What argument were used by people who did not want women to get the right to vote?

Answer 1

While today, we commonly accept that women are as capable as men when it comes to getting a college education or succeeding at a wide range of professional endeavors, those were not common beliefs in the period from the beginning of the USA in the 1770s up through the 1910s. Even the Founding Fathers, demonstrating the views of their time, believed women should not be involved in the public sphere. As far ahead of their time as they were in some ways, when it came to political and social equality for women, they were generally opposed to it, and they only wrote male suffrage into the constitution. But the founders were not alone in feeling this way: even scientists believed women's brains were inferior to men's; that women were ruled by their emotions and thus could not be trusted to make decisions; and that women needed to be protected from the harsh realities of life. Under the laws of that time, female children were categorized first as the property of their father, and if they married, then even if they were adult women, they were considered the property of their husband. (For those who dislike the word "property," another way to express it was they were regarded like children, in need of the protection of the "man of the house.")

The idea that women would want to vote was horrifying to many traditionalists, including members of the clergy, many politicians, and a large number of the men in society. Conservative priests and ministers especially disliked women's suffrage because there is a New Testament verse that says the man is the head of the woman as Christ is the head of the church; a woman was thus supposed to remain in the domestic sphere and be subordinate to her husband. Other people opposed women voting because of stereotypes such as those I mentioned previously-- such as how women were considered far too easily led and far too influenced by emotion to be given such a responsibility; they were also said to be too fragile-- they might hear bad language during the campaign or when they went to vote. And given that they were not supposed to make independent decisions, if they voted, it was believed they would just follow what their husband told them-- so they didn't really need the vote because their husband would vote for them both. It should also be noted that some conservative women opposed voting rights, having accepted the belief that the political world was a man's sphere of influence and women didn't belong there.

Answer 2

jbb 45 w/h 2013