The election of 1894, when Republicans made sweeping gains across the country, followed directly on the achievement of women’s suffrage in Colorado. It was the first election in which Colorado women were able to vote for candidates for Congress. Among voters in that state, both men and women gave majorities to the Republicans — just as they did in many other states, where voters seemed to blame the economic depression on Democrats, who held White House and majorities in both houses of Congress.
Colorado’s Populist governor, Davis Waite, along with many other members of his party, had hoped that women would vote in large numbers for the People’s Party. These Populists were disappointed to find that women’s votes, like men’s, tended to divide along ethnic and economic class lines. Embittered by the defeat, Waite blamed the new voters for Republicans’ victory, denouncing women’s suffrage as a terrible mistake. Waite’s comments precipitated a national debate over women’s voting rights. While the People’s Party had never put women’s suffrage in its national platform, many Populists — especially women in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain states — supported the reform. Others disagreed. The following editorials and letters, printed in a Texas Populist newspaper, illuminate a range of views on the question.
Editorial, December 6, 1894
Woman suffrage became a reality in Colorado by the amendment to the state constitution through mainly [the work of] the Populist party. . . . Despite these facts the women not only voted against reform and in favor of the party or parties that had brought ruin upon the country but also against the party that had championed their cause. . . . This, the Mercury states now, is incontrovertible evidence that women are not sufficiently educated in the duties of citizenship to exercise the functions conferred on them, by the ballot, safely and considerately.
Letter from Grace Danforth, M.D., December 27, 1894
What an unjust and an unfair thing it is to expect women in one election to right all the wrongs masculine rule has fostered upon society! The women of Colorado had no angels to vote for when they deposited their ballots. They had only men and they are largely whisky-loving animals, no matter what political party they chance to belong. . . .
Editorial Response, December 27, 1894
No, doctor, the “whisky-loving animals” did not expect the women to convert earth into a paradise at one election. Nothing of the sort, but they did expect for the women of Colorado to exercise the right of suffrage in the interests of morality and temperance, which it appears from the record they did not do. . . . Eve was an advocate of equal suffrage. She was made equal, but like her Colorado descendants, at the very first election after her enfranchisement she got the whole neighborhood into trouble, Adam included. . . .
Letter from Mary Raborn, January 3, 1895
I am glad the Mercury lets the woman suffrage question take a back seat. We don’t want any more ignorant voters than we have now. It is time to stop howling for woman’s suffrage when not one woman in five hundred has ever read the Declaration of Independence and would not know the Constitution of the United States from a patent office report.
Letter from Bettie Gay, January 17, 1895
I am surprised at any intelligent editor laying the cause of defeat of the Populists in Colorado to women voters, when the democrats and republicans fused . . . to beat the Populists, and spent piles of money to buy up the floating population. All the fraud that is perpetrated hereafter in Colorado will be laid upon the women. I suppose they can stand it for they have been the burden-bearers time out of mind: but they propose to share the burdens hereafter with the would-be lords of creation. Light is dawning and humanity will soon assert its rights. . . . The wise women of Texas will yet lead the men out of darkness, as they (the men) have been a failure in the management of governmental affairs. We propose to have a say in the laws that govern us, as intelligent beings, and not as idiots and criminals. . . . We are the natural guardians of our children, and we want laws that the most innocent can understand. No party will give women her rights till she demands them. The time is not distant when she will demand, and not ask, any party to recognize her. All that is needed is the proper education, and that is going on faster than any party is aware of.
Source: Marion K. Barthelme, ed., Women in the Texas Populist Movement: Letters to the Southern Mercury (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1997), 234–39.
Evaluating the Evidence