The second battle for woman suffrage: Alabama white women, the poll tax, and V. O. key's master narrative of Southern politics.

IN 1937 MINNIE L. STECKEL, A SOCIOLOGIST AT THE ALL-WHITE ALABAMA COLLEGE for women in Montevallo, made the following observations: "A consideration of how [poll tax] laws affect women indicates that in many circumstances they do result in limiting women, more than men, in meeting voting qualifications.... [E]specially during the depression, $1.50 poll tax paid for the husband to vote and also for the wife often meant just that much less food and clothing for the family. If such a family is mindful of the need for voting, in most cases the poll tax will be paid for the man, but not for the woman." Fourteen years later, Katharine Cater, the dean of women at Auburn, wrote: "Why have women not taken better advantage of the vote for which they worked so diligently? There are a number of possible reasons, but one of the most obvious is the poll tax. The Alabama poll tax very clearly discriminates against women between the ages of 21 and 45. Veterans of World War I and World War II are exempt from paying the tax. This includes many men. But it leaves most women with a tax to pay, one of the worst features of which is the fact that it is cumulative." By 1958 Frederic D. Ogden, a University of Alabama political scientist who spent years studying the poll tax, reached the same conclusions. The poll tax, he wrote, "tends to bear more harshly on women than men and analysis of the results of ... reduction of the cumulative feature in Alabama disclosed that more white women had been prevented from voting by the tax than either white men or Negroes." (1)

Even though these observations make clear that earlier generations of scholars and women's activists identified forces that suppressed the white female vote in the South after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, the post-1920 disfranchisement of large numbers of southern white women has gone largely unnoticed and unexplained by recent historians and political scientists. (2) Scholarly discussions of the poll tax and the anti-poll tax campaigns have generally been placed within the context of the civil fights movement, where the focus is on race and/or class discrimination, not gender. (3) Why is it that we are aware of the ongoing struggle black women and men waged through the NAACP and other organizations to challenge black disfranchisement but know so little about the continuing fight for woman suffrage waged by the white women who campaigned to abolish the poll tax and reform election laws in order to make the Nineteenth Amendment a reality? The failure of scholars to address white female disfranchisement seems deserving of an explanation in and of itself.

This essay examines how a growing understanding of the suppressive effects of the poll tax on southern white women voters inspired the Women's Division of the Democratic National Committee to pursue an anti-poll tax agenda at the national level and moved white women in Alabama to launch a state anti-poll tax campaign. These women's political activism was part of the continuing movement to enfranchise women, and their efforts were opposed by white male Democratic leaders. Yet the women's campaigns were also conducted in the midst of the in-depth studies of black disfranchisement and southern political systems that yielded such classic works as Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy and V. O. Key's Southern Politics in State and Nation. (4) These researchers, however, neglected issues concerning women and politics as they gathered data and feverishly wrote chapter drafts to meet impending deadlines. An examination of their methods illuminates the process that has maintained our ignorance of the history of women's political cultures. (5) What we have then are two stories: the first concerns the reality of white female disfranchisement in the South in the post-suffrage decades and women's relentless efforts to combat it at the state and national level; the second centers on the failure of political scientists to study the problem. Telling both stories together provides a concrete example of how we have come to know what we think we know about history and the place of women within it. This investigation, in turn, illuminates a third story, that of the convergence of the struggles of southern white women and people of color in the 1950s.

Until recently, historians and political scientists have accepted an assessment of southern white women's interest in politics exemplified by V. O. Key: "In the land of magnolias, moonlight, crinoline--calico, churn and washtub are more typical--women have been slower to develop a political consciousness than elsewhere." Based on low voter turnouts among women in the 1920s through the 1940s, Key presumed that white southern women had "more than their share of electoral apathy" and tended to be "disinterested" in politics. When used to describe women's pre-1920 attitudes towards politics, disinterested often refers to women's supposed lack of selfish political interests, or the absence of self-serving motives, and has a positive connotation. After 1920 disinterest often connotes apathy--a deliberate failure on the part of women to know or care about politics, or an irresponsible attitude toward the duties of citizenship. When Key and others referred to the "disinterest" of southern female voters, they invoked this second meaning. (6)

As a new generation of historians and political scientists examine the political activities of northern and southern women in the post-suffrage decades, old assumptions about female political apathy and distorted views of women's voting patterns are being challenged. Historians Sara Alpern and Dale Baum have analyzed voter participation in the 1920 election to conclude, "Women did not demonstrate a high degree of apathy ... when compared to male counterparts in that election. Nor did women vote as carbon copies of men." Voter registration and election statistics in fact indicate great variance among women voting in the 1920s, along with a general decline in voter turnout across the board. Kristi Andersen, Walter Dean Burnham, and Paul Kleppner agree that it is erroneous to presume, as some political analysts have, that the entrance of women into the electorate precipitated this decline. Women as a group were not nonvoters; rather, many subgroups within the population, including significant portions of northern white men, now tended not to exercise their right to vote. As one political analyst stated in 1924 after observing Republican women voters in New York, "local conditions, rather than ... any general causes" seemed to account for the diversity in female voter participation. (7)

It goes without saying that "local conditions" have had significant influence on the political participation of particular groups in the South, even though scholars continue to debate the precise impact of legal methods of disfranchisement. In 1949 V. O. Key contended that "formal disfranchisement measures did not lie at the bottom of the decimation of the southern electorate. They instead recorded a fait accompli brought about, or destined to be brought about, by more fundamental political processes." In 1973 J. Morgan Kousser challenged Key's "fait accompli" disfranchisement theory by using regression analysis to estimate the effect of legal, but highly discriminatory, voting restrictions on black and white men in the South between 1890 and 1910. He continued this critique in The Shaping of Southern Politics, demonstrating how voting and election laws, counter to the assumptions of Key and other political analysts, configured the southern political system and structures of power. (8) Kousser, Steven Lawson, and others have emphasized that the poll tax, as a deterrent to voting, cut across racial lines and facilitated voter fraud. While intimidation and the discriminatory application of voting requirements, especially literacy tests, were the methods of choice for disfranchising 90 percent of African Americans in southern states, the poll tax also reduced the voting power of poor white southern men. (9) Economic and racial status had a profound effect on who paid poll taxes and, therefore, on who voted. (10)

This reassessment of the poll tax is not complete unless gender is introduced as a variable. As a general rule, men and women, even those from the same social and class strata, do not have equal economic power. After southern women received the right to vote in 1920, the relationship between gender and economics meant that the poll tax would disfranchise an even greater portion of southern white women than white men. "Since [poll tax] regulations were made before the advent of woman suffrage in the State," Minnie Steckel pointed out in her 1937 study of Alabama women, "it cannot be maintained that the purpose was to place greater hardship upon women than upon men." Yet, she argued, the common condition of women's economic inequality relative to men meant that, regardless of intentions, the poll tax unfairly discriminated against women voters. Just as Mississippi's voting restrictions penalized African Americans, according to Lawson, "without any explicit reference to blacks as members of a racial group," so too did the poll tax penalize female voters, black and white, without explicit reference to women as a group. (11)

The economic depression of the 1930s exacerbated women's already high levels of financial vulnerability due to dependency, family responsibilities, job discrimination, low pay, and the tendency of wives to outlive their husbands. Alarmed at this negative trend, women's organizations initiated studies to explore the scope of women's economic vulnerability and burdens. The National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs (BPW) polled its members and discovered that the number who supported dependents had risen from 40 percent in 1927 to 60 percent in 1931. A U.S. Department of Labor study of working mothers and family income produced similar findings. After surveying the economic landscape, southern clubwomen meeting in Richmond in the 1930s concluded, as one headline declared, "Sex Has Lost In Depression." (12)

It stood to reason that an increase in women's financial responsibilities meant a decrease in their discretionary income and, consequently, a decrease in the voting power of southern white women who had to pay to vote. Any factor that reduced the participation of Democratic women in elections was a concern of the Women's Division of the Democratic National Committee and its leaders, Mary "Molly" Dewson and Eleanor Roosevelt. Since the 1920s, the Women's Division sought to expand women's political influence by making the membership of all Democratic committees, from the local level up, one-half female. Its goals for women and the party had a greater chance of being achieved, its members believed, if women voted in larger numbers, especially in the South, where the Democratic Party dominated. (13)

As the Women's Division organized its work with southern Democratic women, Dewson and Roosevelt became aware of the different degrees of women's political activism among states in the South. North Carolina, for example, was a clear exception to the rule of southern white women's "disinterest" in politics. There, female voters helped abolish the poll tax through a referendum passed in 1920, when newly enfranchised women, exempt from the poll tax requirement, first voted in a general election. Over the next eight years a powerful group of female campaigners emerged in the state and used their influence to oppose conservative forces and to campaign for Alfred E. Smith in 1928. In the aftermath of this election, they worked to defeat conservative southern Democratic candidates who bolted the party in 1928, including North Carolina's chief architect of black disfranchisement, Senator Furnifold Simmons, who lost in the 1930 primary. In 1932 these women campaigned hard for Franklin Roosevelt and steered a large portion of their state's voters, especially anti-Smith women, back into the Democratic column. Democratic women in other southern states also promoted New Deal candidates and philosophies, but according to the Women's Division's estimates, the voter turnout among white women in the poll tax states was not nearly as impressive as in North Carolina. North Carolina also had a significant number of women serving on Democratic executive committees. Southern male Democratic leaders in poll tax states, however, were content to place only a few women on committees, thereby leaving women as a group severely underrepresented within the party's state structures. North Carolina's situation suggested that this male monopoly depended on weak female voter participation, and that the absence of a poll tax, a comparatively high degree of voting among women, and the development of an influential network of politically skilled and active liberal Democratic women went hand in hand. To harness the power and knowledge of this unusual group of southern women, Dewson promoted several of North Carolina's politically talented Democrats to positions in the national organization of the Women's Division. (14)

With the example of North Carolina before them, the staff at the Women's Division, aided by the League of Women Voters (LWV) and the American Association of University Women (AAUW), began to study the poll tax's effect on women across the South. They concluded that the financial burden of payment and the unfair practices associated with its collection, like graft and man-to-man rituals of favor trading, made the poll tax a greater impediment to voting for white women than for white men. (15) These conclusions were confirmed in 1934 when Louisiana, under Huey Long's influence, abolished the poll tax (but kept literacy requirements in place), and the number of white women registered to vote increased by 123,000. (16) When Florida repealed its poll tax in 1937, Women's Division staffers believed that white women voters there would respond to "free" voting as Louisiana's had. Indeed, voter participation increased by more than 140 percent in Florida's 1938 senatorial primary. Although no definitive statistics of voter participation by sex exist for that election, it was commonly believed by female leaders in the Democratic Party that it was Florida's female voters who had turned out in record numbers and who were primarily responsible for the victory of Senator Claude Pepper over his conservative Democratic rival. By the late 1930s leading Democratic women were convinced that even while other structures of male dominance remained within southern political systems, the numbers of white Democratic women voters would still rise dramatically when the poll tax requirements no longer stood between them and the ballot box. (17)

Consequently, the Women's Division worked hard to enlist Democratic women at the state level in the fight against the poll tax. After FDR announced in September 1938 that the poll tax should be abolished, the women stepped up their efforts. At the Tutwiler Hotel in Birmingham, Alabama, on October 26, 1938, the assistant director of the Women's Division, North Carolinian May Thompson Evans, stood before a ladies' luncheon of Alabama's Democratic women and appealed to their loyalty and concern for the South's future to justify their participation in the cause. "[T]he South will pass into partial eclipse as a power in the Democratic party," Evans warned, "--unless,--unless we turn in now to get out our votes." (18) Though seemingly a logical avenue toward increased political power, Evans's call for a larger voter pool was actually quite unusual in the context of late 1930s Alabama. With the exception of chapters of the NAACP, few seemed interested in increasing the number of Alabama's voters, black or white. (19) Democratic leaders in the state wanted to extend their party's strength, but expanding the number of those actively involved in the voting process had not been part of that enterprise. Unmanageable numbers of voters and uncontrolled voter registration lists could weaken the holds of dominant factions and possibly the Democratic Party itself on state and national power.

