Why Men Thought Women Weren’t Made to Vote
During the suffrage movement, conventional wisdom held that civic duty was bad for the ovaries.
Editor’s Note: Read more stories in our series about women and political power.
William T. Sedgwick believed that no good could come of letting women vote.
“It would mean a degeneration and a degradation of human fiber which would turn back the hands of time a thousand years,” Sedgwick said in 1914. “Hence it will probably never come, for mankind will not lightly abandon at the call of a few fanatics the hard-earned achievements of the ages.”
A mere five years after Sedgwick’s warning, Congress the Nineteenth Amendment, which legally granted American women the right to vote. Civilization didn’t come crashing down. But at the turn of the 20th century, many people listened to Sedgwick, a well-known professor at the Massachusetts
