convictions could not stand. The archive's record does not show any anti-suffrage association organizing the crowd or the arrests. The violence came from a mob and from the authorities, and the page should not pin it on the opponents' leaflets.
Congress passed the amendment on 4 June 1919, after Wilson came out for it in 1918. Tennessee ratified on 18 August 1920. The change came by the Constitution's own amendment process, argued in public, which is the system working.
Its legacy
The "Kaiser Wilson" banner sits next to government posters of the same years, such as Treasury's Beat Back the Hun with Liberty Bonds and the Army's Destroy This Mad Brute. The state used the enemy's image to sell bonds and enlistments with official backing. The pickets turned that image on the state and were arrested for it. The power was on one side.
The habit worth keeping is simple. When a leaflet says "the women of Georgia do not want the vote," ask for the vote count. When a label ("Kaiser," "socialist," "procurer") does the arguing, ask what the target actually did. When a sign is held on a sidewalk under its maker's name, defend it, whichever side wrote it. For the federal publicity office running in the same war years, see the Committee on Public Information.
Sources
- Virginia Arnold holding the "Kaiser Wilson" banner, Harris & Ewing, 1917. Library of Congress, Records of the National Woman's Party (mnwp000220).
- "Vote Against Woman Suffrage," Georgia Association Opposed to Woman's Suffrage, c. 1915. U.S. National Archives (DocsTeach), via Wikimedia Commons.
- "America When Feminized," Southern Woman's League for Rejection of the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, Montgomery, Ala., 1920. Alabama Department of Archives and History.
- "I did not raise my girl to be a voter," Puck, 9 October 1915, p. 6. Library of Congress.
- "Anti-Suffrage Arguments: DANGER!", Virginia Association Opposed to Woman's Suffrage, c. 1913. Library of Virginia.
- Library of Congress, "Marching for the Vote: Remembering the Woman Suffrage Parade of 1913," and "Parade Planning Exposes Racial Divides," Shall Not Be Denied exhibition.
- National Archives, Prologue blog: "Suffrage and suffering at the 1913 March," "Women Are First to Protest White House," and "The Movement as a Mosaic: Alice Paul and Woman Suffrage."
- National Archives, 19th Amendment milestone document; petition of the Women Voters Anti-Suffrage Party of New York, 1917 (catalog id 7452146).
- Library of Congress items: The Remonstrance (1909); Alice H. Chittenden; anti-suffrage Decoration Day picnic, 1913.
- FRAME case study "Votes for Women and the anti-suffrage campaigns, 1908 to 1920," for the chronology, the arrest count and the notes on what could not be sourced.