Women’s suffrage had become part of what was presented as a forward-looking set of
policies aimed at improving democracy.
Racial policies that were seen as progressive included:
- Maintaining the supposed natural superiority of native-born white Americans, particularly in contrast to that of new immigrants, who were flooding into the West.
- Because immigration rose, the women’s suffrage movement distanced itself from racial and cultural equality and rather focuses entirely on suffrage, asking questions of why these new immigrants could vote immediately rather than American women.
The arguments for equality and women’s suffrage at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries were in decline:
elitism, nativism and white supremacy were more attractive.
As an anonymous Wyoming legislator is reported to have said when women got the
vote in that territory:
‘Damn it, if you are going to let the niggers and pigtails vote, we will ring in the women, too.’
Southern white women joined the movement at the turn of the century and shifted the focus towards white supremacist arguments.
Women’s suffrage lost its connection with racial equality, which, from the late 1860s, had been shaky anyway.
