Author: Marshall, Susan E.
Title: Splintered Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Campaign against Woman Suffrage.
Publisher: Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997.
Dr. Marshall, a sociologist at UT-Austin, used records from anti-suffragist organizations to show that these women, primarly an urban elite, used a strong political strategy to keep the vote from lower-class, illiterate and uneducated women. They felt that the vote for women would result in an increase in the "ignorant vote" and displace their own families from positions of influence. Marshall relied heavily on the papers from the Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Further Extension of Suffrage and an analysis of the rhetoric of over 200 antisuffrage writings from the 1860s through the 1920s to show how the anti-suffragists feared that their own social and economic status was threatened by broadening the franchise to women.
0 Replies