Evans was fully aware of the subversive implication of her remarks, considering these "local conditions," just as she was familiar with developments at the national level and couched her arguments accordingly. As she explained to the Alabama women, the old process of nominating presidential and vice presidential candidates had changed, and the Democratic National Committee was in the midst of formulating its new method of nomination. For a century, a two-thirds majority of votes from national convention delegates had been needed to determine the nominees, but this system had been abrogated at the 1936 national convention. At the 1940 convention, Evans predicted, "[t]here will unquestionably be a strong movement to base convention strength [the number of delegates from each state] on the number of votes cast" within the states. If such a movement were successful, only a dramatic increase in the number of southern ballots cast would mitigate the erosion of the South's influence even further in the nomination process and in the party. New York alone cast more votes than ten southern states combined. The North's greater advantage, she argued, was not so much due to its large population, but to the fact that its citizens voted in much larger percentages than did those in southern states. (20)

The principal cause for low voter turnout among Democrats in the South, Evans continued, was the poll tax. In 1938 Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas, South Carolina, Texas, Mississippi, and Virginia still had poll tax requirements. The amount owed could be as little as one dollar, but in states such as Alabama, a prospective voter's back poll taxes frequently ranged between fifteen and twenty dollars. Alabama had only an 18.4 percent voter turnout in 1932. Virginia, another Democratic stronghold and a poll tax state, had a voter turnout of 25 percent. By contrast, North Carolina, which had abolished the poll tax as a requirement for voting in 1920, voted about 60 percent of its strength, a figure close to the national average of 70 percent for all the non-poll tax states. Alabama's "handicap," Evans insisted, was clearly the poll tax requirement: "At the risk of touching a sore spot, I am going to say that I think you should get rid of it. You are not voting your full strength, and you can't vote your full strength, until you do. And let no one raise the race question about it. North Carolina, Louisiana, Florida ... have abolished the poll tax as a requisite for suffrage, and there have been no disastrous results." By "disastrous results" Evans meant that white supremacy, protected by other racially discriminatory disfranchising devices, especially literacy tests, was still secure in the non-poll tax southern states. Indeed, Evans implied that southern white political power was not guaranteed as long as so many southern whites, especially white Democratic women, faced the obstacle of the poll tax. The time had come, she implored, for southern Democratic women to fight the degradation of their states' rights by abolishing the poll tax. (21)

With this argument, Evans lifted a page from the playbook of woman suffragists of an earlier era. When southern opponents of woman suffrage argued that enfranchising women would threaten white supremacy, white suffragists responded that woman suffrage would actually ensure white supremacy because white women outnumbered black women. Similarly, vehement opponents of poll tax reform used negrophobia and white supremacist arguments to defend the requirement. In the context of the history of woman suffrage in the region, Evans's decision to use the expedient states' rights approach probably seemed a logical strategy. (22) Shortly after the Birmingham meeting she gave a similar speech at a statewide meeting of Georgia's Democratic women in Valdosta. From these speeches alone, it is difficult to determine how much of Evans's anti-poll tax rhetoric was Women's Division strategy mapped out for the southern context and how much was the true belief of a southern segregationist. Virginia Foster Durr's account of her own experiences with the Women's Division provides some insight into Evans's actions. (23)

In 1933 Virginia and Clifford Durr moved from Alabama to Washington, D.C., where he worked as an attorney and consultant for the New Deal. Virginia became a volunteer and staff researcher at the Women's Division of the Democratic National Committee, an experience she later described as her "initiation into politics." At that time the women were fighting to achieve "50-50" representation on Democratic committees. Durr was anxious to help the Women's Division, for she knew firsthand the political obstacles southern white women faced. She recalled that "in 1928 or 1929, I went down with my husband to vote [in Birmingham] and they said I couldn't vote. Of course, I hadn't paid my poll tax.... [T]hey never told me I had to do it every year. And they never told me I had to pay the back poll taxes, too. So there I was, and my husband thought it was a great joke, but he paid the bill, which I think came to about ... seven or eight dollars, but at the same time it put me in the position of being an idiot." The Women's Division's goal, as Durr understood it, "was to get rid of the poll tax so white Southern women could vote. There was no mention in the Democratic Committee at that time of black people." (24)

While "working quietly" for the equal representation of women on party committees, Durr remembered, the Women's Division also "produced literature against the poll tax and [tried] to get somebody to introduce a bill to abolish it." They carried out these activities independent of the larger Democratic National Committee. Since the Women's Division was in charge of publishing the Democratic Digest, the party's periodical, as well as campaign material and propaganda for the New Deal, their duties gave them the space and permission to study and write about important political issues. When the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, James Farley, got wind of the women's activities, he met with the head of the Women's Division, Dorothy McAllister, and insisted that the women end their work on the poll tax. Farley then had a meeting with FDR, where he reportedly told the president, "You've got to shut up these damn women in the Democratic Committee because it's making trouble on the Hill with the Southern senators and congressmen." As Durr recalled, "Farley was terribly upset about the poll tax fight because it was beginning to catch on." In response, the Women's Division held an emergency meeting to discuss continuing their fight for anti-poll tax legislation through an independent committee. (25) Even though the Women's Division had been "forbidden" to work on the poll tax issue, May Evans nevertheless disobeyed Farley's orders by speaking against the poll tax at Democratic women's conferences in Alabama and Georgia in the fall of 1938. (26) Her defiance indicated that Democratic women had a somewhat different agenda from the party's male leadership. In short, the poll tax outgrew its usefulness in the eyes of southern white female leaders in the Democratic Party before it lost its appeal to the more powerful men. (27)

Significantly, the Democratic ladies' luncheons in Alabama and Georgia served as a prelude to the establishment of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW), which brought together leading southern liberals, black and white, to support New Deal policies that promised a fairer, more democratic, economic system in the South. A few weeks after the Alabama speech, Evans returned to Birmingham for the first meeting of the SCHW, which she attended alongside Eleanor Roosevelt, Virginia Durr, and the conference's honorary chair, Judge Louise O. Charlton, a member of the Alabama Democratic Executive Committee. Although President Roosevelt had initially supported the idea of the SCHW, his unsuccessful efforts to defeat several conservative southern politicians in the primaries led him to distance himself from such a controversial gathering. In this volatile climate, Eleanor Roosevelt criticized Birmingham's Jim Crow laws by protesting the seating arrangements at the conference, and the SCHW passed a resolution calling for the abolition of the poll tax. The first lady's association with the SCHW and the Democratic women's circumvention of Farley's orders became very serious matters, as powerful conservative southern senators, already upset with the president for labeling the region "the Nation's No. 1 economic problem.... not merely the South's," vigorously denounced the SCHW and its Democratic/New Deal supporters. (28)

Meanwhile, the Women's Division staff collected data and clippings on southern women and the poll tax but kept the investigation low-key. Durr channeled her energies into a separate anti-poll tax campaign under the auspices of the National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax (NCAPT), which she had helped establish. She continued to press the issue with Eleanor Roosevelt, even though the first lady had been told by FDR that "he wasn't going to touch the poll tax with a ten-foot pole and she couldn't have any open part in it either." Eleanor Bontecou, a dean at Bryn Mawr College and a Women's Division researcher investigating the suffrage situation in the South, secured support from the New School for Social Research to complete her study. (29) May Evans had assisted Bontecou in the spring and summer of 1939 by writing to leading Democratic women and state officials in every poll tax state for information on "party regulations defining those who are bona fide members of the Democratic Party." Evans sent the requests on the letterhead of the Women's Division but immediately funneled the information she received on white primaries and electoral qualifications to Bontecou. (30)

Virginia Durr assisted Bontecou further by introducing her to George C. Stoney, a young political reporter from North Carolina who was in the process of writing two articles on the poll tax for Survey Graphic. He had also been recently hired to conduct field research in the South for Ralph J. Bunche's extensive white paper, "The Political Status of the Negro," part of the project that culminated in Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma in 1944. Bontecou asked Stoney to collect information on women and suffrage in the South for her study while he conducted his investigations for Bunche and Myrdal. Stoney directed his reports from the field "For Bontecou and Bunche." (31) In June 1940 Bontecou reported to her advisory research committee, which included H. C. Nixon, Arthur F. Raper, and C. Vann Woodward, "We have also gathered valuable and interesting data as to what economic groups do or do not vote, what effect of the tax is upon the voting of women, on the worker, etc." (32) Indeed, in the Survey Graphic articles published in early 1940, Stoney noted the leading roles women and women's organizations played in state anti-poll tax movements. He also reported that, in spite of well-organized campaigns, women's groups in Alabama, Tennessee, and Arkansas could not beat the political machines that favored the poll tax. (33) Some of what Stoney unearthed on white women's difficulties in paying the poll tax and exclusion from the political process appeared in Bunche's seven-volume study on race and politics in the South, but almost none of this material on white women made its way into An American Dilemma. The focus of the latter study was, after all, the status and treatment of African Americans in the nation, not just in the South. (34)

It was Eleanor Bontecou, not Myrdal, who published in 1942 the evidence of the disproportionate disfranchisement of white women in the South. In her twenty-eight-page pamphlet, The Poll Tax, Bontecou asserted, "There is strong evidence that women of the South want to vote, and if given the opportunity would go to the polls in about the same proportion as men." Working-class, poor, and rural women were especially affected by the tax. As one Georgia country woman stated, "A dollar ain't much if you've got it." Many families, Bontecou wrote, "can afford only one vote, which by custom is that of the man.... Widows and single women composed the majority of the women voters."' This last statement suggested that married women, regardless of class, encountered particular difficulties in paying their poll taxes. As Bontecou observed, "[E]ven among the middle classes the wife may not have her own money." In Alabama, where the poll tax was cumulative, Bontecou discovered that "if the family already has one vote, the mother will feel that food for the children, shoes for them to wear to school, rent for a decent house for them to live in, are more important than her personal privilege of casting a vote." Bontecou's pamphlet was published by the AAUW and distributed through predominantly white women's organizations. While its readership was limited, the evidence helped bolster state anti-poll tax movements. (35)

Just as leading southern Democratic men feared, the anti-poll tax movement gained even greater support during the 1940s. Senator Claude Pepper of Florida, working closely with Virginia Durr, held Senate hearings in a futile effort to pass federal anti-poll tax legislation in 1942. In this forum Bontecou's findings were used by various organizations' representatives as reasons to support the Pepper Bill, and Bontecou was one of the first to testify before the subcommittee in March 1942. Other influential southern white women, such as Lucy Randolph Mason, also put on record their knowledge of the discriminatory impact of the poll tax on women. Susan B. Anthony II, in her testimony, made clear the link between the earlier woman suffrage movement and the efforts of women's organizations to abolish the poll tax. As Anthony told the senators, "[A]lthough woman suffrage is the law of the land, the women in eight States still do not really have the suffrage. These are the poll tax States--the States where it costs money to vote.... While the poll tax still endures woman suffrage has not yet been won." (36)

Between 1942 and 1949 the House passed bills five times that sought to ban the payment of poll taxes as a prerequisite for voting in national elections, but the Senate failed each time to pass the legislation. Three times the measures were killed by southern filibusters. (37) In the climate of the Cold War, opponents of poll tax legislation began labeling the NCAPT "communist," and the organization folded in 1948. By 1949 it was clear that the only way Congress could abolish poll tax "qualifications" would be through a constitutional amendment, just as it had nullified the sex "qualification" with the Nineteenth Amendment. These national anti-poll tax campaigns culminated in the passage of the Twenty-fourth Amendment, which finally rendered poll taxes unconstitutional, in January 1964. By that time, only five states--Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia--still had poll tax requirements. As the movement to abolish the poll tax escalated at the national level through the 1950s, much of the debate, and therefore the publicity, focused on racial discrimination. Consequently, historians of poll tax reform have generally emphasized the national campaign and racial effects. (38)

The national focus of most historians has also worked to obfuscate the significant leadership of southern white women in running poll tax reform campaigns in their home states and hence our better understanding of the anti-poll tax movement at the state level. After more than a decade of fighting in Tennessee, female activists in 1949 managed to pass legislation exempting women from the poll tax requirement. Full repeal was achieved in 1953. Heavy pressure from the Georgia League of Women Voters, under the leadership of Josephine Wilkins of Atlanta, played an important role in the repeal of Georgia's poll tax in 1945. (39) Alabama women also led an arduous poll tax reform campaign. Their movement illustrates most effectively the extent to which the women involved considered their anti-poll tax activism an extension of the fight for woman suffrage--and how their efforts were ignored by some of the most influential political scientists of the era.

In the 1930s the Alabama movement for poll tax reform was conducted by professional, economically independent, married and single working white women--primarily leaders in the Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs, university-educated women in the AAUW, and women prominent in the state Democratic Party. The Alabama BPW fought to change laws that prohibited women from serving on juries and that discriminated against married women, especially in employment. State AAUW chapters supported these reforms, lobbied to place women in positions of authority in government, and guarded against lawmakers' efforts to pass legislation that discriminated against women on the basis of sex. The organizations' causes and leadership overlapped, and both focused on developing a more active female electorate in order to achieve and sustain their political agendas. As a result, poll tax reform became a high priority. (40) Seven Alabama women's organizations, including the Alabama Parent and Teachers Association (PTA) and the BPW, joined forces to fight for the abolition of the poll tax and the passage of secret ballot legislation. Their motivation, George Stoney noted, was to give their organizations, with a combined membership of 150,000 white women, even greater political leverage. When Alabama clubwomen canvassed their organizations, they discovered that only 16-30 percent of the membership of the state's most active white women's clubs voted. The BPW clubs were a notable exception, with an estimated 80 percent of their members voting. (41)

The state-supported white women's college in Montevallo provided much of the expertise and work that sustained the Alabama women's anti-poll tax activism. A cadre of feminists among the college's faculty and administrators constantly challenged the barriers erected against women in academia and other professions and fought for woman suffrage rights, equal pay for equal work, and women's rights in general. They also comprised the core of the AAUW's leadership and publicized the problem of white female disfranchisement. Two female faculty members, Hallie Farmer, a history professor and head of the Division of Social Sciences, and her colleague Josephine Eddy, fought as a team for twenty years for poll tax reform and held leadership positions in both the BPW and AAUW. (42)

These women's efforts to change the state poll tax laws began in the early 1930s when the Alabama BPW and AAUW helped establish a citizens' "Council of Good Government" that directed its attention to "certain pressing problems of citizenship," especially voter registration restrictions and poll taxes. In 1934 and 1935 the AAUW supported the BPW's efforts to convince state legislators to reduce the poll tax accumulation period. By 1936 the women had grown disgusted with politicians who pretended to support poll tax reform but betrayed the women at critical moments. (43) To make politicians less resistant and more accountable, the women established the Women's Joint Legislative Council of Alabama (WJLC), a coalition of Alabama chapters of the AAUW, the BPW, the League of Women Voters, the PTA, the Federated Clubs of Alabama, and the Alabama Library Association, to serve as a "unified front of organized [white] women to get `needed governmental reforms.'" (44)

The anti-poll tax movement also appealed to another dedicated feminist, Nina Miglionico, a young lawyer who provided legal advice and analysis of women's legal status to women's organizations. Miglionico came from a Birmingham working-class, Italian American, and Catholic background, and she battled many forms of discrimination to become an attorney. A woman with tremendous energy, she came to poll tax reform through the BPW and brought other female lawyers into the movement. Another Birmingham woman, Dorah Sterne, a well-respected member of the Jewish community, took up the cause as part of the women's efforts to clean up Alabama government and improve prison conditions. Delphine Thomas from Auburn, depicted in the press as one of Alabama's "gracious ladies," earned a place on the Women's Joint Legislative Council through her work in the AAUW, PTA, Girl Scouts, and Red Cross. She also directed the Women's Division's programs at the state level. Unlike Farmer, Eddy, and Miglionico, Sterne and Thomas were married women, and their presence provided the movement with a shield of respectability, as well as financial and political power. This rather diverse coalition of female leaders developed into a pressure group dedicated to poll tax reform and other liberal causes. (45)

