Vote Against Woman Suffrage (c. 1915), the Georgia Association's seven reasons

A card from the Georgia Association Opposed to Woman's Suffrage in Macon, about 1915, lists seven reasons to vote against woman suffrage. Three are about keeping Black Georgians from voting, and the last reads "White Supremacy must be maintained."

What the card prints

Content note: the card argues openly for racial disfranchisement. It is quoted in full because the argument is the object.

Vote Against Woman Suffrage

BECAUSE the women of Georgia do not want the vote.

BECAUSE under equal suffrage election expenses show increase of 20 per cent.—consequent increased taxation.

BECAUSE universal suffrage wipes out the disfranchisement of the negro by State law.

BECAUSE of the danger to farmers' families if negro men vote in addition to 2,000,000 negro women.

BECAUSE farm lands would depreciate under universal suffrage.

BECAUSE the South has been notified that Federal authorities will supervise elections.

BECAUSE White Supremacy must be maintained.

THE GEORGIA ASSOCIATION OPPOSED TO WOMAN'S SUFFRAGE / Headquarters 132 High St., Macon, Ga.

Who issued it

A private advocacy group, the Georgia Association Opposed to Woman's Suffrage, headquartered at 132 High Street in Macon. The FRAME record dates the card to about 1915; the scan is a National Archives (DocsTeach) image hosted on Wikimedia Commons, public domain as a U.S. publication before 1931. No NAID is given.

What it gets wrong

The card says what it means, which makes the wrong easy to name. Three of its reasons are about women, money, or land, and none comes with a source: no survey of what Georgia women wanted, no basis for the 20 per cent, no evidence on land values. The other four are the real case. The card opposes votes for women because votes for women would include Black women, because universal suffrage would undo disfranchisement "by State law," and because, it says, the South had been notified that federal authorities would supervise elections. Its last word is the thesis: white supremacy.

That was wrong. Disfranchisement by race denied equal protection to American citizens, and a case against one group's vote that rests on denying another group's vote has no ground left to stand on. The card itself lists federal supervision of elections among its reasons to fear the vote.

The group had a right to print and hand this out, and voters had a right to read it and say no. The opposite argument, made in public at the White House, is on the Kaiser Wilson banner. The case study on the fight over the women's vote quotes this card's reasons and sets them beside the suffragists' own campaign.