"Why Not Woman's Suffrage in Alabama?" by William H. Sims.
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@ Alabama Department of Archives and History, 624 Washington Avenue, Montgomery, Alabama 36130
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"A Paper Read before the Quid Pro Quo Club of Birmingham, Alabama." In the paper, Sims addresses the strengthening call for women's suffrage in the country, which for a long time "made no headway in the South, where it was long handicapped by reason of its birth in the hot-bed of abolitionism." In his argument against suffrage, he questions what more female voters could achieve, citing state laws that "go further than equal protection" for women, and which were "wholly enacted by men and without feminine agency, and thus were a free gift to woman from man, her protector." He also acknowledges the challenge equal suffrage poses to white supremacy in the South: ". . . in a more complicated society composed of negroes and white male voters . . . the problem of adjusting our electorate so as to receive all the white and colored women of the State who can qualify as men, cannot be undertaken without the gravest apprehensions and doubt." Sims provides both scientific and biblical examples in support of his position (though he concludes that "she is the finest and most inscrutable being God ever made!"), and he ends with a lengthy quotation by Ida Tarbell ("one of the brainiest of her sex, and it might be added of either sex") on the inherent differences between men and women and the unnatural qualities of "the militant woman."
Text
300 Ppi Tiff
1912 February 3 1912 02 03
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!["Reply to the Anomymous [sic] 'Protest Against Woman's Suffrage in Alabama.'"](https://d2l9jrtx1kk04i.cloudfront.net/79bf0a2ec24a4c9a0f328ae6cc830d776968b505.png "\"Reply to the Anomymous [sic] 'Protest Against Woman's Suffrage in Alabama.'\"")