In September 1936 the BPW and the faculty of Alabama College launched a collaborative project to inventory "the progress which has been made since the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment" and "to study the development of woman suffrage in Alabama." In effect, the women gathered data on the impact of the poll tax on white women voters. (46) The project had a double agenda: first, to inform politicians that the state BPW members had the power to influence the votes of roughly 17,000 men and women; and second, to identify obstacles that kept women from wielding even greater political influence. The women were careful to point out that the survey did not "attempt to discover the political alignment of women but rather to accumulate data...." (47)

According to the survey report, one woman commented, "I have never voted because I did not become interested in politics until four years ago. Now the back poll tax is too much." Another responded, "Was unable to pay poll tax during the depression and during other times of distress, but I will pay again in a few days and vote in the future. Lack of participation was not due to lack of interest." The report's author, Minnie Steckel, concluded that the poll tax was a primary reason for high levels of nonvoting among Alabama's white women in the years since the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, that the requirement disfranchised a greater percentage of women than men, and that the sex-based differential had grown wider as a result of the Great Depression. (48)

During the late 1930s, with the introduction of federal anti-poll tax legislation and the first meeting of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare in Birmingham, the Alabama movement to abolish the poll tax became closely linked to even more controversial issues: racial equality and states' rights. The Birmingham AAUW refused to attend the SCHW as a group because the conference was racially integrated, but individual members, such as Dorah Sterne, attended on their own. (49) Indeed, the SCHW meeting epitomized the difficult situation anti-poll tax activists encountered as the color line and racism undermined the possibility of black and white women joining forces in unified support of state legislation that might increase the political power of both groups. (50) At the federal level, southern white and black women, such as Virginia Durr, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Mary Church Terrell, worked together through the Civil Rights Committee of the SCHW, the National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax, and the NAACP. Bethune and Terrell also promoted anti-poll tax legislation through the National Council of Negro Women and the National Association of Colored Women. (51) Black women in southern chapters of the NAACP worked for anti-poll tax legislation and a variety of other electoral reforms and civil rights legislation at the federal level during the 1940s. Had they taken the lead in state anti-poll tax campaigns, their participation, considering the racist climate, would have hindered the formation of a white support base. The visible and open support of black women would have been used as a weapon in the hands of the opposition, a reality that preemptively sabotaged their effectiveness as lobbyists for state-level anti-poll tax legislation. (52) Likewise, white women activists found that their agenda stood more of a chance at the state and local levels if they either dismissed the racial issue or used racial prejudice to their advantage. (53)

In the 1940s, with the crisis of World War II at center stage, Alabama's white female activists continued to persevere on the anti-poll tax front, but they adjusted to the concerns of the day by organizing local "grassroots" meetings, rather than holding statewide meetings, in order to conserve tires and gasoline. They also led various domestic programs to support the war effort. (54) Emphasis on the preservation of freedom and democracy seemed to intensify the women's concerns for their own suffrage rights much as it had during World War I. At a meeting in January 1942 the Tuscaloosa chapter of the AAUW polled the members in attendance to see how many had registered to vote "and why the others failed to do so." Of the twenty-five who responded, only twelve were registered. Six women cited "unpaid poll tax" as their reason for not being registered, and one refused to pay her poll tax on principle. The members were encouraged to make their payments on time and to "strive to make our voting strength 100 per cent in order to make it count." (55)

Although official voting statistics by sex were not yet available, small anecdotal surveys conducted among women's organizations demonstrated that women had their own methods for determining levels and causes of female disfranchisement. To the women involved, these surveys were far more meaningful than abstract studies of voter participation in the general population, especially since the results validated their own observations. In March 1942 the Alabama club-women's surveys reached beyond the state to the U.S. Senate hearings on anti-poll tax legislation. Representatives from the National Women's Trade Union League of America (NWTUL) informed the Subcommittee, "In a recent census an alarming increase in nonpayment of poll taxes was shown in those wards where the lowest incomes were prevalent. The greatest decrease was among potential women voters." NWTUL representatives further cited a survey conducted by the Alabama PTA that showed that only 20 percent of its membership voted. In the context of the hearings, this statistic suggested that the poll tax disfranchised southern middle-class as well as working-class and poor women. (56)

When the Alabama legislature passed a bill in 1944 exempting World War II servicemen and veterans from the poll tax, Alabama activists at last had incontrovertible grounds for claiming that "the tax requirement fell most heavily upon [women]." Few women, compared to men, were in the military, though over 200,000 people in Alabama, roughly 12 percent of the state's 1950 voting population, had been inducted into service. An expanded military, combined with the veterans' exemption, meant that the electoral power of men in Alabama would increase and the relative influence of white women voters would diminish. The anti-poll tax crusaders even began to claim that "Alabama's tax disfranchises more white women than negroes." To make such a claim in a southern state with a large black population was cynical, insensitive, and racist on its face. However, 1940 census figures indicated that there were 983,290 African Americans and 922,101 white women living in Alabama. These statistics, coupled with the exemption of black military personnel from the poll tax, could give rise to such a claim. In truth, though, few on either side of the poll tax issue believed that a significant number of black men, regardless of the laws, would be allowed to vote in Alabama. The statement was tactical inasmuch as it countered white supremacist arguments that getting rid of the poll tax would lead to "negro rule." The white monopoly on political power nevertheless seemed less secure after the U.S. Supreme Court declared white primaries unconstitutional in 1944. To ensure the persistence of high levels of black disfranchisement, Alabama's Democratic legislators passed and voters ratified the Boswell amendment, which required that prospective voters be able to read, write, and understand any article of the Constitution in order to register. (57)

Anti-poll tax activists in Alabama, however, immediately questioned the constitutionality of the amendment. Among those who opposed it was James "Big Jim" Folsom, who in 1946 captured the governor's office in a campaign that called for the elimination of the poll tax and criticized the exclusion of women from juries. (58) Nina Miglionico, chair of the Birmingham AAUW's Committee on the Economic and Legal Status of Women, protested the amendment by producing a "Survey of Political and Civil Rights of Negroes in Alabama," a compilation of state and local Jim Crow ordinances collected with the assistance of other AAUW branches. The Boswell amendment, she stated, "gave means for discrimination against the negro without providing for discrimination openly and legally." She proceeded to identify other blatant race-based inequalities, particularly citing the inferior status of black public schools. Miglionico distributed this information along with results of a survey she conducted on the voting habits of Jefferson County women. According to Miglionico, three-fifths of the nonvoting women surveyed "gave nonpayment of poll taxes as the reason for not voting," and sentiment among Birmingham women, she reported, was "strongly against the poll tax." (59)

With the toppling of the white primary in 1944 and the Democratic Party's split over Harry Truman's civil rights platform in 1948, which sparked the Dixiecrat revolt, momentum for change was building. In January 1949 the U.S. District Court in Mobile ruled that the Boswell amendment was unconstitutional, and the Supreme Court upheld this decision. The Alabama legislature responded by passing legislation requiring a fee to vote in the Democratic primary. (60)

At this point, few Alabama AAUW women seemed to question, much less reject, racial segregation, but Miglionico's decision to examine the related issues of women's curtailed voting rights and race-based injustice was a prelude to discussions concerning the commonalities of gender and racial prejudice. When well-educated black women in the late 1940s pressured the national AAUW to allow them to join, many white members in AAUW chapters resisted racial integration, but some leaders stated that integration was a principle to work toward. (61) In the face of this controversy, and with Nina Miglionico serving as an expert, the 1949 WJLC workshop at Montevallo devoted much of its program to "racial understanding." In fighting to reform or abolish the poll tax at this point in Alabama's history, there was no way white women in the movement could avoid the issue of black civil rights or discuss racial injustice in an abstract fashion. (62)

In the turmoil of the late 1940s Hallie Farmer continued to lead the anti-poll tax activism of the WJLC. Alabama's coalition had grown to include the Methodist Missionary Women, the Federation of Farm Women, the Alabama Women Lawyers' Association (organized by Nina Miglionico), as well as thirteen other women's organizations, the AFL, the CIO, and the Farmers' Union. (63) Newly arrived wives of poll tax-exempt military personnel stationed at bases near Montgomery re-established the Alabama LWV with the poll tax as their central issue and target. (64) After the defeat of a repeal bill in 1947, the women focused more sharply on increasing their influence at the polls, which meant paying their poll taxes. Activists set up booths in downtown Tuscaloosa and advertised to remind women to pay the required fee. Inspired by Hallie Farmer, women at a Home Demonstration Club meeting in Birmingham in 1950 organized a bake sale and used the $200 earned to pay the back poll taxes of fifteen white women interested in abolishing the voting requirement. That year, another anti-poll tax gubernatorial candidate, Gordon Persons, was elected. (65)

In December 1953 a compromise anti-poll tax referendum to reduce the cumulative period of the poll tax to two years and to exempt anyone over the age of forty-five years was submitted to Alabama's citizens. To defeat the initiative, the Jefferson County Democratic Executive Committee unleashed a barrage of anticommunist and racist propaganda stating that the Communist Party and the NAACP supported the measure as part of a plan to raise the wages of unskilled workers and eliminate racial segregation--charges that certainly had some validity. Nonetheless, the referendum passed by a vote of 70,951 to 53,532. (66)

In the final analysis, political scientist Fred Ogden declared that "[m]ajor credit for altering the cumulative period from [twenty-four] years to two years goes to the women.... With something of the vigor and sense of righteousness of suffragettes, they organized to repeal the poll tax." Certainly the women recognized this. "WE WON!!!!" Hallie Farmer wrote her co-workers. "If I were an artist, I would put a huge crowing rooster (perhaps a cackling hen would be better!) at the top of this letter." But Farmer also reminded the women that the fight was not over. She urged them to "capitalize on our poll-tax victory" by launching a "poll-tax-paying-registration campaign" to boost registration in time for the May primary. (To vote in May, taxes had to be paid by February 1.) The women's anti-poll tax coalition paused briefly to celebrate, then pursued their goal of "constructive legislation." As the Birmingham LWV Bulletin stated, "The effort is directed toward full abolition and not just the cumulative feature." (67)

After the 1953 law took effect, many watched to see what difference the change would make on the composition of the Alabama electorate. The projected effect prompted a conservative state Democratic Party leader to complain to former governor Frank M. Dixon: "We are not going to be able to do much in the way of preventing the registration of white citizens, even though they are of a type which has no business voting." Conservative forces, with Governor Persons's support, moved quickly to pass a new Voter Qualification Amendment known as "Boswell, Jr." Clifford Durr recalled that in 1954 "there was an immediate increase in the registration of [white] women, around 200,000. The blacks did not get in on that deal to amount to anything. But it was the women whose husbands did not pay their poll tax [who benefited]." (68)

It was only a matter of time before the second battle for woman suffrage and the movement for black civil rights in Alabama would clearly interact. Even though poll tax reform did not have a dramatic impact on black voters at the time, the interest of Montgomery's fledgling LWV chapter in diminishing voter restrictions encouraged some Alabama black women, who wanted more black women to vote, to try to integrate the all-white chapter. Mary Fair Burks and other leaders among Montgomery's black women seemed to believe that they and the LWV had a common cause in the late 1940s. When the chapter refused to integrate, Burks and her associates founded the all-black Women's Political Council (WPC) in Montgomery. In 1955, after years of trying to improve the treatment of people of color on the city's bus lines, the WPC, led by Jo Ann Robinson, started and sustained the Montgomery bus boycott and thereby launched a new era in the movement for civil rights. (69)

Hallie Farmer, Josephine Eddy, Delphine Thomas, Nina Miglionico, Dorah Sterne, and the coalition of labor and women's organizations continued to fight for poll tax repeal, even as the 1954 Supreme Court decided to desegregate the public schools and, later, as the Montgomery bus boycott generated dangerous backlashes against the movement. By 1956 the women's organizations had been fighting for twenty years; most leaders had been in their forties when they started. With the election of governors John M. Patterson in 1959 and George C. Wallace in 1963, hopes that the Alabama legislature would make further concessions on the issue of suffrage rights strained reality. Farmer retired and moved back to her home state of Indiana. A former colleague remarked that it was wise that Farmer had left Alabama and speculated that, considering Farmer's age and her support of black civil rights, her health would not have sustained her for long in the increasingly tense environment of the Deep South. Alabama's poll tax remained secure, although its bite had been weakened, until the ratification of the Twenty-fourth Amendment in 1964. (70)

Most of the white women who sought to abolish Alabama's poll tax initially had little interest in fighting racial discrimination and segregation. In 1940 George Stoney commented that it was "fortunate" that "Alabama's anti-poll tax fight has been carried on chiefly by women" because southern white women could "defy the Negro domination threat without loss of gallantry, and they are less in danger of economic reprisals." In other words, southern white women were perhaps freer than white men to advance controversial democratic causes, even to the point of challenging the bugaboo of "Negro domination," because southern codes of chivalry would, theoretically, protect white women. Like white woman suffragists of an earlier era, they were willing to use racism and risk being race-baited in the course of promoting their cause. (71) And, if making ballots more accessible to white women meant that as a by-product black citizens would be further empowered, that was a change the women were willing to abide. To advance white women's post-1920 suffrage rights, these anti-poll tax activists cloaked their cause in the rhetoric of universal democracy, repeatedly arguing that all citizens had certain basic civil rights. Having made these claims for so long, the women found it difficult to deny the validity of other causes based on the arguments they themselves had advanced, even when their commitment to democratic principles challenged their personal racial prejudices. (72)

Any effort to ascribe one ideological label to all of Alabama's white female anti-poll tax activists is complicated by the varieties of feminism, liberalism, and racism that historians place within the span of the 1910s to the 1960s and by the tactical use of racist rhetoric. In the case of Hallie Farmer, Josephine Eddy, and many of the AAUW and BPW members involved in the movement, the liberalism they exhibited represented a combination of liberal feminism, developed in the battles for woman suffrage and academic advancements for women, and a belief in small "d" democratic principles. In general, those who fought hardest to repeal the poll tax also supported the New Deal. Several bills for which the women labored, such as legislation allowing women to serve on juries, were considered matters of simple justice and promoted as such. In Alabama such reforms were unquestionably more "liberal" than the status quo. In the 1940s and 1950s concerns on the international front moved many of the women to support the United Nations and denounce the antidemocratic excesses of McCarthyism, especially the senator's attacks on the AAUW. Aspects of the Alabama anti-poll tax activists' ideologies that seemed most consistent through the years were their beliefs in democratic principles and equal rights regardless of sex. Indeed, they worked to extend the meaning of democracy to include feminist principles and battled to represent these within state and national committees of the Democratic Party. Before long, Alabama woman activists had to consider to what extent an issue of social, economic, and political justice, such as racial discrimination, was a different matter from gender-based discrimination.

