How Women Finally Got the Vote (with My Uncle’s Help)
By: Jacque White Kochak
Tags: American Politics, Family, Voting Rights, Nineteenth Amendment, Tennessee History

Roberts earned a master’s degree during his time at the Alpine Institute and studied law in the office of a Livingston attorney. He was appointed superintendent of public instruction for Overton County while he built his law practice. In 1918 he was elected governor as a Democrat in an uneventful campaign overshadowed by the war in Europe and the influenza epidemic at home.

In his short two years in the governor’s office, Roberts focused on tax reform. He delighted in giving examples of large holdings previously assessed at a small fraction of their true value and oversaw the amendment of tax laws to remove assessment inequalities. A new tax helped counties fund schools; the average elementary school teacher salary increased by 40 percent while the average high school teacher’s salary increased by 19 percent.

A workers’ compensation law was passed, and the State Police Bill was signed into law, including historic provisions that prohibited lynching and other forms of mob violence. He even oversaw creation of the Tennessee Historical Commission.

The anti-suffrage women circulated pamphlets accusing all suffragists of being ‘atheistic feminists who rewrote the Bible,’ ‘destroyed the home,’ and ‘blackened the honor of Robert E. Lee.’

As the 1920 primary election approached, however, Roberts’ campaign advisers had good reason to fear he might lose. Farmers hated the new tax laws, and labor was organizing against him because of his emphasis on “law and order,” which included sending National Guardsmen to break up strikes against the Carter Shoe Co. and the Knoxville Railway & Light Co. Gov. Roberts had managed to alienate almost everyone.

In her 1978 American Heritage article, “Countdown in Tennessee: 1920,” Carol Lynn Yellin chronicled the tense day-by-day battle for women’s suffrage in Tennessee, describing Gov. Roberts as a “mild-mannered, deliberate teacher-turned-lawyer.” She agreed that his main worry was renomination, but carefully and thoroughly explained that criticisms of Roberts were unfounded.

For one thing, Gov. Roberts was on solid ground when he insisted he could not call a special session of the sitting Tennessee legislature to ratify the controversial amendment until after the 1920 election. The state’s constitution required that the legislature vote on federal amendments only when legislators were elected after an amendment was submitted. This wasn’t a stalling tactic.

Gov. Roberts was pressured by President Woodrow Wilson, but there’s no reason to believe he bowed to the pressure unwillingly. Catherine Kenny, ratification chair for the Tennessee League of Women Voters, had conceived the idea of asking Wilson to wire Gov. Roberts with a “loving message” urging him “to deliver the 36th state for the Democrats.” On June 23, 1920, Wilson indeed telegraphed the Tennessee governor with just such a message, Yellin wrote. The governor still hesitated, wiring the President on June 24 saying he had to consult his state attorney general.

The governor was bombarded by an overwhelming avalanche of messages from both friend and foe, plus an onslaught of newspaper editorials. He finally scheduled the special session for Aug. 9, after he won renomination in the primary but before the general election in November. Suffragette and anti-suffragette forces converged on Nashville from all over the country.

In the midst of the maelstrom, Gov. Roberts was turning out to be the most committed ratificationist of them all.

The anti-suffrage women circulated pamphlets accusing all suffragists of being “atheistic feminists who rewrote the Bible,” “destroyed the home,” and “blackened the honor of Robert E. Lee,” and they liked to label all suffragettes as “she-males.”

Josephine Pearson, president of the state’s branch of the Southern Women’s Rejection League, wrote to supporters across Tennessee, appealing for “active moral backing” to fight three “deadly principles” somehow hiding in the 19th Amendment, Yellin wrote. Pearson claimed that passage of an amendment giving women the right to vote would surrender state sovereignty, give Negro women suffrage, and in some unspecified way further the dreaded prospect of “race equality.”

Prohibition also passed in 1920, and women advocating for temperance usually were suffragists as well. The effort to ban demon rum made perfect sense as another “women’s rights” issue, because drunk men beat up their wives and spent their paychecks on liquor. As a result, the liquor interests backed the anti-suffragist cause.

The railroads and textile manufacturers also backed the “anti’s.” “Southern mill owners believed an inevitable result of woman suffrage would be sociopolitical demands for higher wages for women or, more inconvenient, the enactment of child labor laws,” Yellin wrote.

In the midst of this maelstrom, she noted, Gov. Roberts was turning out to be the most committed ratification supporter of them all. With his nomination secured, Roberts opened up an unofficial caucus room in the State Capitol for legislators favoring the amendment and actively campaigned for its passage.