Jeanette Leonard Gilder, journalist and author

JEANETTE Leonard Gilder (1849-1916) was a successful author and journalist who worked for the Chicago Tribune, Boston Saturday Evening Gazette, Boston Transcript, Philadelphia Record and Press, and other newspapers.

She was one of many thousands of women opposed to the women’s franchise in the late 19th century, a founder of the Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Extension of Suffrage to Women.

Gilder argued that suffragists were utopians. Instead of a paradise on earth, they would, she argued, unleash “the wheels of purgatory.” The intensely religious zeal and impossibly bright hopes of a perfect future she believed women would bring to politics is all too familiar to us today.

An excerpt from her essay, “Why I am Opposed to Woman Suffrage:”

IT has been quite a shock to people who do not know me, but who thought they did, to find me opposed to woman’s suffrage. Because I have been for so many years a working woman, and because the profession I chose is, or was at the time I entered it, supposed to be entirely a man’s profession, they thought I wanted all the privileges of men. But I don’t. You could have counted the women journalists on the fingers of one hand at the time I entered the ranks. Nowadays you could not find fingers enough in a regiment to count them on. There are now certain branches of journalistic work that are almost entirely given over to women, and women not only edit mere departments of daily papers, but there are those who edit the Sunday editions of some of the biggest dailies.

I am a great believer in the mental equality of the sexes, but I deny the physical equality. I believe in putting men’s work and women’s work of the same kind side by side, and judging them not as sex work, but simply as work. To have a ” Woman’s Building ” at the World’s Fair did not seem to me a compliment to the sex, but I believe some good reasons were advanced for it. Even some of its staunchest advocates, however, doubt if there will ever be such another building at such another show. I do not believe in sex in literature or art. Every book should be compared with all other books of its kind, and so with every picture, statue, or musical composition. There are few trades or professions that I do not think women fairly well equipped for, or capable of being prepared for. I cannot say that I quite like the idea of a woman preacher, but that may be a mere prejudice; nor do I think that I would retain a woman lawyer. But this is neither here nor there. In politics I do not think that women have any place. The life is too public, too wearing, and too unfitted to the nature of women. It is bad enough for men — so bad that some of the best of them keep out of it; and it would be worse for women.

[…]

….I speak from experience when I say that I don’t see how women can cultivate home life and enter the political arena. Circumstances forced me to go out into the world to earn my own bread and a part of that of others. When my mother was living, she made the home, and all went well. But after that, after marriages and deaths, a family of four small children came to me for a home. I don’t mean for support, for they had a father living, but for a home. I had to take, as far as possible, the place of my sister, their mother. To do my duty … was the most difficult task I ever undertook. I had to go to my office every day and leave them to the care of others. Sometimes the plan worked well, but oftener it worked ill — very ill indeed. I had seven people doing, or attempting to do, what I and two others could have done had I been able to be at home and look after things myself. Suppose that politics had been added to my other cares? Suppose that I had had meetings to attend and candidates to elect, perhaps to be elected myself? What would have been the result? Even direr disaster! We cannot worshjp God and Mammon; neither can we be politicians and women. It is against nature, against reason. Give woman everything she wants, but not the ballot. Open every field of learning, every avenue of industry to her, but keep her out of politics. The ballot cannot help her, but it can hurt her. She thinks it a simple piece of paper, but it is a bomb — one that may go off in her own hands, and work a mischief that she little dreams of.

Many of the women who are enthusiastic in the cause of suffrage seem to think that if they are once given the power to vote, every vexed question will be settled, every wrong righted. By dropping their ballots in the box they believe that they can set in motion the machinery of an earthly paradise. I wish I could think so. It is my opinion that it would loose the wheels of purgatory.

(Harper’s Bazar, 1894)

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