For Nina Miglionico, who was elected to serve on the Birmingham city council in 1963, where she became a formidable political power on behalf of women, blacks, and labor throughout the 1960s, the connections between her stand for democratic feminist principles and the modern civil rights movement were profound. She was among the few white leaders in the community to publicly criticize Governor George Wallace for his refusal to desegregate the schools in 1963. Although Miglionico probably never intended to challenge the racial injustice of Alabama's political system, her efforts to advance the rights of white women took her to a point where she began to challenge the structures of white, as well as white male, dominance. As resistance to the civil rights movement grew increasingly vicious, Miglionico became a target for attacks by antisegregationists and white supremacists. One January morning in 1965 Miglionico's Italian-born father stepped out on the porch of the home he shared with his councilwoman daughter and discovered a package containing a bomb. After carrying the bomb into the yard, the eighty-three-year-old grocer carefully disconnected the detonation device, called the police, and woke his wife and daughter. Miglionico's elderly mother suffered a severe heart attack as a result of the shock. Upon hearing of the attempted bombing, George Wallace changed course in midflight and returned to Birmingham to make a great show of his concern for Miglionico's family. Thirty-four years later, Miglionico still recalled with obvious disgust the photographs of Wallace attempting to comfort her mother. (73)

As the bombing incident indicated, Miglionico's work on behalf of traditionally marginalized southerners threatened the political system fashioned in the years prior to her birth. The destiny of oppression, however, was not one she could accept. A few years later white women of a younger generation would come to the same conclusion through their work for black civil rights. (74) By then, Miglionico had traveled a similar path through an earlier formative era characterized by white women's battles for civil and suffrage rights and efforts to transform the Democratic Party.

As Miglionico's case attests, the anti-poll tax movement in Alabama provided white women with an outlet for political involvement and personal ideological development to an extent that belies the common claims of female, especially southern female, political apathy. Yet these claims, rather than an understanding of disfranchisement and women's efforts to combat it, persist. One explanation for their longevity stems from the fact that the book most responsible for enlightening the nation on the subject of politics in the South, V. O. Key's Southern Politics in State and Nation, went to press in 1949 without the section on women and voting, "Sex Differentials in Voting: Politics is Man's Business," that Key once intended to write as part of chapter 24 but failed to complete. The extant raw data, field notes, correspondence, in-house memos, and chapter drafts of Southern Politics invite historians to analyze how this landmark study was produced. Although it claimed to be a candid, complete study, it systematically eliminated women from the story of politics in the South and in the nation, with long-term results.

Key's neglect of southern women's political activism is all the more remarkable considering the research project's geographical proximity to and overlapping personnel with the Alabama women's movement to abolish the poll tax. The four-year collaborative study of the electoral process in the South that produced Southern Politics was headquartered at the University of Alabama, just forty miles from Alabama College in Montevallo. The study's initiator, Roscoe C. Martin, had moved in 1938 with his wife Mildred Ellis Martin from Austin, Texas, to Tuscaloosa to teach political science at the university. Mildred, a former president of Austin's AAUW branch, immediately became active in Tuscaloosa's chapter. Through the Alabama AAUW, she directed workshops involving fifty women's organizations to advance legislative reforms, including anti-poll tax initiatives. (75) Roscoe Martin assisted the AAUW by giving talks on politics and government and by teaching special courses for the women on drafting legislation. Roughly three times a year for eleven years, he addressed Women's Joint Legislative Council and AAUW meetings to help the women pass bills and defeat political opponents. (76) In 1942 Martin, now head of the Bureau of Public Administration at the University of Alabama, hired Hallie Farmer to study the Alabama legislature for the bureau, and she produced several publications that proved extremely useful to political activists. (77)

In 1944 Martin turned the bureau's attention to a study of the poll tax in the South. A national offensive on the poll tax had triggered another round of congressional hearings in Washington, D.C., and Martin provided the office of Georgia governor Ellis G. Arnall with information concerning the requirement. Both Arnall and Martin concluded that if southern states appeared to move in the direction of poll tax reform, it might forestall federal action. Liberal activists at the time, and historians since, questioned the sincerity of Arnall's interest in repealing the poll tax. But Martin's suggested interest in impeding federal action might have been a ruse inasmuch as he was genuinely interested in making anti-poll tax headway in the South. Martin might have been using conservative states' rights arguments to advance a hidden liberal agenda, or perhaps he preferred poll tax reform to come through state action rather than federal. In any case, Arnall's office assured Martin of its support for a southwide study of the poll tax. (78) Martin began soliciting advice from newspaper editors, college professors, and other prominent southern men with the intention of forming study commissions in every poll tax state; almost no women were considered for these positions. Martin also made it clear that he did not want closed-minded individuals dedicated to defending existing suffrage restrictions on the commissions. (79) But the political climate in Georgia changed when Arnall's political rival came out against the poll tax, and the governor suddenly announced himself in favor of repeal. Arnall's new stance made it difficult for his office to sponsor an impartial study of the poll tax, so Martin decided to rescue the project by expanding the scope to political conditions in the South in general and sought alternative means of support. (80)

In 1946 Martin won a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to conduct the project. He then engaged in a dogged campaign to secure the expertise of Valdimer Orlando Key Jr. (known to his colleagues as "V. O."), professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University and a fellow Texan, to direct the research and to analyze, write, and edit substantial portions of the manuscript. One purpose of the study, Martin informed Key, was to prove that southerners could produce an evenhanded analysis of their own political situation, a thinly veiled criticism of Myrdal's American Dilemma. (81) With Key on board, the two men quickly assembled a group of southern researchers, including Donald S. Strong from the University of Texas, who came to Tuscaloosa as an assistant professor in political science and researched and wrote drafts of the Texas chapter, and Alexander Heard, a Georgia native and graduate of the University of North Carolina, where he and George Stoney had been classmates. Heard conducted the lion's share of the project's fieldwork and wrote most of the early drafts of the chapters on individual states. (82) Fred Ogden, a Johns Hopkins doctoral candidate and political science instructor at the University of Alabama, was primarily responsible for research on the poll tax, the original focus of the study. (83) Before starting the fieldwork, the staff created a system for gathering and organizing data by drafting a questionnaire and assigning codes to each question and corresponding answers. For fifteen months, while the staff in Tuscaloosa assembled statistics, catalogued field notes, and clipped articles, Heard and Strong conducted interviews: Heard in nine states and Strong in two, spending about six weeks in each state. (84)

Alabama was the first state to receive Heard's attention when, on December 3, 1946, he made the short trip from Tuscaloosa to Montevallo "for a long conference with Dr. Farmer." By February Heard had finished his interviews in Alabama and moved on to North Carolina, but he began to have grave doubts about his "techniques." As he reported to Martin and Key:

   Unless we can perfect my techniques a good deal more than seems probable we
   shall inevitably come out of each of the states with an incomplete picture
   ... with other aspects or viewpoints ignored or under-emphasized. We might
   even overlook some major considerations or helpful methods of approach....
   [W]e might make a break in the field work and do some piecing of the report
   together to try to bring to light some of our neglected topics or
   questions. (It seems to me inevitable that in anything this size there are
   bound to be such.) ... It is not so much the adequacy of the answers we are
   getting as it is the adequacy of the questions we are asking which concerns
   me.

Heard's doubts increased as the project progressed. "I am very fearful," he wrote Martin and Key, "that under the present plan with the success in interviewing which I have had so far we may end up with a great deal of material on a multitude of topics and sub-topics but without sufficient completeness to permit real understanding in discussion of particular conditions in particular places." Annoyed by Heard's criticisms, Key wrote Martin, "I remain of the opinion that this project is in excellent shape, notwithstanding the cold water thrown on it...." (85)

Although the field researchers sought out southerners "active in public life," a criteria that included politicians, "influential Negroes," and "leading spirits in reform movements," they interviewed very few white women. In Arkansas and Tennessee, where George Stoney had found heavy involvement of women's organizations in 1930s anti-poll tax campaigns, no women were interviewed. The neglect of women in Arkansas is striking considering the unprecedented tenure of Hattie Caraway, the first woman elected and reelected to the U.S. Senate, who held the office for thirteen years before losing to J. William Fulbright in the 1944 primary. Women in Alabama were also ignored, in spite of Hallie Farmer's efforts to persuade Heard to interview female political candidates. (86)

In the interviewing process, then, female politicians and candidates, as well as the issue of female voter participation, got lost in the shuffle. As Heard had suspected, the range and type of questions meant that researchers might "overlook some major considerations." Even though the researchers were familiar with Eleanor Bontecou and her work (Heard met with one of her research assistants to discuss the poll tax) and used Ralph Bunche's report as "our Bible," somehow the issue of southern white women's disfranchisement was ignored. To his credit, Heard always insisted that in the method he used "the opportunities for bias are obvious." It is significant that the researchers intended to write a section on women and political participation. It is also significant that they failed to generate sufficient data to do so. (87)

In October 1947 Key worked on several drafts of "Sex Differentials in Voting: Politics is Man's Business," whose very title emphasized women's lack of power. Although the staff dutifully clipped articles on the political activism of women in Virginia, New Orleans, Dallas, and Mississippi and noted George Stoney's articles, Key ignored the evidence. (88) In the unpublished draft he instead wrote of how little southern women cared about politics: "Glib and easy generalizations about the social position of women invoke scorn (especially from women), but probably few would dispute the contention that in southern mores the notion is more firmly implanted than elsewhere that women's place is in the home. Not until 1946, for example, were chapters of the League of Women Voters established in Mississippi." Key's misinformation regarding the political activities of women in Mississippi, and the role the Mississippi LWV played in key Democratic primaries in the 1920s, indicated how little he cared to explore the subject. (89) In a halfhearted attempt to analyze female voter participation, Key asked an assistant to seek out the Louisiana secretary of state's report on registered voters, specifically requesting figures for the number of white and black males and females registered. These statistics showed that in 1946, twelve years after Louisiana repealed the poll tax, 44 percent of the whites registered to vote in the state were women. (90) As the materials came together, it became difficult for Key to write what he had planned--to depict southern politics as exclusively "man's business" or to dismiss southern white women as politically apathetic. In the end, the Louisiana evidence and the articles on women's political activism, which did not support Key's premise, ended up in "discard" files. (91) In February 1949 Key and his staff decided to drop the section on women from the manuscript. (92) Instead, he wrote, "Analyses of voting made in many parts of the world demonstrate a remarkable uniformity of voting behavior: almost everywhere larger proportions of men vote than of women.... While the evidence indicates that the same general tendencies prevail in the South, the southern electorate also possesses peculiarities growing out of its population composition, traditions, and suffrage regulations." (93)

This is a less than satisfying analysis of gender and voting patterns in the South, not only because of its lack of content, but also because it ignored what female scholars and activists had published and proclaimed for years concerning the discriminatory impact of the poll tax on women voters. Furthermore, Key was very uneven in his application of evidence. He recognized, for example, that "[r]ecent campaigns by Negro organizations to induce their members to pay the poll tax suggest mention of its role in Negro disfranchisement." Yet inexplicably, Key did not reach the same conclusion in regard to women, despite similar evidence from investigators like George Stoney who had emphasized the strong role of white women's organizations in anti-poll tax movements and their efforts to get members to pay their poll taxes. Moreover, Key observed, "The poll tax has had little or no bearing on Negro disfranchisement, the object for which it was supposedly designed. On the contrary, those kept from voting by the tax have been the whites." Yet Key restricted his analysis of the impact of the poll tax on "whites" to the working class, farmers, and "poor whites." For Key, women, no matter their color or class, were just not in the picture. (94)

Key's drafts of the unpublished section demonstrate that he could neither "see" southern white women as politically oppressed nor take their political activities seriously. His decision not to include the section perpetuated the practice of ignoring women as forces in southern political history. Yet, had he published the section, which as drafted contained glaring factual errors and stereotypes that contradicted his own evidence, Key might have encouraged a greater dismissive attitude towards southern women's political history than already prevailed. Even more importantly, Key's declaration of women's political impotence might have hampered efforts of southern white women to pass electoral reforms.

Indeed, in 1949 as Southern Politics went to press, women very close to the research study in Alabama were still engaged in a heated battle to repeal the poll tax. The women connected to the Southern Politics study--Hallie Farmer and the wives of the project's researchers, including Mildred Ellis Martin, Emily Trenckmann Strong, and Jessie Cupitt Ogden--had been working together for several years for poll tax reform, particularly through the local AAUW. Their activism intensified throughout the years of the study, as Alabama's voting laws became increasingly controversial after the state's starring role in the 1948 Dixiecrat revolt. In the early 1950s Emily Strong helped reestablish League of Women Voters chapters in Alabama with the specific goal of abolishing the poll tax. (95)

Despite Mildred Martin's and Emily Strong's active involvement with women's political associations, and the fact that both Roscoe Martin and Donald Strong assisted their wives and the women's organizations in the anti-poll tax movement, these men in particular still managed to exclude women from their study of politics in the South. Perhaps the personal nature of their knowledge of the women's activism and their own involvement may have compromised their ability to judge its significance. Such a personal connection could be perceived as unprofessional. In addition, the political climate at the University of Alabama grew colder and more reactionary so that by 1949 Roscoe Martin felt compelled to leave Alabama for a position in Syracuse, New York.

