Public Reactions
The Seneca Falls Convention inspired many women to advocate for women's rights. Subsequent women's rights forums featured female chairs. Nevertheless, many women balked at defying social standards. In response to the Convention's call for suffrage, an anti-suffrage movement began.
Positive"While some men were laughing, or maybe because they were, women did begin to take up the battle started in Seneca Falls. ... Before long there were state organizations in Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Kansas."
~ Bill Severn in Free but Not Equal: How Women Won the Right to Vote |
Negative"So pronounced was the public voice against us, in the parlor, press, and pulpit that most of the ladies who had attended the convention and signed the declaration, one by one, withdrew their names and influence and joined our persecutors. Our friends gave us the cold shoulder, and felt themselves disgraced by the whole proceeding"
~Elizabeth Cady Stanton, on those who attended the Seneca Falls Convention "I am with you thoroughly, but I am a born coward. There is nothing I dread more than Mr. Seward's ridicule."
~ Wife of Senator William Seward "... the stolid indifference of women. They hug their chains because they hate responsibility. I find more apathy and indifference with the women than the men"
~Paulina Wright, in Complaint of Other Women |
Anti-suffragists
Anti-suffragists represented radical portions of a largely negative public reaction. Yet, the existence of the anti-suffragist movement showed that the suffrage movement was gaining recognition.
"The first principle of religion is obedience. The woman who does not rightly obey her husband will not obey the God who enjoins her submission."
-Robert Afton Holland, an antisuffragist writer "The masculine represents judgement, the practicable, the expedient, the possible, while the feminine represents emotion, what ought to be, the dream of excellence, the vision of complete beauty.... [Woman] jumps at conclusions..."
-Octavius B. Frothingham, an antisuffragist minister |