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Historians have tried to use social movement, organizational, and leadership markers to define the anti-suffrage movement and to explain the radical change that occurred in that movement in 1917, and they have largely failed in doing so. As an alternative, this essay explains the anti-suffrage movement through that change, and specifically through its discursive transformation. To illuminate this transformation, the essay focuses on the case of the anti's treatment of Elizabeth Cady Stanton's Woman's Bible. Before 1917, antis opposed woman suffrage on narrowly pragmatic grounds: that it would be bad for the family, for women, for progressive organizing. After 1917, the anti-suffrage movement evolved into a larger anti-radicalism movement, using the Woman's Bible to link together suffrage, feminism, socialism, and Bolshevism, and decrying them all as evil. This discursive transformation signals a shift from social movement to counterpublic.
If woman suffragists failed, in their own day, to come to terms with the nature of their opposition, it only follows that feminist historians more than 80 years later still struggle to understand who opposed women's right to vote. Passed in 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which was known as the Susan B. Anthony amendment and which guaranteed women the right to vote, is by now one of the least controversial amendments. In the decades leading up to its passage, however, the suffrage amendment was highly controversial, and thousands of women and men campaigned on its behalf at the local, regional, and national levels before it finally passed. Woman suffrage literature of the early twentieth century suggests that as they did so, they largely believed that their opposition, the anti-suffrage movement, was led by men in the powerful industries: railroad, textile, liquor, and the like.1 The men in these industries were presumed to be leading the opposition because they stood to lose the most through the progressive reforms that a female electorate threatened.
Scholars of the suffrage movement initially followed the lead of the suffragists in assuming that anti-suffragists were industry moguls, and their scholarship has focused largely on institutions and organizations, rather than on discourse.2 The nature of the movement, however, belies this type of analysis, and it is my position that analysis focused on the discursive structures of anti-suffrage provides a more...