Another possible explanation for the neglect of women in Southern Politics is that methodological trends in political science tended to privilege one kind of data over another. Correspondence between Key and Roscoe Martin suggests that "political statistics" may have had too great an influence on Key. Certainly, the estimated female voter turnout in the South predisposed Key and others to underrate women's political activism in the region. Interestingly, after the publication of Southern Politics, Martin criticized Key's excessive use of statistical evidence. As Martin wrote a colleague, "The project produced three or four side results which I thought worthy of some further exploration. Among these was the conclusion, renewed and reinforced by repeated bitter experience, that political statistics in the South are in a terrible mess.... The simple truth is that, the law and case books aside, there is no earthly way to do productive research work in southern politics except through tortuous and expensive inquiry made at first hand in the field." In January 1954 Martin took up this theme again when he wrote to congratulate Key on the publication of A Primer of Statistics for Political Scientists. Martin could not resist a good-natured criticism of Key's overemphasis on the "statistics of politics": "I am aware that another set of illustrative data would serve just as good purpose.... [While] the fundamental soundness of your book is not seriously impaired by the data-of-politics emphasis[,] I am sure you wrestled with this problem and solved it to your satisfaction; I mention it only to indicate that I, too, have wrestled with it." Key responded, "Your estimate coincides pretty much with my own. I was especially worried about the sole reliance on electoral data for illustrations, [though] it can be said in defense that this is the territory in which technique has been most developed." (96)

But in light of the criticisms of other highly respected scholars concerning his methodology and selection of evidence, Key's response is not very convincing. In 1946 Mary Ritter Beard, in Woman as Force in History, chastised Key for neglecting evidence of women's political influence and leaving women's political activities out of his 1942 textbook Politics, Parties and Pressure Groups. Beard's attack on Key was not only direct, it was personal; she and her husband, the constitutional historian Charles Beard, were very close friends of Key and his wife, Luella Gettys, a political scientist and author of The Law of Citizenship in the United States. (97) Mary Beard wrote, "It has been a freakish aspect of American political science which both as theory and descriptive thinking tends either to abstraction or to the thought of the male only as a factor in the state." Beyond "reporting that women now have the vote in the United States," Beard observed that textbooks on government "pay little or no attention to what women have done with the vote, to their political agitations, to their ideas of government, and their work in government as administrators and judges." Key's textbook, which Beard admitted was "[o]ne of the very best treatises on party organization and practices, by a witty and discerning scholar," also bore the "impress of the current tendency" to neglect women's influence in politics and government, particularly their influence at the Democratic and Republican conventions. (98) Beard's 1946 criticisms should have been fairly fresh in Key's mind when he was writing drafts of Southern Politics in 1947. (99)

One Southern Politics researcher did recognize the importance and effectiveness of female activists in the anti-poll tax movement and gave the women their due. Fred Ogden, in his 1958 book The Poll Tax in the South, pointed out, "Following repeal in Louisiana and alteration of the cumulative feature in Alabama, white women registered in greater numbers than any other group." The Louisiana statistics combined with the results in Alabama convinced Ogden that "poll taxes bore particularly heavily upon women" and dramatically suppressed white female voter participation. Ogden had additional evidence that this effect of the poll tax cut across class lines after he learned that a surprising number of politicians' wives did not vote until after the cumulative period was reduced; "the 1953 amendment," he noted, "particularly encouraged white women to become voters." (100)

In hindsight Ogden recalled that his relationship to the women and their movement during the most heated years of the anti-poll tax campaign, from 1948 to 1953, made him realize the importance of their efforts, (101) While his wife, Mildred Martin, and Emily Strong worked on poll tax reform, Donald Strong and Fred Ogden taught at the University of Alabama, and Ogden wrote his dissertation based on his poll tax research, collected during the Electoral Process Study. Unlike Key, who conducted most of his work for Southern Politics while living in Baltimore, Ogden had lived and worked in Tuscaloosa since 1946. Perhaps if Key had spent more time in Tuscaloosa, Southern Politics might have contributed more to an understanding of women's political oppression and activism in the South. (102)

Southern Politics continues to serve as a master narrative on the subject, and many political historians continue to treat southern white women and their activism as inconsequential to the history of politics in the region. Once historians recognize that the Nineteenth Amendment failed to enfranchise large numbers of southern women, white and black, we can begin to reject the fallacy that the woman suffrage movement ended in 1920. It did not: it continued in the form of the second battle for woman suffrage, the women's anti-poll tax campaigns at the state and federal levels that were distinctly political movements that especially affected the Democratic Party and the composition of the southern electorate. The battles for woman suffrage raged longer and harder than has been previously recognized. Through those campaigns, which ultimately facilitated the slow awakening of the nation and the South to the overall injustice of disfranchisement, the long fight for women's suffrage rights challenged the fundamentals of southern politics and, in the process, offered some assistance to the cause of civil rights.

(1) Minnie L. Steckel, "The Alabama Business Woman As Citizen," Alabama College Bulletin, 30 (July 1937), 24; Katharine Cater, "Women in Alabama," Alabama College Bulletin, 44 (July 1951), 9; Frederic D. Ogden, The Poll Tax in the South (Tuscaloosa, 1958), 177. I would like to thank Jane Sherron De Hart, J. Morgan Kousser, and Wayne Flynt for their comments on various versions of this essay, and the anonymous readers for the Journal, who provided invaluable suggestions. Earlier versions were presented at the 1997 Mid-America Conference and the 1999 Southern Historical Association meeting, and I wish to thank the participants for their comments and suggestions. I am especially grateful to Arkansas State University's Faculty Research and Development Fund for generous support of this project.

(2) Those who would wish to study women's disfranchisement in the period are also hampered by the lack of thorough and reliable female voting statistics. As Sophonisba P. Breckinridge wrote in 1933, "No one knows exactly how many of the voters at any general election are women. Only a few studies have been made. Of as great interest perhaps as any attempt to set out the subject are those which were stimulated by the National League of Women Voters, and conducted by state and local leagues in the period from 1926 to 1929. Although those inquiries were conducted by amateurs, they were under skilled direction. In the limited areas surveyed the information was assembled by an examination of the official poll lists and by house-to-house canvassing." Breckinridge, Women in the Twentieth Century: A Study of Their Political, Social and Economic Activities (New York and London, 1933), 247-48. Judith Sealander also notes in her study of women and the labor force that the American Association of University Women, the YWCA, the League of Women Voters, and other well-established women's organizations gathered statistics on women's professional and political status, and these were used by the Women's Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor beginning in the 1920s. Sealander, As Minority Becomes Majority: Federal Reaction to the Phenomenon of Women in the Work Force, 1920-1963 (Westport, Conn., 1983), 31-32. The National Election Surveys conducted by the University of Michigan do provide a systematic collection of data on voting by sex, but the surveys did not begin until after World War II. Peter S. Tuckel and Felipe Tejera, "Changing Patterns in American Voting Behavior, 1914-1980," Public Opinion Quarterly, 47 (Summer 1983), 232 n. 2.

(3) For a solid study that focuses primarily on issues of race and class see Steven F. Lawson, Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944-1969 (New York, 1976), esp. vii, 58, 367 n. 13.

(4) Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York and London, 1944); V. O. Key Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York, 1949).

(5) The pervasive neglect of women's political cultures in studies by political scientists is not a new issue. For a provocative and insightful examination of the problem see Susan C. Bourque and Jean Grossholtz, "Politics an Unnatural Practice: Political Science Looks at Female Participation," Politics and Society, 4 (Winter 1974), 225-66. For a recent example of efforts to rectify this flaw in the scholarship see Anna L. Harvey, Votes Without Leverage: Women in American Electoral Politics, 1920-1970 (Cambridge, Eng., and other cities, 1998).

(6) V. O. Key Jr., "Sex Differentials in Voting: Politics is a Man's Business," unpublished second draft, October 21, 1947, in Folder on "Electoral Participation, MSS Composition of the Electorate--Earlier Drafts Sex Differentials," Box 5, Southern Politics Collection (Special Collections Division, Jean and Alexander Heard Library, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn.); see also Donald R. Matthews and James W. Prothro, Negroes and the New Southern Politics (New York and other cities, 1966), 65-66. On women's political activism and partisanship prior to 1920 see Paula Baker, "The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780-1920," American Historical Review, 89 (June 1984), 62047; Melanie Gustafson, "Partisan Women in the Progressive Era: The Struggle for Inclusion in American Political Parties," Journal of Women's History, 9 (Summer 1997), 8-30; Suzanne Lebsock, "Women and American Politics, 1880-1920," 35-62, and Nancy F. Cott, "Across the Great Divide: Women in Politics Before and After 1920," 153-76, both in Louise A. Tilly and Patricia Gurin, eds., Women, Politics, and Change (New York, 1990).

(7) Sara Alpern and Dale Baum, "Female Ballots: The Impact of the Nineteenth Amendment," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 16 (Summer 1985), 43-67 (first quotation on p. 64); Kristi Andersen, After Suffrage: Women in Partisan and Electoral Politics Before the New Deal (Chicago and London, 1996), 5-11, 54-60; Walter Dean Burnham, "The Changing Shape of the American Political Universe," American Political Science Review, 59 (March 1965), 7-28, esp. 15-16; Paul Kleppner, "Were Women to Blame? Female Suffrage and Voter Turnout," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 12 (Spring 1982), 621-43; Sarah Schuyler Butler, "Women Who Do Not Vote," Scribner's Magazine, 76 (November 1924), 530 (second quotation; see also Andersen, After Suffrage, 55).

(8) Key, Southern Politics, 533 (quotation); J. Morgan Kousser "Post-Reconstruction Suffrage Restrictions in Tennessee: A New Look at the V. O. Key Thesis," Political Science Quarterly, 88 (December 1973), 655-83, esp. 656-57; Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restrictions and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910 (New Haven and London, 1974), 3-5, 208, 239-46.

(9) Kousser, Shaping of Southern Politics, 49, 63-72; Lawson, Black Ballots, chap. 3. Numerous scholars have observed that the poll tax disfranchised hundreds of thousands of "poor whites," and that some politicians, newspaper editors, and reformers favored its repeal in order to expand the white electorate. Few have mentioned the disproportionate effect the requirement seemed to have on white women compared to white men. Lawson, Black Ballots, 56-58, 367 n. 13; Key, Southern Politics, 533-54; Numan V. Bartley, The New South, 1945-1980 (Baton Rouge, 1995), 24; Wayne Flynt, Poor But Proud: Alabama's Poor Whites (Tuscaloosa, 1989), 91. For the poll tax and southern Democratic politics generally see Paul Lewinson, Race, Class, and Party: A History of Negro Suffrage and White Politics in the South (New York and other cities, 1932); Jennings Perry, Democracy Begins at Home: The Tennessee Fight on the Poll Tax (Philadelphia and New York, 1944); Chandler Davidson and Bernard Grofman, eds., Quiet Revolution in the South: The Impact of the Voting Rights Act, 1965-1990 (Princeton, 1994); Douglas B. Craig, After Wilson: The Struggle for the Democratic Party, 1920-1934 (Chapel Hill and London, 1992); William D. Barnard, Dixiecrats and Democrats: Alabama Politics, 1942-1950 (Tuscaloosa, 1974); and Earl Black and Merle Black, Politics and Society in the South (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1987).

(10) As Fred Ogden concluded in 1958, "In times of economic depression and low income, a tax requirement will discourage more citizens from becoming qualified voters. It restricts the suffrage significantly when the economic level is low and is an important deterrent to low income individuals at any time." Ogden, Poll Tax in the South, 173. Another key factor in voting was literacy. Illiteracy among blacks in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi averaged 30 percent in 1920, as compared to white illiteracy rates of 5.4 percent, 6.3 percent, and 3.6 percent in those states respectively. U.S. Department of Commerce, Statistical Abstracts of the United States: 1933 (Washington, D.C., 1933), 43.

(11) Steckel, "Alabama Business Woman As Citizen," 24 (quotation), 46; Lawson, Black Ballots, 11.

(12) Richmond Times-Dispatch, March 6, 1935, p. 9.

(13) On the Women's Division see Susan Ware, Beyond Suffrage: Women and the New Deal (Cambridge, Mass., 1981); and Ware, Partner and I: Molly Dewson, Feminism, and New Deal Politics (New Haven and London, 1987).

(14) Sarah Wilkerson-Freeman, "From Clubs to Parties: North Carolina Women in the Advancement of the New Deal," North Carolina Historical Review, 68 (July 1991), 320-39; Wilkerson-Freeman, "Women and the Transformation of American Politics: North Carolina, 1898-1940" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1995). In her autobiography Virginia Foster Durr discusses the position of Democratic women in the party structures of poll tax states. Hollinger F. Barnard, ed., Outside the Magic Circle: The Autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr (Tuscaloosa, 1985), 115.

(15) As Virginia Durr explained, "If a poor tenant farmer had scraped up a dollar and a half to pay his poll tax, he sure as hell wasn't going to pay a dollar and a half for his wife. And the women themselves never had any money." Barnard, ed., Outside the Magic Circle, 101-2.

(16) Ogden, Poll Tax in the South, 126. On post-1934 disfranchisement mechanisms in Louisiana see Adam Fairclough, Race and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915-1972 (Athens, Ga., and London, 1995), 23-25; and Eleanor Bontecou, The Poll Tax (Washington, D.C., 1942), 22. Pamela Tyler shows in her study of Louisiana women that the number of white women registered to vote in Orleans Parish rose from 47,966 in 1934, when the poll tax was still in effect, to 70,303 in 1936 after poll tax repeal, an increase of 46.6 percent. The increase among white males was 14 percent. Although it cannot be stated definitively that the post-1934 increase in female voters was due primarily to "free" voting, the relationship appears extremely strong. Pamela Tyler, Silk Stockings and Ballot Boxes: Women and Politics in New Orleans, 1920-1963 (Athens, Ga., and London, 1996), 28, 90-92.

