1869: Two Anti-woman suffrage publications

Opposition to extending the vote to women was wide-spread in the United States during the late 1800s. These two volumes printed in 1869 represent arguments posited in favor of keeping the exclusionary status quo.

Linus P. Brockett (1820–1893) was a medical doctor, an early social scientist, and the author of Woman's Work in the Civil War. Horace Bushnell (1802–1876) was a Yale graduate, a Congregational minister, and the theologian sometimes credited as being the father of American religious Liberalism. In 1869 both men agreed that voting rights were not in women’s best interest. A growing number of women (and men) disagreed.

Woman: Her Rights, Wrongs, Privileges and Responsibilities

by Linus P. Brockett

Curio 396 B864w          Read the full text online.

"If women are to vote, they must either be conversant with the political questions of the day, and able to form an intelligent opinion on them, or they must vote under the leading and guidance of others, and thus become the dupes and prey of selfish and unprincipled politicians." (page 279)

Women's Suffrage; The Reform Against Nature

by Horace Bushnell

Curio 324 B87              Read the full text online.

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"But there is a very deep, not improbable connection between this matter of women's suffrage and the family state, where it is likely to have a dangerously demorilizing power." (page 152)