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‘This Work is God's Cause’: Religion in the Southern Woman Suffrage Movement, 1880–1920

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Evelyn A. Kirkley
Evelyn A. Kirkley
Affiliation:
Ms. Kirkley is assistant professor of American church history in Colgate Rochester Divinity School/ Bexley Hall/ Crozer Theological Seminary, Rochester, New York.
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As I began researching religion and woman suffrage in the South I asked a prominent historian of southern religion if he knew of any sources. I had assumed that religion and woman suffrage had an intimate relationship in the South, since historians have amply documented the close connection between southern religion and culture. After scraching his head for a moment, however, he commented dryly, “There really aren't any sources. That will be a short paper.” He went on to explain that religious arguments were seldom used in the struggle for woman suffrage, that natural rights ideology and the social benefits of moral women voting were more common defenses than ones based on Scripture. Even antisuffragists relied on the threat of black women voting and the superfluity of women voting when they were represented by their husbands at the ballot box more often than explicitly religious arguments.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 59 , Issue 4 , December 1990 , pp. 507 - 522
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1990

References

1. For an example of how negatively some northern suffragists viewed the Bible, see Stanton, Elizabeth C. and the Revising Committee, The Woman's Bible (1895, 1898; reprint, New York, 1972)Google Scholar.

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8. Virginia Clay-Clopton, undated fragments, Clement C. Clay Papers, Manuscript Collection, Duke University Library, Durham, North Carolina (hereafter cited as CCP).

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18. Although I have not examined every southern suffrage tract and speech, no reference to Galatians 3:28 was made in the hundred or so sources I consulted. On the ideal of the evangelical southern woman and the importance of gender differences among southern evangelicals, see Mathews, , Religion in the Old South, pp. 97–124.Google Scholar

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64. HWS, 4:237.

65. Ibid., 6:327.

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