Though Women’s History Month is winding down, we thought we’d post some amusing pages from Alice Duer Miller’s Are Women People? A Book of Rhymes for Suffrage Times, published in 1915.
One of our favorite quotations:
Why We Oppose Votes for Men…
5. Because men are too emotional to vote. Their conduct at baseball games and political conventions shows this, while their innate tendency to appeal to force renders them peculiarly unfit for the task of government.
May Walden, a Socialist Party organizer and activist based in Chicago, shrewdly capitalized on a number of current political issues when she turned this portable drinking cup into a 1912 presidential-campaign novelty for Eugene V. Debs, the 1912 Socialist candidate for United States president. Printed on the reverse side of this intriguing example of printing ephemera is the slogan “A Clean Cup for Clean Politics.” Debs ran for president five times between 1900 and 1920, the last time from federal prison, where he was incarcerated for his antiwar sentiments. In 1912, however, the Socialist Party reached its high watermark, with its candidate receiving nearly one million votes. Reformers also enjoyed an unusual level of political influence that year. Jane Addams seconded Theodore Roosevelt’s nomination for president on the Progressive Party ticket, the first time a social reformer and a woman had been recognized as a political kingmaker, despite the fact that most women did not yet have the right to vote.
