Polarized Families, Polarized Parties. Gwendoline M. Alphonso
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era’s social and political turbulence. How ideational divisions over family and gender interacted to uphold alternative state ideologies is most clearly seen in debates over “woman suffrage,” a prominent policy concern of the time. These disagreements would come to be embedded in the emergent national state and serve as the latent ingredients for future partisan battles to follow.
For all members of Congress at the start of the twentieth century, family inhabited a domestic, private sphere that was in many ways distinct from the public one. The prevailing “separate-spheres ideology” divided public and private spheres by gender: women embodied moral qualities, purity, and nurturing abilities associated with the home, while men possessed physical qualities, aggressiveness, and firmness, seen as essential for the public spheres of work and politics.21 A carryover from the nineteenth century, separate sphere ideals endured in the early twentieth century. However, the traditional separation of male and female gender roles and the exclusivity of their spheres were starting to be strongly challenged, dividing members of Congress accordingly. The more progressive faction applauded new developments in work and family that melded domestic and public spheres, and more conservative delegations opposed them. Underlying legislators’ differences over the shifting boundaries between public and private were their strongly embedded ideas of family as foundationally economic and/or valuational.
Progressive members of Congress who supported women’s suffrage attacked the traditional separateness of domestic and public spheres by using a predominantly economic family framework. They advocated an intertwined relationship between government, economy, and home, arguing that laws should actively intervene to improve primarily economic and, second, valuational conditions of home life. Senator Robert Owen (D-OK), for instance, approvingly recounted a long list of legislation enacted in Colorado when women were allowed to vote, citing “the most highly perfected school system that any State in the Union has,” “laws taking care of defective children, laws punishing those who contributed to the delinquency of a child; laws taking care of the weaker elements of society, of the deaf and dumb, the blind, the insane, the poor; laws beautifying the cities and improving many other conditions of life,” along with more values-laden laws, such as those “establishing the curfew to prevent children being exposed to temptation at night,” also asserting that “women can not be persuaded to favor the liquor traffic, the white-slave traffic, gambling, or other evils of society.”22
However, conservative legislators opposed to women’s suffrage, distinctively many from the South, warned that the progressive conjoining of hitherto separate spheres would result in the degradation of the domestic sphere and debasing of traditional family values, such as the sanctity of marriage. For instance, Senator Nathan Bryan (D-FL) asserted the higher than average incidence of divorce in all the equal-suffrage states,23 claiming, “Pretty soon after woman suffrage came, divorce would be as respectable as marriage.”24 These members opposed the political inclusion of women by extolling the virtues of the antisuffragette as “the woman who yet believes that the home and the child are her sphere and that politics and business are the sphere of the man.”25
In their antisuffrage remarks, conservative southern legislators used a Soul approach to focus policy attention on preserving patriarchy as the dominant family form. The southern patriarchal family structure, they insisted, engendered a “chivalrous attitude” of men, such that women exercised far greater power indirectly through men than they would independently. Senator John Williams (D-MS) claimed to speak for “other Senators from the cotton States” when he asserted that “women have more influence with regard to public measures in Mississippi and those States to-day than they have in any suffrage State in this Union.” When women “put themselves behind anything in the State of Mississippi,” he said, “that thing the men vote for, and the politician who dares oppose it gets defeated by the other men. Let it be prohibition; let it be anything else; if the women of Mississippi say to the men of Mississippi in sufficient tones, so that the men can understand them, ‘we want this thing,’ the men give it to them.”26 Using racially charged language to impugn the virtue of suffragettes, suffrage opponents claimed that these women looked upon the “indissoluble Christian marriage” as a “slave union” and were seeking to upstage it;27 this, they warned, would lead to a precipitous decline in male authority, “a state of society where man will not figure except as the father of her child.”28
For prosuffrage legislators, the conservative emphasis on preserving patriarchal families and hierarchical gender values was an illegitimate, sectional concern, an innate southern “prejudice” against women that must be “overcome.” Senator George Chamberlain (D-OR) offered his own personal story as an example of this, recounting how he was born and reared in “a Southern State” and went to the “western country” with “a feeling, which many southern men had of antagonism to the propriety of enfranchising women.” Yet, he said, he was able to “overc[o]me the prejudice, which was inborn in me, and which still lurks in the bosom of nearly every southern man, I am sure,” and became “an ardent supporter of the doctrine of equal suffrage.”29
Illustrating the gender liberalism that would come to persist within the Hearth family approach, prosuffrage legislators instead emphasized the desirability of moving toward egalitarian gender ideals. They presented an egalitarian family view, centered on companionship, nurturing, and affection, instead of on chivalry and hierarchy—a family ideal that could be best realized, they said, if women were granted suffrage. Senator Everis Hayes (RCA), for example, celebrated “the ideal of a home where human nature can develop to the full,” saying, “you who have never enjoyed the privilege of going to the polls, our most sacred shrine, in company with your mother and your wife, as I have done, can not realize the supreme pleasure of sharing with your nearest and dearest the highest of privileges, that of full American citizenship.”30
Yet, their support for progressive gender relations and more active participation of women in politics did not stop those in favor of suffrage, like their colleagues on the other side, to continue to view the domestic sphere as feminine and women as first and foremost mothers. For them too, women’s moral capacities flowed from their familial roles, interests, and qualities, as mothers, wives, and daughters and not as independent actors. Far from being gender neutral, the Hearth family economics approach in the Progressive Era specifically targeted women as mothers and housewives. In numerous policies for the encouragement of “American” dietary norms, food and clothes consumption, and family health-related practices, mothers were seen as central to family behavior, and Hearth policies devised to improve material family practices were expressly directed at them. In so doing, legislators were echoing the prevailing ideologies of “maternalism” and “civic housekeeping” advocated by prominent female reformers of the time. Jane Addams, founder of the Hull House settlement in Chicago, popularized “civic housekeeping,” arguing that a city ought to be conceived as a household needing continuous housekeeping, cleanliness, and caring to rectify social problems, tasks for which women were especially suited.31 Characterized as “maternalists,” female reformers used their position as mothers to seek social reform of primarily Hearth (but some Soul) problems such as increasing poverty, full female citizenship, labor unrest, runaway crime, high levels of child mortality, and public health issues such as increasing workplace injuries and spread of epidemic diseases—all while seeking more egalitarian gender relations and the political inclusion of women as bureaucrats, administrators, and voters.32
The Soul-aligned conservative faction in Congress, however, viewed such modern women reformers as women who chose to abandon the hearth and their domestic responsibilities. For instance, Representative Jerome Donovan had the following exchange with maternalist witness Lillian Williamson, from the National Federation of Women’s Clubs, who was testifying before the Committee on Education in favor of Federal Aid for Home Economics. Doubting the need for federal government programs in home economics, Congressman Donovan (D-NY) asked, “How was it that the mothers whom you have so pictured … that were the ideal mothers and were the ideal home builders, how was it that they did not have the advantage of these things: and yet that they attained a great strength of attainment which they did as home builders and mothers?” To which Ms. Williamson replied by emphasizing the economic transformations in family lives, saying, “The mother that