The Chief Business of Women is Mothering: American Suffragists and the Political Utility of Motherhood

By the turn of the twentieth century, a barrage of antisuffrage arguments portrayed suffragists as “unsexed,” “abnormal,” “non-mothers” who rejected “true womanhood” by refusing to marry and have children. Such a destabilization of home and family, antisuffragists argued, would lead the nation to ruin—all at the hands of woman suffrage agitators. The consistency of these charges compelled suffragists to respond. In fact, many suffragists began to publicly agree with antisuffragists that the “chief business of women is mothering.” Suffragists, however, argued that the only way for a mother to guarantee the safety of her children in a modern, industrial age was through the exercise of the franchise. Emphasizing female maternal instinct and domestic expertise, suffragists argued that voting women could ensure healthy babies, pure food, clean air, and safe homes. “Mother” became an icon that both justified the expansion of the franchise and counteracted negative gender stereotypes about suffragists rejecting an essential womanhood rooted in biology and reproduction. Suffragists lauded motherhood at large by urging the celebration of Mother’s Day and publishing songs, postcards, and pamphlets about enfranchising mother; simultaneously, suffragists personally connected themselves to motherhood by providing childcare advice, printing names of suffrage mothers in newspapers, and circulating pictures of suffrage children. This paper argues that suffragists embraced dominant reproductive expectations by using motherhood as a political tool to both argue for the expediency of female enfranchisement and to demonstrate that they were non-threatening “motherly” women.