“The Right of Suffrage Has Been Thrust on Me”: The Reluctant Suffragists of the American West

On a visit to New York in May 1897, Elizabeth Howell Smith (Mrs. Edward Laban Smith) of Cripple Creek, Colorado, spoke openly of her opposition to equal suffrage in her home state. She hoped her experience in Colorado would sway her sisters in New York to heed her warnings and refrain from demanding suffrage. “In no section on this broad continent are women so hampered in attempting public affairs as in the West, and in no other sections do the lines of life fall so crooked to the housewife,” she lamented. “I vote because the right of suffrage has been thrust on me, and I feel to shirk it would be like shirking any other serious duty,” Smith asserted, claiming others like her felt the same. “Hearing this so repeatedly, you get the idea that even those who do vote do it under protest.”¹ Regardless, they voted. Smith's experience as a voting anti-suffragist was not unique to her. Although they had waged extensive campaigns against equal suffrage, once it passed in their states, anti-suffragists in the American West begrudgingly exercised their right to vote in hopes of neutralizing the influence of “immoral” women. As equal suffrage expanded, the Western anti-suffragist strategy became the strategy of anti-suffragists everywhere and would eventually become the foundation for conservative women's activism well into the twentieth century.

In the limited historiography of the American anti-suffrage movement, scholars have largely focused on the leadership, strategy, and rhetoric of anti-suffragists in the East. Each historian has found a new way to contribute to our understanding of the movement by helping us to learn who the anti-suffragists were, where they came from, and what shaped their ideas, largely by concentrating on one particular state organization or their rhetorical styles.² However, as suffrage scholars like Rebecca Mead, Sara Egge, and others have demonstrated, region matters for the history of the suffrage movement and so it should in the study of the anti-suffrage activists.³ Mead's work is especially important as it was the first to examine the women's suffrage movement in detail in the American West. And although scholars have recognized the importance of the West in suffrage activism, few have made the connection between the American West and the anti-suffrage movement.