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The Cardinal was wrong on woman suffrage
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From the Elkhart Truth, Saturday, Nov. 6, 1909:
SEES DEATH BLOW TO HOME HAPPINESS IN WOMAN SUFFRAGE
Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore, who is unalterably opposed to woman suffrage (sic). In a recent letter to letter to the secretary of the National League for the Civic Education of Women, the anti-suffrage organization which held a convention in New York, he declared that “woman suffrage, if realized, would be the death blow of domestic life and happiness.”
Cardnal James Gibbons (1834-1921) was for many years a spokesman for American Catholicism. His books on the Catholic faith were best-sellers, and he was known for his support of the right of workers to organize. H. L. Mencken, an agnostic who often lampooned the clergy, wrote of Gibbons, "More presidents than one sought the counsel of Cardinal Gibbons: he was a man of the highest sagacity, a politician in the best sense, and there is no record that he ever led the Church into a bog or up a blind alley. He had Rome against him often, but he always won in the end, for he was always right." (quote from Wikipedia)
But in this case he was wrong. Women got the right to vote in 1920, and cast their first presidential ballots nationally that year. “Domestic life and happiness” certainly did not suffer a death blow.
Opposition to woman suffrage was widespread. Here in Indiana, the otherwise-progressive governor, Thomas R. Marshall, opposed woman suffrage, as did Woodrow Wilson, who would choose Marshall as his running mate in 1912. Wilson later changed his mind on suffrage and even addressed the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) Convention in 1916.
Cardinal Gibbons may have been reacting more to pioneers of the women’s movement: Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and their contemporaries were idealists, who believed they could transform society through the vote. Parker Pillsbury, an ally of Anthony and Stanton, thought the women’s movement would bring about “a glorious, bloodless, millennial revolution.” (Mari Jo and Paul Buhle, ed., The Concise History of Woman Suffrage, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978, p. 16.) The cardinal also may have been reacting to the suffrage movement in Britain, which was much more militant than in the United States.
The NASWSA, founded in 1890, took a much more pragmatic approach to the cause, especially in the late 1890s and the twentieth century. Under the leadership of Carrie Chapman Catt, the organization worked state-by-state for the vote.
“Catt had neither time nor patience for a Stanton-like ideologue; her sensibilities, and the spirit she injected into the NAWSA, were more prosaic,” write the Buhles (p 313).
Under Catt’s leadership, and with the reluctant support of President Wilson, woman suffrage became a reality. Catt went on to become one or the founders of the League of Women Voters. And in 1920, men and women went to the polls and overwhelmingly elected Warren G. Harding, whose slogan was “Back to Normalcy,” to the White House.
The revolution that Parker Pillsbury foresaw did not happen. It was more of an evolution, which, after some ninety years, is still evolving.
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