Southern Strategies: Southern Women and the Woman Suffrage Question.

By Elna C. Green (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. xx plus 287pp. $45.00/cloth $16.95/paperback).

If you have ever wondered about the origins of the Phyllis Schafleys of the world, women who have made a mark in public life by advocating that women's public roles should be circumscribed, you should read Elna Green's Southern Strategies. Green has unearthed the foremothers of Schafley in the turn-of-the century South. Unlike most studies of the women's suffrage movement that tend to focus on the women who supported political equality for their sex, this book examines women on both sides of the issue. Using membership lists of organizations, biographical dictionaries, obituaries, and census data, Green shakes the family trees of several hundred white women from the rank and file of pro- and anti-suffrage movements throughout the South. African-American women suffragists and anti-suffragists are treated in the book also, though not as extensively. The book is a significant achievement, given that most studies have focused on leaders and have made assumptions about the larger group based on the few.

Green compares the backgrounds of the women who fought for and against suffrage and discovers many subtle but important differences. The anti-suffragists descended from families rooted in the Old South ruling class, especially cotton planters and leaders in the Democratic Party. The pro-suffragists, on the other hand, were heirs of white collar professionals of the emergent middle class located in urban centers, though also loyal Democrats. Women on both sides were mostly married women in their 40s and 50s with free time to engage in extra-familial activities. Women in both groups had received some formal education, though the pros were better-educated in elite four-year colleges. The overall profile that emerges is predictable. The women who supported the enfranchisement of the "fairer sex" were more liberal than the women who did not.

Green is also curious about what motivated the rise of suffragism a generation later than women's activism in the North. The pro-suffrage movement developed in two phases; the first occurred in the 1890s when the National American Women's Suffrage Association in the north was revived and reached out to its sisters in the south. But a mass base did not materialize until the second phase of the movement by 1910. Urbanization and industrialization produced conditions like poverty that prompted a new middle class of college-educated women with professional and voluntary experience ready, able, and eager to fight for a variety of social causes. New Women of the New South came to see the merits of equal suffrage as they sought to implement Progressive reforms but were stymied by their political powerlessness and reliance on the goodwill of men.

Green patently rejects the idea that racism was the major impetus for Southern suffragism, which she perceives to be a central premise of other historians. Racism, along with Biblical and biological justifications for preserving the status quo of gender inequality, shaped the ideology and tactics of the opponents of suffrage not of the advocates. Green asserts: "Southern white women did not band together and work for ten or twenty (or more) years to obtain the ballot in order to outvote their black neighbors." (p. xii) She also argues that white women in the South were not uniform in their thinking on race relations. These are red herrings, however. Most historians agree that white women wanted to win the right to vote primarily because of their own desire for political equality and that they varied from extreme bigotry to moderately liberal views on race.

There are significant differences between Green and other scholars on the race issue, however. Where Green sees only a few white women willing to use racebaiting in the 1890s to win the right to vote for themselves, others argue that this tactic was commonplace. But Green does not provide sufficient evidence to convince readers. For example, she suggests that "the majority of suffragists appeared more reluctant than male legislators to argue for woman suffrage as a means of guaranteeing white supremacy," (p. 11) but she cites the speech of one woman in Alabama who did not mention the race issue. This pattern is repeated throughout the book as Green does not fully substantiate what "the majority" rank and file members actually thought and practiced any more than historians who have focused exclusively on leaders.

In addition, Green tends to extract race where race was an important factor. In arguing that the Progressive movement prompted white women to demand suffrage Green leaves out the role of race in shaping the regional variations of reform. Most white Progressives in the south supported black disfranchisement in the interests of "purifying" electoral politics, purging the body politic of the corruption associated with "black rule" during Reconstruction. Middle-class white women in particular were indignant over the fact that "ignorant" black men had achieved the right to vote first. Their racial and class biases led many to argue not for universal unrestricted suffrage for either men or women but for suffrage for "the best white women." Green does not examine the link between these class and race issues and how they may have influenced rank-and-file suffragists. Where Green emphasizes silence on race among white women suffragists in the second phase of the suffrage movement in the 1910s, other historians have stressed that race-baiting had become a moot tactic by then because black men had been eliminated from politics. Where Green finds some white women willing to accept voting by some black women in order to secure their own rights, again, one must account for the significance of class and selective suffrage.

Green's thesis on race is difficult to sustain without a much more rigorous analysis of all of the evidence that supports and conflicts her claims. Mainstream suffragists are more clearly identified in this study than in previous accounts, but their views are not completely fleshed out. On the whole, the combination of the treatment of anti- and pro-suffrage movements is an important addition to the literature on Southern women and politics.

Tera W. Hunter Carnegie Mellon University