(17) "Statement of Milton Moran Weston, International Workers Order," March 14, 1942, and Eleanor Bontecou, "Supplemental Statement as to the Constitutionality of Senate Bill 1280," Poll Taxes: Hearings Before the Subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary of the United States Senate, July 1941-September 1942, United States Senate, Seventy-Seventh Congress, Second Session on S. 1280 (Washington, D.C., 1942), 165, 38; hereinafter cited as Poll Taxes (77 Cong., 2 Sess.). The Women's Division assisted Pepper in his 1937 campaign by promoting him as a speaker. Molly Dewson to May Evans, March 8, 1937, Box 22, May Thompson Evans Papers, PC1466 (North Carolina State Division of Archives and History, Raleigh). See also Ogden, Poll Tax in the South, 182-85.

(18) Address by May Thompson Evans, October 26, 1938, pp. 3-4, in Box 4, Evans Papers. Evans had been educated and groomed by North Carolina's tough female political fighters of the 1920s and was the first woman elected president of North Carolina's Young Democrats, a position she used to defeat conservative Democrats. During the 1930s she developed into a tenacious campaigner and an inspiring speaker for the New Deal. Eleanor Roosevelt and Molly Dewson appointed her to the Women's Division's number-two post in 1938.

(19) There were other exceptions. Southern chapters of the League of Women Voters frequently led "get-out-the-vote" campaigns and had a history of defying the national organization's policies on nonpartisanship. During the 1930s the national organization cracked down on overtly partisan chapters, primarily in the West and South, and revoked the charters of several southern chapters. Many former LWV activists in the South channeled their energies into Democratic Party and government work during the New Deal. Wilkerson-Freeman, "Women and the Transformation of American Politics," 445-594.

(20) Evans address, October 26, 1938, p. 4. Attached to the speech is an excerpted copy of Bennett Champ Clark's 1936 convention resolution calling for the reformulation of the system by which convention delegates and alternates were apportioned by taking into account the Democratic strength in each state; see also Oliver A. Quayle Jr., comp., Official Report of the Proceedings of the Democratic National Convention Held at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (Washington, D.C., 1936), 189. Evans's argument concerning the possible diminishing strength of the South in the Democratic Party after the 1936 convention was not new. In February 1938 a Roanoke, Virginia, newspaper was "worried about the South's influence in the Democratic Party in the years to come" as a result of the convention's changes. The story was picked up by a Tennessee newspaper that concluded, "Voting should be free." Knoxville News-Sentinel, February 10, 1938. The argument gained a wider audience after Virginius Dabney published "Shall the South's Poll Tax Go?" in the New York Times Magazine, February 12, 1939, pp. 9, 20.

(21) Evans address, October 26, 1938, p. 4; Bontecou, Poll Tax, 21.

(22) For more on southern woman suffrage movements see Suzanne Lebsock, "Woman Suffrage and White Supremacy: A Virginia Case Study," in Nancy A. Hewitt and Suzanne Lebsock, eds., Visible Women: New Essays on American Activism (Urbana and Chicago, 1993), 62-100, esp. 62-63; Elna C. Green, Southern Strategies: Southern Women and the Woman Suffrage Question (Chapel Hill and London, 1997), 92; Green, "`Ideals of Government, of Home, and of Women': The Ideology of Southern White Antisuffragism," in Virginia Bernhard et al., eds., Hidden Histories of Women in the New South (Columbia, Mo., and London, 1994), 96-113; and Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States (New York and Oxford, 1993).

(23) For Evans's Valdosta speech to the Georgia Affiliated Democratic Women's Clubs see Augusta Chronicle, November 19, 1938; and Atlanta Constitution, November 19, 1938. The Georgia clubwomen did not endorse her suggestion that the poll tax be abolished. Although the group's leader, Marry Rolliston, publicly denounced Evans's anti-poll tax stance, she indicated in a confidential letter to Evans in March 1939 that she personally opposed the poll tax but feared that Eugene Talmadge "and his kind" would take over the state politically if it were abolished. Waycross (Ga.) Journal-Herald, November 21, 1938; Rolliston to Evans, March 9, 1939, Evans Papers.

(24) Barnard, ed., Outside the Magic Circle, 99-102 (first and second quotations on p. 101; fourth quotation on p. 102); interview with Virginia Durr by Gwen Patton, Mary Weidler, and Louise Weinrib, May 24, 1989, pp. 7-8 (third quotation), in Folder 1, Box 10, League of Women Voters of Alabama Papers, RG 282 (Archives and Manuscripts Department, Auburn University Libraries, Aubum, Ala.).

(25) Barnard, ed., Outside the Magic Circle, 114-15. FDR initially endorsed efforts to abolish the poll tax and wrote a supportive letter to a leader in Arkansas's anti-poll tax movement, but the initiative backfired when the letter was made public and touted as an example of presidential meddling. The reform referendum in Arkansas failed in November 1938, and the Democratic leadership distanced itself from the controversy. Ogden, Poll Tax in the South, 225; George Brown Tindall, The Emergence of the New South, 1913-1945 (Baton Rouge, 1967), 639-41. For Farley's efforts to rein in the reform efforts of the Women's Division, see the interview with May Evans by Thomas F. Soapes, January 30, 1978 (Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, N.Y.).

(26) According to Virginia Durr, after Farley's injunction the "poll tax fight was put in a state of abeyance. The Democratic Women had been forbidden to work on it." Durr seems to have been unaware of Evans's continued efforts on behalf of the Women's Division against the poll tax. Barnard, ed., Outside the Magic Circle, 115.

(27) Evans specifically criticized Farley and the white male leaders of southern state committees for trying to run the Democratic Party like a "closed corporation." According to Evans, these men resented the women's movement to open the process and work for liberal policies, especially when the women's efforts ran contrary to their husbands' economic interests. Evans interview.

(28) Linda Reed, Simple Decency and Common Sense: The Southern Conference Movement, 1938-1963 (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1991); John Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (New York, 1994), 184-85, 192-94; Blanche Wiesen Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt. Vol. II: 1933-1938 (New York, 1999), 564-66; Barnard, ed., Outside the Magic Circle, 120-28; National Emergency Council, Report on Economic Conditions of the South (Washington, D.C., 1938), 1 (quotation). Scholars disagree on the nature and extent of Eleanor Roosevelt's resistance to Jim Crow seating arrangements during the SCHW, but all generally acknowledge that she publicly signaled her disrespect for the laws.

(29) Barnard, ed., Outside the Magic Circle, 152-70 (quotation on p. 158). Eleanor Bontecou worked as an attorney and legal advisor for the civil rights division of the Department of Justice from 1943 to 1946; in the early 1950s she turned her attention to investigating the impact of the federal loyalty program on civil liberties. Historian Steven Lawson describes Bontecou as "a volunteer NCAPT researcher," but he does not connect her with the Women's Division. Since Bontecou's study was called "The Suffrage in the South: An Inquiry under the Auspices of the New School of Social Research" and was later published under the title The Poll Tax by the AAUW, it was not obvious that the Women's Division played a role in the project, which was probably a deliberate strategy. Lawson, Black Ballots, 64, 369 n. 36 (quotation); Bontecou, The Federal Loyalty-Security Program (Ithaca, N.Y., 1953).

(30) Evans's spring 1939 correspondence in the "Poll Tax" Folder, Evans Papers; Evans to Bontecou, July 6, 1939; Raymond C. Maxwell to Evans, July 12, 1939 (quotation); Bontecou, "Intermediate progress report of the study of the Suffrage in the South," June 10, 1940; all in Box 5, Eleanor Bontecou Papers (Harry S Truman Presidential Library, Independence, Mo.).

(31) Stoney's reports "For Bontecou and Bunche" are in Folders 10 and 13, Box 38, Ralph J. Bunche Papers (Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library). I would like to thank George Stoney for sharing his knowledge and insights on women and the anti-poll tax campaigns, especially for illuminating his role as a researcher for Bontecou and Bunche and revealing the connections between this research and the Women's Division of the Democratic National Committee. Interview with George Stoney by the author, New York City, 1996; interview with Stoney by John Egerton, June 13, 1991 (A-346), pp. 33-37, in Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007 (Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of Noah Carolina at Chapel Hill). Today George Stoney is an internationally recognized pioneer documentarian and is currently the Paulette Goddard Professor in Film at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. See Liz-Anne Bawden, ed., The Oxford Companion to Film (New York and London, 1976), 661-62.

(32) Bontecou, "Intermediate progress report of the study of the Suffrage in the South." The other members of the Advisory Research Committee for Bontecou's study included Ralph J. Bunche, Francis W. Coker, and Max Lerner.

(33) George C. Stoney, "Suffrage in the South, Part I: The Poll Tax," Survey Graphic, 29 (January 1940), 42-43; Stoney, "Suffrage in the South, Part II: The One Party System," Survey Graphic, 29 (March 1940), 166-67; Stoney interview by the author, New York City.

(34) Some of Stoney's material on women also appears in the edited version of Bunche's report published in 1973. In Putnam County, Georgia, Bunche wrote, "The honest poor folks, `especially women folks,' will not register because they fear the payment of that dollar annually and are too honest to try to get out of it." Ralph J. Bunche, The Political Status of the Negro in the Age of FDR, edited by Dewey W. Grantham (Chicago and London, 1973), xii-xiii, xv, 377 (quotation). For a critical behind-the-scenes account of the production of An American Dilemma and an assessment of its legacies, see David W. Southern, Gunnar Myrdal and Black-White Relations: The Use and Abuse of An American Dilemma, 1944-1969 (Baton Rouge and London, 1987). See also Walter A. Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America's Conscience: Social Engineering and Racial Liberalism, 1938-1987 (Chapel Hill and London, 1990).

(35) Bontecou, Poll Tax, 16-18.

(36) "Statement of Miss Lucy Randolph Mason, Public Relations Representative, Congress of Industrial Organizations," 69, and "Statement of Susan B. Anthony II, Representing the Congress of Women's Auxiliaries of the Congress of Industrial Organizations," 179-81, both in Poll Taxes (77 Cong., 2 Sess.).

(37) Ogden, Poll Tax in the South, 243-49, 252-57. After the 1942 hearings, and in spite of FDR's reprimands, Eleanor Roosevelt worked with Virginia Durr on writing and lobbying for the Soldier Vote Act. Passed in September 1942, the act exempted soldiers "at time of war" from requirements to pay poll taxes as a condition for voting in federal elections. Southern politicians viewed this law "the nose of the camel under the tent" and fought all the harder to terminate future anti-poll tax initiatives. Barnard, ed., Outside the Magic Circle, 158; U.S. Statutes at Large, Vol. LVI, Part 1 (1942), 753. For debates concerning the constitutionality of this law see Senate Reports, 78 Cong., I Sess., No. 530: Poll Taxes (Serial 538, Washington, D.C., 1943), November 2, 1943.

(38) Tindall, Emergence of the New South, 638-40; Barnard, ed., Outside the Magic Circle, 152-70, 189-91; Lawson, Black Ballots, 55-85, esp. 81-82; Senate Reports, 78 Cong., 1 Sess., No. 530: Poll Taxes, November 2, 1943; Bartley, New South, 176.

(39) Ogden, Poll Tax in the South, 185-88, 193-99; Frank B. Williams Jr., "The Poll Tax as a Suffrage Requirement in the South, 1870-1901," Journal of Southern History, 18 (November 1952), 474-75 n. 22; Atlanta Constitution, December 8, 1938, p. 6; Harold Paulk Henderson, The Politics of Change in Georgia: A Political Biography of Ellis Arnall (Athens, Ga., and London, 1991), 78-88.

(40) The Alabama AAUW had a broad agenda that combined pre-suffrage era women's reform issues, such as pure food, prison reform, and child labor, with the post-1920 issues of jury service for women, poll tax reform, and secret ballot laws. The organization also fought for such controversial measures as "selective" sterilization of "mental defectives" and the criminally insane, prenatal care for black and white women, and more equitable marriage laws. To join, a woman had to have a degree from an institution that supported the principle of equal pay for equal work by not discriminating against female faculty and that provided well-equipped dormitories and professionally trained deans of women for female students. Only four Alabama institutions met these standards: University of Alabama, Alabama College [for Women], Birmingham-Southern College, and Howard College. Folder 37, Box 2595, and Hallie Farmer, undated radio address, Folder 12, Box 2595, American Association of University Women Papers (William Stanley Hoole Special Collections Library, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Ala.); hereinafter cited as AAUW Papers. Historians Leila Rupp and Verta Taylor, in their study of feminist activism from 1945 to the 1960s, conclude that the BPW and the AAUW were instrumental in keeping the women's movement alive during an era considered "generally hostile to feminism." They consider the work of these organizations evidence of the "historical continuity of the American women's movement"; furthermore, they argue that these groups in the post-1945 period "had an impact on the goals and strategies, ideology, and composition of the resurgent women's movement that grew in the late 1960s." It is worth noting that the evidence provided here strengthens the "continuity" argument and adds support from the 1930s. Leila J. Rupp and Verta Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women's Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s (New York and Oxford, 1987), 190-93, 204-5 (quotations). For more on Alabama women activists see Mary Martha Thomas, The New Woman in Alabama: Social Reforms and Suffrage, 1890-1920 (Tuscaloosa and London, 1992); Joanne Vamer Hawks, "Stepping Out of the Shadows into Politics: Women in the Alabama Legislature, 1922-1990," in Mary Martha Thomas, ed., Stepping Out of the Shadows: Alabama Women, 1819-1990 (Tuscaloosa and London, 1995), 154-75.

(41) The survey revealed the following percentages of voter participation among club members: Federated Farm Women, 16 percent; Federated Women's Clubs, 25-30 percent; Alabama Methodist Missionary Societies, 30 percent; PTA, 25-30 percent; and BPW, 80 percent. Stoney, "Suffrage in the South, Part I," 42. The poll tax issue was especially complicated for women's groups with a strong interest in education. "By giving money raised through poll taxes to education," Stoney observed, "the politicians ... anchored it into the very heart of the South's progressive people." By the 1930s, however, it was clear that Alabama's public schools suffered because of this link to the poll tax, an extremely limited and unstable source of funding. Ibid., 41.

