Anti-Suffrage to Anti-Maternal Health: Ethel Brigham Leatherbee's Work in Periodicals and Public Relations

Ethel Brigham Leatherbee was a Massachusetts anti-suffrage activist in the 1910s. Author of the 1915 Anti-Suffrage Campaign Manual, she worked as a publicity agent, spreading anti-suffrage messages via newspapers and public speeches. She worked against such progressive reforms as the 1921 Sheppard-Towner Maternity Health Act (her press notices claimed it would lead to Bolshevism). When she was hired to conduct a press campaign in Boston to eradicate rats, she framed it as a nationalist fight against immigrant rats and Asian diseases. According to Kim Neilson in How Did Women Antifeminists Shape and Limit the Social Reform Movements of the 1920s, “Antifeminist organizations…had influence beyond their size because of their effective political communication.” Leatherbee contributed to this influence as a pioneer in public relations.

            The paradoxes of Leatherbee’s career are like those of some other anti-feminists: She gave public speeches though argued against a public role for women; she received money for her work while advocating women’s place in the home. Less typically, she wrote an anti-Christian, anti-religious book. Her scrapbook collection of her writings and speeches reveals her uses of the press, as she endorsed various positions under assumed names and invented different versions of herself as she spoke and wrote. Important recent scholarship like Mary Chapman's work has explored suffragists' innovative uses of print. I argue that Leatherbee’s scrapbook collection of her speeches, writings, and campaign artifacts shows that anti-suffragists were innovative in their own ways, equally worthy of attention by scholars interested in women, politics, and periodical culture.