College Students' Reaction to Woman Suffrage
Suffrage activism at North-Western College was not without its critics, as Fanny Smith’s (now Frances Smith Hildreth’s) memoir from 1943 shows. In this excerpt, she remembers how a petition in favor of woman suffrage was not universally well received, and how the Cliospohic Society, one of North-Western’s popular literary societies, staged a tableau about the effects of woman suffrage on men. A tableau, short for tableau vivant, was a static stage performance with silent live actors who were usually posed, in costume, with props and/or scenery. The fear that woman suffrage would mean men would have to assume traditionally feminine duties was widespread during this time period, and often played for humor in songs, illustrations, and stage productions.
Frances Smith Hildreth wrote several accounts of the suffrage tableau. Two of them, written soon after the events occurred, are included here. Note the comment in the newspaper piece that “the wonder of it is that it took so many men to do one woman’s work.”
Fanny Eyre Smith played a key role in advocating for woman suffrage at North-Western College and in Naperville, but it is important to remember that her work, and the work of many woman suffragists, was shaped by the prejudices and beliefs among middle and upper class white people of the time. One of the arguments Smith and other white middle and upper class suffragists used was that white middle and upper class women, because of their race and class as well as the “superior virtue” that women supposedly possessed, would make better use of the vote than the lower class white men who already had that right. Smith never mentions race outright in her efforts to secure the vote for women, but her journal does display prejudices against Black people that were common among whites at the time.