“NOT RATIFIED BUT HEREBY REJECTED:” THE WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT IN GEORGIA, 1895-1925 by ELIZABETH STEPHENS SUMMERLIN (Under the Direction of Kathleen A. Clark) ABSTRACT The women’s suffrage movement in Georgia consisted of a small but spirited group of women who unsuccessfully fought for enfranchisement from 1895 to 1920. Though this movement failed nominally, the strategies white southern women pursued represent an important case study of conservative progressivism in the New South. Suffragists publicly pushed for change while maintaining that their enfranchisement would actually shore up existing power structures, especially white supremacy; however, their very existence in politics and public space symbolized the disorder that many southerners had used to characterize the changes wrought by industrialization and modernization in Georgia. While comprehensive studies on this subject have been limited, this thesis also benefits from seminal regional and transnational studies that have inspired more theoretical perspectives on this topic and illuminated the complex forces that impacted Georgia’s suffragists in their battle for the ballot. INDEX WORDS: Georgia, women, southern politics, woman suffrage, New South, women’s rights, anti-suffrage movement, white supremacy, gender, 19 th Amendment, Mary Latimer McLendon, Rebecca Latimer Felton, Mildred Rutherford, Eugenia Dorothy “Dolly” Blount Lamar “NOT RATIFIED BUT HEREBY REJECTED:” THE WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT IN GEORGIA, 1895-1925 by ELIZABETH STEPHENS SUMMERLIN B.A., Georgia College and State University, 2007 A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS ATHENS, GEORGIA 2009 © 2009 Elizabeth Stephens Summerlin All Rights Reserved “NOT RATIFED BUT HEREBY REJECTED:” THE WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT IN GEORGIA, 1895-1925 by ELIZABETH STEPHENS SUMMERLIN Major Professor: Kathleen Clark Committee: James C. Cobb John Inscoe Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia December 2009 iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Without my family, friends, and advisors, this thesis would have never come into fruition. As members of my thesis committee, James Cobb and John Inscoe provided invaluable insight and keen criticisms that helped me understand southern history more clearly. I owe a special thanks to my advisor Kathleen Clark, whose patience and ever discerning eye made this piece so much more than I ever imagined it could have been. My graduate school classmates, Jessica Fowler and Hannah Waits, and I shared humorous perspectives into life as a graduate student and teaching assistant that made even the most trying times bearable. I thank the two of them for their incredible ability to offer me support in my personal and professional life. My family continued to support my endeavors as they have always done—a deed which has never gone unnoticed or unappreciated. My dog, Maggie, who is an unsung hero for this project, sat by my side while I combed through documents and books and typed for hours on end. Finally, my husband and best friend Donnie showed me unconditional love and support and brought me through those times when I thought that this project would never see completion. I look forward to spending the rest of “forever” with him. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................ iv INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 1 A Cautious Beginning: The Atlanta Convention and the “Doldrums,” 1895- 1912 ......................................................................................................... 22 2 Momentum Gained and Lost: Suffragists, Anti-Suffragists and the General Assembly, 1913-1916 .............................................................................. 55 3 Victory? State and National Campaigns Collide, 1917-1925 ......................... 97 CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................... 127 BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................................................................................... 131 1 INTRODUCTION The women’s suffrage story in the South does not coincide with the usual accounts of triumph presented in the national narrative. Southern suffragists trod upon difficult terrain in their efforts to attain the vote, and they stumbled over numerous obstacles. Suffrage movements in the South attracted fewer followers than those in the rest of the nation, and in several instances, southern states ultimately rejected women’s voting when Congress sent the Nineteenth Amendment to the states for ratification. Yet, in one of history’s more ironic turn of events, the South did deliver the most important ruling on women’s enfranchisement, as Tennessee rendered the necessary vote to successfully ratify the Nineteenth Amendment. This study examines the tumultuous relationship between white southerners and the women’s suffrage movement. Yet, this does not tell a story of ultimate victory as was the case with Tennessee. Rather, I present a more typical outcome for southern suffragists by tracing events in Georgia, the first southern state to formally reject the Nineteenth Amendment during its ratification process. Though the movement’s efforts in this state nominally failed, Georgia presents an important case study of southern politics in the midst of the Progressive Era and Jim Crow. Most especially, it speaks to the particular situation of southern white suffragists, who simultaneously pushed for social change along the lines of gender while trying to maintain, or at least not threaten, traditional racial and class hierarchies. 2 The women’s suffrage movement in Georgia and the South at large has received limited attention in scholarly literature. While numerous works have addressed the achievement of women’s rights during the early twentieth century, historians have less frequently highlighted the important experience of women’s suffrage campaigns in the American South. Perhaps this relative inattention rests upon the assumption that since the South largely rejected the Nineteenth Amendment, few significant suffrage efforts took place in the region. 1 Nevertheless, the tireless efforts of the pioneer suffrage historian A. Elizabeth Taylor suggest otherwise, as she carefully chronicled suffrage movements in many individual southern states. These works, completed approximately fifty years ago (in many cases), have remained the definitive studies on suffrage movements in individual southern states, including Georgia. Taylor’s pieces consist largely of descriptive narratives with little or no theoretical basis, and they communicate only the most basic information about the movement’s major events. Georgia’s suffrage movement deserves reexamination in light of new perspectives and frameworks in historical studies. 2 The two most significant and more recent studies that explore women’s suffrage in the South are Marjorie Spruill Wheeler’s New Women of the New South and Elna C. Green’s Southern Strategies . Both have made important contributions to our 1 In addition to Tennessee, the state that delivered the necessary three-fourths majority for the amendment’s ratification, Kentucky, Texas and Arkansas were prominent exceptions from the South; however, with the exception of Tennessee, the rest could not be considered “Deep South” states, thus indicating the relative difficulty many southern women faced in the region. 2 Taylor’s work includes studies on Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas. As is the case with Georgia, most of these works remain the definitive studies on this subject, Taylor’s works lack a theoretical base and are largely descriptive, thus demanding a more analytical approach in light of the gains made in historical research and inquiry over the past couple of decades. See Bibliography for full citations. 3 understanding of the southern suffrage movement as a variant of the national narrative. Using a biographical approach that examines the lives of twelve southern suffragists, Wheeler asserts that the suffrage movement gained momentum in the South when its participants offered women’s voting as an expediency measure to counteract black political power in the 1890s. When this strategy failed largely due in part to black disenfranchisement measures passed during the period, the suffrage movement limped along in the South until the Progressive Era provided the necessary inspiration to reinvigorate it. Wheeler argues that race continued to shape suffrage arguments in the 1910s, but that southern suffragists had expanded their arguments to include progressive social reform legislation and leaned less on white supremacist rhetoric as a strategic aim. Green disputes Wheeler’s emphasis on race, contending that “southern women did not band together and work for ten or twenty (or more) years to obtain the ballot in order to outvote their black neighbors.” Rather, she claims that southern suffragism arose as a middle-class response to problems produced by urbanization and industrialization in the region; she argues that suffrage debates concerning the race issue typically occurred only as a response to anti-suffragist prodding and were secondary to primary concerns of women’s suffragists, such as civil reform and labor regulation.