(42) Carolyn Hinshaw Edwards, Hallie Farmer: Crusader for Legislative Reform in Alabama (Huntsville, Ala., 1979), 17-18.

(43) Eula P. Egan to Rosa Lee Walston, December 1, 1938, Folder 12, Box 2595, AAUW Papers (quotations); Steckel, "Alabama Business Woman As Citizen," 24, 30, 46; Stoney, "Suffrage in the South, Part I," 42.

(44) "Legislation Aim of Women's Unit," December 8, 1936, unidentified clipping, Folder 9.8.41, Alabama Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs Papers (Archives Department, Birmingham, Ala., Public Library; hereinafter cited as BPL); hereinafter cited as Alabama BPW Papers. In many states, women's clubs organized coalitions similar to the national Women's Joint Congressional Committee (WJCC), which was founded just after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. The WJCC served as a clearinghouse for women's organizations' legislative initiatives and was most influenced by the national League of Women Voters, which opposed equal rights legislation. The Alabama WJLC differed from the national WJCC in that the Alabama BPW, which did favor equal rights legislation, was a driving force in the state WJLC. For more on the WJCC and LWV see Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven and London, 1987), 97-99, 122.

(45) Nina Miglionico, Scrapbook on Women's Issues, 1949-1955 (BPL); Dorah Sterne file, Folder 399.1.3.4.29, Southern Women's Archives Papers (BPL); Delphine Thomas, Surname clippings file (Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery, Ala.). See also Auburn Lee County Bulletin, July 2, 1963; Montgomery Advertiser, July 24, 1963; Birmingham News, January 10, 1954 (quotation); all in Surname clippings file.

(46) Steckel, "Alabama Business Woman As Citizen," 13, 19. The BPW conducted two other surveys on women's economic status in 1932 and 1936. Alabama College assisted with the second study and published it as "A Study of the Employability of Women in Alabama, 1929-1935," Alabama College Bulletin, 29 (July 1936). The BPW studies predated George Stoney's investigative work. Stoney recalls that he may have had access to this data when he wrote the Survey Graphic articles. Discussion with Stoney, October 16, 1998, Buffalo, New York.

(47) Dolly Dalrymple, "What is Woman's Status in Alabama?" Birmingham News-Age Herald, February 7, 1937, clipping in Folder 9.8.41, Alabama BPW Papers.

(48) Steckel, "Alabama Business Woman As Citizen," 23, 30 (quotations), 46. The report was discussed at a public forum sponsored by the WJLC at Alabama College on July 10, 1937; program in Joint Legislative Council Papers (BPL). Steckel also discovered that during the 1931-35 period Alabama women's financial obligations to support dependents greatly increased, a situation that made it even harder for women to justify paying any "tax" that could be avoided. Minnie L. Steckel, "Women's Financial Responsibility Toward Maintenance of Others," Sociology and Social Research, 22 (July/August 1938), 557-63.

(49) Rosa Walston to Eula Egan, November 29, 1938, Folder 12, Box 2595, AAUW Papers; Outline, Dorah Sterne interview, Folder 399.1.3.4.29, Southern Women's Archives.

(50) Historian Mary Frederickson observes that recent examinations of interactions between black and white southern women collectively reveal that "patterns of interracial cooperation and racial animosity coexisted" and asserts that black female activists frequently tried to circumvent white racism by "convert[ing] their concerns about the economic and social conditions faced by black southerners into a format that was ... not threatening to white women." In a similar fashion, white female anti-poll tax activists sometimes used racism to convert their feminist agenda into a format that was less threatening to white men. Frederickson, "`Each One Is Dependent on the Other': Southern Churchwomen, Racial Reform, and the Process of Transformation, 1880-1940," in Hewitt and Lebsock, eds., Visible Women, 297. For more on the difficulties of southern women's interracial activism see Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, "Discrimination Against Afro-American Women in the Woman's Movement, 1830-1920," in Sharon Harley and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, eds., The Afro-American Woman: Struggles and Images (Port Washington, N.Y., and London, 1978), 17-27; Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, "Beyond the Sound of Silence: Afro-American Women's History," Gender and History, 1 (Spring 1989), 50-67; Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Black Neighbors: Race and the Limits of Reform in the American Settlement House Movement, 1890-1945 (Chapel Hill and London, 1993); and Stephanie J. Shaw, What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do: Black Professional Women Workers During the Jim Crow Era (Chicago and London, 1996). For more on the political dynamic that complicated interracial southern political action, see Myrdal, American Dilemma, 724-29, 823-26.

(51) Barnard, ed., Outside the Magic Circle, 127, 130, 152-53, 158-59. For African American women's activism at the national level see Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy A Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994 (New York and London, 1999), 142-211; and Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York, 1984).

(52) While southern NAACP chapters were not at the forefront of the state anti-poll tax campaigns, neither were they silent. In 1937 the Texas NAACP state conference "called upon all branches and other agencies to carry on a state-wide campaign for free exercise of the ballot in all public elections." In 1940 several local NAACP chapters in Tennessee added their voices to the call for a special session of the legislature to repeal the poll tax law. Crisis, 44 (August 1937), 248; Crisis, 47 (May 1940), 152. See also Ogden, Poll Tax in the South, 233.

(53) The YWCA, which hosted racially integrated summer and local conferences where members discussed racial injustice, stands out as an exception to the rule. Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, The Making of a Southerner (New York, 1947), 189-93; Marion W. Roydhouse, "Bridging Chasms: Community and the Southern YWCA," in Hewitt and Lebsock, eds., Visible Women, 270-95. In March 1942 Mrs. Sherwood Anderson, a national board member of the YWCA and wife of the famous southern author, testified before the Senate that the organization's 225,000 women members had "in no uncertain terms" resolved to work for the removal of the poll tax. Poll Taxes (77 Cong., 2 Sess.), 82-84.

(54) Branch officer and committee reports, Folder 40, Box 2596; Rosa Walston to Kathryn McHale, February 16, 1942, Folder 26, Box 2595; both in AAUW Papers.

(53) Of the remaining members one cited "Not interested"; one gave no reason; and four were nonresidents. Tuscaloosa AAUW News Letter, May 1942, AAUW Papers. Even though the Tuscaloosa chapter supported poll tax reform, methods for changing the laws remained an issue. After discussing the federal anti-poll tax legislation, it reported that the "branch favored state action." Tuscaloosa Branch Legislative Committee report, Tuscaloosa AAUW News Letter, 4 (No. 5, 1942-43), AAUW Papers.

(56) Statement of Margaret Stone and Elizabeth Christian, March 10, 1942, Poll Taxes (77 Cong., 2 Sess.), 199-200.

(57) Ogden, Poll Tax in the South, 39-40, 43-44, 232-33 (first quotation on p. 232; second quotation on p. 44); Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940: Population (Washington, D.C., 1943), Vol. II, Pt. I, p. 206, table 4; Edwards, Hallie Farmer, 36; Lawson, Black Ballots, 90-93; Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649 (1944). The estimated number of blacks registered to vote in the southern states grew from 250,000 in 1940 to 775,000 in 1947. Lawson, Black Ballots, 53.

(58) Carl Grafton and Anne Permaloff, Big Mules and Branchheads: James E. Folsom and Political Power in Alabama (Athens, Ga., 1985), 62, 68, 74, 108. Leaders of the Alabama white women's anti-poll tax movement developed a more-or-less cooperative relationship with Folsom. Hallie Farmer had led the successful fight in the 1930s for an anti-patronage merit system within state government, but Folsom repeatedly refused to abide by its restrictions during his two terms as governor (1946-50, 1954-58). Edwards, Hallie Farmer, 46-55. Folsom was relatively liberal on women's and civil rights issues, but Farmer and her associates abhorred the corruption in his administration. Folder 399.1.3.4.29, Southern Women's Archives; Grafton and Permaloff, Big Mules and Branchheads, 154-60.

(59) "Survey of Political and Civil Rights of the Negro," Folder 45, Box 2596, AAUW Papers. In addition to discussing this survey, the Birmingham AAUW chapter "carefully reviewed" An American Dilemma, studied the possible impact of proposed legislation on women (under Miglionico's direction), and "mailed cards to all our members urging them to pay their poll tax and vote." Birmingham Branch, 1944-1945 report, Folder 40, Box 2596, AAUW Papers.

(60) Davis v. Schnell, 81 F. Supp. 872 (1949); Lawson, Black Ballots, 93-97, 376 n. 29; Black and Black, Politics and Society in the South, 84-88.

(61) In 1946 Mary Church Terrell, supported by white AAUW members, fought the segregationist policies of the Washington, D.C., AAUW branch. Her efforts led to a court battle between the local branch, which resisted integration, and the national AAUW, which issued "a strong statement against discrimination on the basis of race, religion, or politics." The national organization resolved the conflict by recognizing a pro-integration group as the official District of Columbia branch and admitting Terrell and two other black women as members. Rupp and Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums, 156-58 (quotation on p. 157).

(62) Executive Board minutes, memos, and correspondence, Folder 83, Box 2597, AAUW Papers.

(63) Ogden, Poll Tax in the South, 232-33. Another organization, the Alabama Policy Committee, a Birmingham-based group of leaders in industry, labor, academia, journalism, and government, had also been active in the state anti-poll tax fight during the early and mid-1940s. Ibid.; Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day, 177, 182-84.

(64) The Alabama League of Women Voters was established in 1919 by white women suffragists, but its goal to promote women's participation in politics was greatly hampered by the severe restrictions on voting and the closed nature of southern politics generally. In the 1920s the Alabama LWV did not support the poll tax; however, since it was the law, the LWV helped collect the tax as a way to encourage voting. Many southern LWV members resigned their posts in order to campaign during the 1928 election. In the 1930s the economic hard times that made it more difficult for southern women to pay their poll taxes also made it difficult for LWV members to pay their dues. During the depression, and again during the Second World War, the organization in Alabama ceased to function, but it was revived in the 1950s specifically to challenge the poll tax requirement. Birmingham News, May 23, 1977.

(65) Edwards, Hallie Farmer, 36-37.

(66) Ogden, Poll Tax in the South, 233-35.

(67) Ogden, Poll Tax in the South, 232; Hallie Farmer to "Dear Co-Workers," January 4, 1954, and Bulletin, Provisional League of Women Voters of Birmingham, [January?] 1953, both in Folder 51.1.3.1.5, League of Women Voters of Greater Birmingham Papers (BPL).

(68) Thomas J. Gilliam, "The Second Folsom Administration: The Destruction of Alabama Liberalism, 1954-1958" (Ph.D. dissertation, Auburn University, 1975), 30, quoted in William Warren Rogers et al., Alabama: The History of a Deep South State (Tuscaloosa and London, 1994), 537 (first quotation); Ogden, Poll Tax in the South, 136 n. 32; Grafton and Permaloff, Big Mules and Branchheads, 125, 163-65 (second quotation on p. 164); interview with Virginia (and Clifford) Durr by John Egerton, February 6, 1990 (A-337), in Southern Oral History Collection (third quotation).

(69) David J. Garrow, ed., The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson (Knoxville, 1987), xii-xiii; J. Mills Thornton III, "Challenge and Response in the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-1956," Alabama Review, 33 (July 1980), 173-74, 174 n. 12, 186-97.

(70) Edwards, Hallie Farmer, 81.

(71) Stoney, "Suffrage in the South, Part I," 42 (quotation). According to Rupp and Taylor, white leaders in the movement for the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1940s and 1950s were similarly "opportunistic" in their tendency to use both racism and movements for racial justice to advance their cause. Rupp and Taylor accurately conclude that ERA activists did not forge organizational connections to the civil rights movement until the late 1960s, and that "throughout this period [white] women's rights leaders tended to perceive the burgeoning civil rights movement as a competitor likely to win rights for black women and men that were still denied to white women." Their study, focusing on the ERA, the Woman's Party, and primarily northern feminists, does not take into account post-1920 woman suffrage/anti-poll tax movements in the South. Examining this aspect of the "women's rights movement," which focused on voting rights, suggests that historical associations between feminist and civil rights movements are subtle, complex, and (perhaps especially in the case of southerners) deliberately concealed by historical actors who were well aware of the controversial nature of their beliefs and actions. Rupp and Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums, 158-65 (quotation on p. 159).

(72) Steven F. Lawson has concluded that in the 1940s, "[a]s the walls of discrimination started to crack, southern whites appeared more inclined to accept Negro voting than other forms of equality." Gunnar Myrdal also emphasized this point in his study of black disfranchisement. Lawson, Black Ballots, 22.

(73) Glenn T. Eskew, But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle (Chapel Hill and London, 1997), 394 n. 40; interview with Nina Miglionico by the author, August 1, 1999, Birmingham, Alabama.

(74) Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York, 1979).

(75) Mildred Martin was president of the Austin, Texas, branch of the AAUW in 1932-33. During the late 1930s Mildred Marlin served as chair of the Tuscaloosa AAUW's International Relations Committee. As World War II ended, she turned to more local issues and organized an intensive workshop on legislative action for leaders in the state's white women's organizations. Finding aid, AAUW Austin Branch Papers (Austin History Center, Austin, Tex.); Tuscaloosa AAUW News Letter, September 1944, Folder 40, Box 2596, AAUW Papers; Tuscaloosa Branch Yearbook, 1947-1948, AAUW Papers.

(76) Roscoe Martin addressed Alabama women's organizations on such topics as "Problems Which May Be Expected to Come Before Alabama's New Legislature," "Democracy and Efficiency in Alabama Government," "The National Political Scene: Personalities and Issues," "Fact and Fiction in the News: The Citizen's Dilemma," and "Major Changes in Government in Alabama Under the Present Administration." He also presided over numerous AAUW "Open Forums." See the various programs, program announcements, and reports in Folders 12 and 18, Box 2595, AAUW Papers.

