Turn-of-the-Century Thinkers Weren’t Sure If Women Could Vote and Be Mothers at the Same Time
Editor's Note: Read more stories in our series about women and political power.
Charles Worcester Clark’s “Woman Suffrage, Pro and Con,” an essay published in the March 1890 issue of The Atlantic, does not read like the kind of thing the author ever expected a woman to see.
Over the course of nearly 7,000 words, Clark asserted that women in the United States didn’t know the difference between the roles of the state and federal legislative bodies that governed them, so busy were they with the demands of motherhood and household maintenance. “The average man understands the difference in functions of national and state governments, and knows what part the candidate for whom he votes will have to play if elected. The average woman knows nothing of this,” Clark wrote. “Neither has she any idea what the tariff is, though she may applaud or denounce it with all the vehemence of the party newspaper she occasionally reads. This ignorance is not discreditable to her, for she has enough to do already, but it exists.”
Just one major irony of Clark’s statements about women is that it would not be long before women themselves wrote for about women’s suffrage: As , in the years leading up to the time women’s suffrage became law in 1919, published a
