Women Who Vote and "Reverends" Who Don't Approve

Scapegoating some for the troubles caused by others is not a new phenomenon. It has always existed, and one suspects is always will. But what motivates a minister to claim that women who vote are the cause of the destruction of a whole country? Jesse Lee Peterson had this to say, as reported by NY Daily News:

"We should have never turned [the vote] over to women," Peterson said during the sermon. "And these women are voting for the wrong people. They're voting for people who are evil, who agree with them, who are gonna take us down the pathway of destruction."

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/rev-jesse-lee-peterson-women-vote-greatest-mistakes-america-made-article-1.1075372#ixzz2UnsQus5L

Is that really so?
 
The Library of Congress has a publication from around 1896, written by Alice Stone Blackwell from the National American Woman Suffrage Association. In this publication, Ms. Blackwell lists 16 reasons why women should be allowed to vote, and one of them is that it has been proven to be good for society.

16. Because experience has proved it to be good. Women have for years been voting literally by hundreds of thousands, in England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Utah, and Idaho, in all these places put together, the opponents have not yet found a dozen respectable men who assert over their own names and addresses that the results have been bad, while scores of prominent men and women testify that it has done good. An ounce of fret is worth a ton of theory. (http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/presentationsandactivities/presentations/timeline/progress/suffrage/whyvote.html)

Respectable men don't argue against female suffrage. Hmm...

Why is Mr. Peterson so insistent that women should not vote? Perhaps he doesn't like women very much, or perhaps because of the protection the vote gives to women. Ms. Blackwell writes:

3. Because laws unjust to women would be amended more quickly. It cost Massachusetts women 55 years of effort to secure the law making mothers equal guardians of their children with the fathers. In Colorado, after women were enfranchised, the very next Legislature granted it. After more than half a century of agitation by women for this reform only 13 out of 46 States now give equal guardianship to mothers.

Ok, maybe shared custody is not what Mr. Peterson was referring to. Is there anything else he could have meant?

4. Because disfranchisement helps to keep wages down. Hon. Carroll D. Wright, National Commissioner of Labor said in an address delivered at Smith College on February 22, 1902 "The lack of direct political influence constitutes a powerful reason why women's wages have been kept at a minimum."

Equal pay has most certainly been considered evil by men, as seen in all the politicians who voted against the Equal Pay Act this year. But is the whole country going to be ruined if women get equal pay?

Finally, although Mr. Peterson thinks that women vote for candidates who are evil, history is not on his side:

12. Because woman's ballot will make it hard for the notoriously bad candidates to be nominated or elected. In the equal suffrage states, both parties have to put men of respectable character or lose the women's vote.

There you have it. Where women vote, women and children are protected, equal pay is at least considered, political candidates have to respectable, and everyone has a say how taxes are spent. And this is somehow a bad thing? Nice try, Mr. Peterson, but we aren't buying it.