(77) Edwards, Hallie Farmer, 58-59. Farmer also used her Public Administration research to write The Legislative Process in Alabama (University, Ala., 1949). Her other publications included A Manual for Alabama Legislators (rev. ed.; University, Ala., 1943).

(78) Henderson, Politics of Change in Georgia, 92, 138-39, 148; Roscoe C. Martin, "A Brief Prospectus on the Poll Tax," paper delivered at the Southern Regional Conference on Research and Training in Public Administration, November 11, 1944, University of Alabama, in Folder on "Poll Tax Study--News Stories and Editorial Comment From Governor Arnall's File," Box 160, Alexander Heard Collection (Special Collections and University Archives, Jean and Alexander Heard Library, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn.). The Heard Collection is currently in the midst of being processed; the locations of its materials cited here are based on the collection's condition in 1997. Thanks to Alexander Heard for his gracious assistance.

(79) Folder on "Poll Tax Study, Recommendations for members of commission," Box 160, Heard Collection. Concerning the selection of the commission members, Martin wrote a political scientist at Furman University: "You will understand that while we are not looking for a one hundred per cent `abolitionist,' neither do we want to make the mistake of appointing a stand-patter who is exactly satisfied with things as they are. If all of us believed that the poll tax is exactly right the way it is, there would be no point in making a study." Martin to Nicholas P. Mitchell, September 26, 1944, ibid.

(80) Alexander Heard, "Introduction to the New Edition," in V. O. Key Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation (new ed.; Knoxville, 1984), xxiii; Ogden, Poll Tax in the South, 185-87.

(81) Roscoe C. Martin, "Foreword," in Key, Southern Politics, vi (new ed., p. xl); Heard, "Introduction to the New Edition," xxii-iv; William C. Havard, "V. O. Key, Jr.: A Brief Profile," in Key, Southern Politics, new ed., xxvii-xxxvi, esp. xxxi; Martin to Key, n.d., "Hang Over Stories" Folder, Box 160, Heard Collection. In the foreword Martin also pointed out that the study's "principal staff members were all southerners," who proved capable of "arriv[ing] at an understanding of their own problems"--another criticism of the Myrdal group. The Electoral Process Study (EPS) offices opened at the University of Alabama on September 1, 1946. Martin, "Foreword," vi (new ed., p. xl).

(82) Donald Strong grew up in a staunchly Republican household in Chicago, but he became a Democrat. He attended graduate school at the University of Texas in the 1930s, where he worked with Roscoe Martin. Telephone interview with Stuart Strong by the author, 1998. Alexander Heard worked for the government and the military in various capacities during World War II. Heard and Strong continued to collaborate on projects after completing Southern Politics. See Alexander Heard and Donald S. Strong, Southern Primaries and Elections, 1920-1949 (University, Ala., 1950).

(83) Ogden began his connection with the University of Alabama in the fall of 1946 as an instructor, worked as a summer researcher for EPS in the summer of 1947, and was then hired full-time as an instructor in political science in 1948. His work culminated in the publication of his Johns Hopkins dissertation as The Poll Tax in the South.

(84) Heard, "Introduction to the New Edition," xxii; Martin, "Foreword," vi (new ed., p. xl). The Electoral Process Study was a team effort. As Martin noted, "In the execution of all phases of the project, from the initial collection of data to the preparation of the final manuscript, Mr. Key had the assistance of Mr. Heard." Martin, "Foreword," vii (new ed., p. xli). Donald Strong and Merrill R. Goodall worked for the project during the summers. Mary Helen Crawley and Katherine Wade Thompson worked for long periods as research assistants, and Margaret Bittner and Samuel Strang assisted the project for shorter periods. Martin, "Foreword," vi-vii (new ed., p. xli). Researchers carefully collected, dated, and filed data, but Key was responsible for the final analysis, the majority of the writing, and the editorial decisions. The researchers were acquainted with George Stoney's articles, Ralph Bunche's work, and Eleanor Bontecou's research on the poll tax. Key to Martin, memo, "One Year of the Electoral Process Survey," September 20, 1947, "V. O. K[e]y" Folder, Roscoe C. Martin Papers (Syracuse University Archives, Syracuse, N.Y.).

(85) Heard to Key, December 6, 1946 (first quotation); Heard to Martin and Key, February 19, 1947 (second quotation); Heard to Martin and Key, February 28, 1947 (third quotation); Key to Martin, March 11, 1947 (fourth quotation); all in "V. O. K[e]y" Folder, Martin Papers.

(86) Martin, "Foreword," vi (in new ed., p. xl) (quotations); "Arkansas Interviews" Folder, Box 8, and "Tennessee Interviews" Folder, Box 10, both in Southern Politics Collection; Stoney, "Suffrage in the South, Part I," 42; Farmer to Heard, December 5, 1946, Box 4, Heard Collection. Use restrictions that apply to the Southern Politics Collection prohibit the "direct quotation by name of the persons interviewed" and "direct attribution of identification." For this reason, the identities of individuals who were interviewed, with the exception of Hallie Farmer (whom Martin labeled a consultant), cannot be revealed. Scholars may nonetheless use the collection so long as they adhere to the style used by Key: for example, "`We thought it was so,' a banker later said who has long functioned as a collector of campaign funds from businessmen, mill owners, and large economic operators generally." The location of the interview (box, file, item) should be described in such a way that conceals the identity of the interviewees. See use agreement for the Southern Politics Collection (first and second quotations); Martin, "Foreword," viii (new ed., xlii); Key, Southern Politics, 149 (third quotation).

(87) Heard to Key, February 19, 1947, "V. O. K[e]y" Folder, Martin Papers (first quotation); interview with Heard by the author, July 30, 1997, Nashville, Tennessee (second quotation); Heard, draft of "Interviewing Southern Politicians--Some Notes on Method," May 13, 1949, p. 13 n. 5 (third quotation), in Folder on "Articles on Statistics and Interviewing in Southern Politics," Box 19, Heard Collection. For more on the EPS researchers' use of Bunche's manuscript see Martin to Key, May 3, 1947, Key to Martin, May 8, 1947, and Ralph H. Carruthers to Martin, May 7, 1948, all in "V. O. K[e]y" Folder, Martin Papers.

(88) Folder on "Electoral Participation, Composition of Electorate, Discards," Box 5, and Folder on "Poll Tax Discards," Box 6, both in Southern Politics Collection; Key, Southern Politics, 595 n. 18.

(89) Key, "Sex Differentials in Voting" draft. In the 1920s and 1930s southern white women's political organizations succeeded in electing several women to state legislative office. The Mississippi League of Women Voters played an instrumental role in defeating Theodore G. Bilbo in the 1923 gubernatorial primaries and electing Henry L. Whitfield, a former president of the state's public women's college, to the governor's post. It is interesting that Key mentions the important role of "Whitfield's girls" in carrying the day against Bilbo but fails to recognize how many of these "girls" were mature former woman suffragists and leaders in the state LWV. Hawks, "Stepping Out of the Shadows into Politics," 154-55; Vinton M. Prince Jr., "Will Women Turn the Tide? Mississippi Women and the 1922 United States Senate Race," Journal of Mississippi History, 42 (August 1980), 212-20; Key, Southern Politics, 242. See also Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930 (Chicago, 1970; Charlottesville and London, 1995), 201-11; Scott, "After Suffrage: Southern Women in the Twenties," Journal of Southern History, 30 (August 1964), 298-318; and Wheeler, New Women of the New South.

(90) Key to Samuel Strang, October 15, 1947, "Bittner, Margaret" Folder, Box 4; Strang to Key, November 10, 1947, in "VOK" Folder, Box 5; both in Southern Politics Collection.

(91) In the published section on the disfranchising effects of the poll tax, Key speculated that "probably as good a guess as any is that under Louisiana conditions the abolition of the tax cannot be credited with bringing an additional turnout of more than 10 per cent of the adult whites. Given a low level of participation, such an addition to the number of voters is, of course, not inconsiderable." Key offered no evidence for his conclusions concerning turnout, but as J. Morgan Kousser has correctly observed, it was a pattern in Key's work to downplay the impact of the poll tax and other disfranchising mechanisms. Key made no mention of the dramatic increase in voting among Louisiana's white women after the 1934 repeal of the poll tax. Key, Southern Politics, 603-5 (quotation on p. 605); Kousser, Shaping of Southern Politics, 3.

(92) A draft of the "Table of Contents," dated February 11, 1949, reveals how Key reorganized chapter 24 and, in the process, dropped the section on women. In the outline of the chapter's sections, "Metropolitan Voting" was renamed "Political Flourishes at the forks of the Creeks"; "Negro Voters and Non-Voters" was scratched, and "Black Belt whites" was penciled in; "Black Belt whites: Intense Political consciousness" was scratched, and "Negro Voters and Non-voters" was put in its place; "Sex Differentials in Voting: Politics is Man's Business" was eliminated, and "Political tension, voter turnout, and composition of the electorate" took its place. "Voting differentials and their consequences" was kept as the final section. As a result, the only section cut from the chapter was "Sex Differentials." This draft represented the final version of the titles and sequence of sections for chapter 24 that appeared in the book. Of the thirty chapters outlined in this "Table of Contents" draft (chapter 31 had not yet been planned), "Sex Differentials" was the only section dropped. Draft of "Table of Contents," "Bittner and C[r]awley" Folder, Box 4, Heard Collection; Key, Southern Politics, chap. 24, pp. 509-28.

(93) Key, Southern Politics, 510.

(94) Key, Southern Politics, 597 (first quotation), 618 (second quotation); Stoney, "Suffrage in the South, Part I," 42-43. Most critics of Key's analysis of southern politics focus on his characterization of factional politics and interparty competition in states, his contention that primary voters differ significantly from general election voters, and his treatment of black disfranchisement as having been achieved through a fait accompli prior to the implementation of legal disfranchisement. For critical approaches see Kousser, Shaping of Southern Politics; Kousser, "Post-Reconstruction Suffrage Restrictions in Tennessee," 655-83; Andrew J. DiNitto and William Smithers, "The Representatives of the Direct Primary: A Further Test of V. O. Key's Thesis," Polity, 5 (Winter 1972), 209-24; William R. Majors, "A Re-Examination of V. O. Key's Southern Politics in State and Nation: The Case of Tennessee," East Tennessee Historical Society's Publications, 49 (1977), 117-35; and Jeffrey M. Stonecash, "Political Cleavage in Gubernatorial and Legislative Elections: Party Competition in New York, 1970-1982," Western Political Quarterly, 42 (March 1989), 69-81. For an uncritical examination of the making of Southern Politics, see Alexander P. Lamis and Nathan C. Goldman, "V. O. Key's Southern Politics: The Writing of a Classic," Georgia Historical Quarterly, 71 (Summer 1987), 261-85.

(95) Emily Trenckmann Strong's family had been active in Texas and Austin politics for three generations. She was born in 1917 and received her B.A. with honors in 1938 from the University of Texas, where she met Donald Strong. Telephone interview with Stuart Strong. Mildred Martin was president of the AAUW Tuscaloosa branch in 1947 and 1948, at the same time Strong chaired the branch's legislation committee. Banks Branch reports, Folder 45, Box 2596, AAUW Papers. On Strong and the LWV see Bulletin, Provisional League of Women Voters of Birmingham, [January?] 1953, Folder 51.1.3.1.5, LWV Papers.

(96) Martin to Rene Williamson, May 16, 1949, Martin Papers (first quotation); Martin to Key, January 20, 1954 (second quotation), and Key to Martin, January 22, 1954 (third quotation), both in "V. O. K[e]y" Folder, Martin Papers. See also V. O. Key Jr., A Primer of Statistics for Political Scientists (New York, 1954).

(97) Mary R. Beard, Woman as Force in History: A Study in Traditions and Realities (New York, 1946); V. O. Key Jr., Politics, Parties and Pressure Groups (New York, 1942); Luella Gettys, The Law of Citizenship in the United States (Chicago, 1934). On the women's friendship see their correspondence in the Mary Ritter Beard Papers and the Luella Gettys Key Papers (Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.). The two women were so close that Mary Beard stayed with the Keys in Baltimore after her husband died.

(98) Beard, Woman as Force in History, 61-62. In a footnote in the 1952 edition of his textbook, Key acknowledged that Mary Beard "chided me gently" for neglecting the "place of women in the national convention" and included the number of women present at the 1948 Republican and Democratic conventions. Key did not comment, however, on the significance of the statistics and women's growing influence in the parties. After reading Key's rather patronizing response, Beard wrote Luella Gettys that she did not think she had been particularly "gentle" in her criticisms; indeed, she had meant to be "rough." Exchanges between Beard, Key, and Gettys indicate that as early as 1946 female colleagues had tried to make Key aware that he was unduly neglecting women in his studies of politics. V. O. Key Jr., Politics, Parties, and Pressure Groups (3d ed.; New York, 1952), 454 n. 32; Mary Beard to "Lulu belle my precious," June 25, 1953, Beard Papers.

(99) Both Fred Ogden and Alexander Heard have remarked that Key's neglect of women's political activism was interesting considering that Key's wife was a political scientist and a feminist. Interview with Ogden by the author, Louisville, Kentucky, 1995; Heard interview by the author. Luella Gettys and Mildred Martin were also good friends in the early 1950s after the Martins moved to Syracuse, but it is unclear how well they knew each other during the research and writing of Southern Politics. Martin to Heard, October 15, 1953, "Alexander Heard" Folder, Martin Papers.

(100) Ogden, Poll Tax in the South, 136-38 (first and second quotations on p. 138; third quotation on p. 137).

(101) Ogden's mention of the activism of Emily Strong, Mildred Martin, and Jessie Ogden inspired me to examine the women's anti-poll tax movement in Alabama. For this and for his excellent research on the poll tax, I am especially grateful. Ogden interview by the author.

(102) It is important to note that Alexander Heard also spent only a short time in Alabama. Soon after publication of Southern Politics, Heard accepted a position at the University of North Carolina, located in one of the few southern states without a poll tax.

MS. WILKERSON-FREEMAN is an associate professor of history at Arkansas State University.