1918 was a roller-coaster for suffragists in Arkansas, as Jack Schnedler's story “So close and yet so far” reports today. If you haven't read that yet, read it here. We'll wait.
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Schnedler mentions a notorious piece of anti-suff editorializing by the Arkansas Democrat in 1911, but he notes that by 1918, the newspaper's position had changed. On the day the state was to vote up or down on a new state Constitution, the paper endorsed the proposed charter because it included full voting rights for women.
I looked up both editorials and found them so delightful — for different reasons — that I simply had to quote them here, so you can enjoy them too.
First, the funny one. It's too long to mess about with italics, so please pay attention to the quotation marks. Until you encounter a close-quote mark, you are reading the words of R.P. Robbins from the Feb. 15, 1911, Democrat:
“When Women Vote ...
"It seems that there will always be the agitation by some for the right of suffrage for women, but the great majority of the American women are content to be a potent influence in managing the affairs of the country, and care nothing for the right to cast a ballot.
"Few of them in this country would vote if they had the right.
"It is not to be wondered that some women of the country keep up the agitation and from year to year make unseemly scrambles to obtain the ballot.
"It is the woman without home life, more often, who must needs have something to employ her mind, and, having tired of theater parties, card parties and poodles, her mind naturally reverts to the suffrage question.
"The woman who has boys at home and girls to raise and clothes to make for them and lessons to teach them and darning and mending has all she cares to do, and if she does not desire the ballot she is doing more to control the government by raising boys who will be good citizens than all the suffragettes who ever lived.
"It is not likely that woman suffrage will come in this country soon; surely not in the next generation or the next, and it is not likely that it will be the boon some women think it will be when it comes, if it ever does.
"The women of the country are protected now by every law on the statute books. There is no lawmaker or judge or executive who does not want to make provision safe and sure for his own family, and when they do that they must provide for the families of other men.
"The woman is safer now without the ballot than she ever will be with the ballot. The surest safeguard any woman can have is the protection and fidelity of some good man. It is not necessary that they participate in the making of laws, because while the politicians may skin each other, and while they may hold up the corporations and make laws that cause the business men to sit up and take notice, not one of them will ever make a law that will work harm to the women of the country.
"The women can safely leave all such matters in the hands of the men, because the meanest crook on earth, given the power in this country to make any laws he pleased, would never make one that would be to the hurt of women."
WHO WAS THAT GUY?
According to Fred Allsopp's 1922 History of the Arkansas Press for a Hundred Years and More, Robbins was born in Cornerville, Tenn., in 1872. He began his newspaper career in Pulaski, Tenn., at the Citizen.
He was editor and then owner of the Jonesboro Times/Enterprise for 13 years. He married Bessie Crawford of Jonesboro in 1898. In 1907 he moved to Little Rock to be a reporter and editorial writer for the Democrat. During that period he wrote anti-temperance squibs and scoffed about theater parties and poodles.
He later edited the Batesville Guard and a paper at Stuttgart before returning to Little Rock to organize the Little Rock Daily News in 1917. The News, Allsopp notes, catered "largely to the working classes."
Did Robbins' views change over time? We can read the News' editorials about women's suffrage at Newspapers.com. Here's one from June 5, 1919 — right after the U.S. Senate passed the 19th Amendment on the states for ratification.
While we don't know that Robbins wrote it, he was the editor, Allsopp says. Here's its bottom line:
Woman is emancipated; she stands today the peer of man, she knows as much of government, she is man's equal in every industry where she has been permitted to enter.
That she is to have the ballot is a source of joy to right thinking men; and we may hope that her entry into politics will be the dawn of an era of statesmen instead of demagogues, that the greater, the profiteer and the man who has turned public funds into private treasuries will crease to exploit the people of this country.
MEANWHILE ...
Back to the Arkansas Democrat. It also made a 180 turn after 1911. One Clio Harper was its editor in February 1911; later that year Elmer E. Clarke of New Orleans became publisher.
Clarke's Democrat was for the proposed Constitution of 1918 (which, remember, failed in a low-turnout poll). Here is an excerpt of its editorial laying out reasons to vote "yea" in the special election of Dec. 14, 1918:
"Among the strong provisions of the new State constitution the following are especially commendable:
"Giving to women the right to vote in all elections. The women of Arkansas already have the right to vote in primaries and they have exercised the suffrage so well in the primary elections that no fear should be felt that they will not be worthy of the new trust placed in them. If they had never before deserved the right to vote, they won it during the war. There was no call, however great the sacrifice, that the women of this State did not meet promptly and completely during the national crisis. Their knowledge of educational matters and sanitation should result in better educational and health laws, when they are given the ballot. They should prove a terror to the corrupt politicians and will undoubtedly raise the standards of election throughout the State. There is probably no man who does not know some women who will exercise the ballot more intelligently than some men. The old-time argument against women suffrage, that women's place is exclusively in the home, was shattered during the war. If the men were willing to accept the benefits of the sacrifices of women during the war they should be willing to share the responsibilities of public life with them in time of peace. If the women were able to carry on their tremendous war activities and still maintain their homes, they should surely be able to continue to maintain their homes while casting their ballots to guarantee that questions affecting their homes shall be settled right."
Email:
cstorey@arkansasonline.com
Style on 11/05/2018