RISING UP WITHOUT PUSHING DOWN: LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE SUFFRAGETTES' ANTI-IMMIGRANT RHETORIC

[...]this Article calls upon the modern women's movement to take a different path: rising up without pushing down. [...]this was the argument put forth by suffragette Emma Smith DeVoe, who traveled around South Dakota in an effort to convince the state to vote for female suffrage in the election of 1890.30 She rallied supporters by arguing that a foreigner could move to the United States without "property or knowledge of our institutions" and still gain the right to vote, whereas a (white) American woman, educated, resourceful, owning property, and paying taxes, was denied that same privilege.31 But other invocations of the ignorant foreign vote cannot so easily be attributed to potentially benign argumentation. Anna Howard Shaw, another president of NAWSA, stumped across the Midwest in favor of suffrage.36 Along the way, she made two interrelated points about immigrant voters.37 First, she revived the long-standing suffragist description of immigrants as "astonishingly ignorant,"38 frequently recounting the story of a naturalization hearing where the noncitizen did not know the name of the president of the United States.39 She contrasted the value of such a voter with the potential of educated women not yet allowed to vote.40 This, of course, is familiar ground. "42 Women voters, in contrast to foreigners, were loyal to the United States.43 Questioning of the motives of noncitizen voters was both new and potentially explosive: identifying United States residents as "foreign traitors" would undoubtedly have consequences far beyond the cause of female suffrage.