Votes for Women: Selections from the National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection, 1848-1921
History
Yellow ribbon from 1911 Suffrage Parade 
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4) Other Reforms: Temperance, Marriage, Religion
"For some odd reason
the Wholesale Liquor
Dealers Association
doesn't happen to like
the idea of female
suffrage." From,
"How it feels to be the
husband of a suffragette,
by him. Illustrations
by May Wilson Preston.
[c. 1915]
Among the reform movements of this period, documents discussing temperance, marriage, and religion can be found in this collection.
Search on religion for such documents as "Woman's Right to Preach the Gospel" [1853], which is the sermon preached at the ordination of the first American woman into the clergy.
Search on temperance for such documents as "Address Before the Second Biennial Convention of the World's Christian Temperance Union" [1893], by Frances Elizabeth Willard, which relates temperance to other areas of reform.
Search on husband, marriage, and wife for documents about women's rights in a marriage. "For Rent--One Pedestal," [1917], contains a lively set of letters by Marjorie Schuler narrating her account of being, at first, a reluctant activist in the suffrage movement. The humorous "How It Feels to Be the Husband of a Suffragette" includes this commentary:
Lots of good men who have no intellectual objection to women's voting nurse at heart a timidity whenever they visualize the horrible results. You can see it in many a polite, genteel citizen's eye, the moment suffrage talk starts, as if he were wondering just what his own women folks would act like around the house if they knew they were as good as he was and could prove it legally.
Of course it is a false alarm. The percentage of divorces doesn't rise in suffrage states because of suffrage; and logically there is no more reason why two domestic partners who are comrades, mutually acknowledging a pleasant equality, should separate, than there is for the separation of two people of opposite sex who, condemned to live together, are striving diligently to maintain an inequality.
From "How it Feels to be the Husband of a Suffragette, by him." [c1915]
Last Updated: 01/12/2010