Georgia Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage (GAOWS) & Mildred Lewis Rutherford
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Mildred Lewis Rutherford, circa 1890s.
Courtesy of Atlanta History Center, Atlanta History Photograph Collection.
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A class attending the Lucy Cobb Institute in Athens, Georgia in 1888.
Courtesy of Atlanta History Center, Atlanta History Photograph Collection.
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A pamphlet containing arguments against woman suffrage published by the Georgia Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage (GAOWS).
Courtesy of the University of Georgia, Georgia Historic Books.
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A political cartoon in the editorial section of Hearst’s Sunday American illustrating those who oppose woman suffrage as dunces and predicting their inevitable defeat on July 4, 1915.
Courtesy of the Georgia Newspaper Project, Georgia Historic Newspapers.
As principal of the Lucy Cobb Institute, a prestigious school for Georgian girls, Mildred Lewis Rutherford encouraged her students to emulate the behavior of an antebellum southern belle, embracing modesty, piety, and domesticity. Rutherford’s idealization of the Old South and advocacy for women’s traditional domestic roles led her to become an anti-suffrage activist. By publishing essays and delivering speeches insisting that the nefarious, unsavory realm of politics “unsexed” women and eroded their natural moral superiority, Rutherford ironically became a prominent political figure who blurred the very gender conventions she so staunchly supported.
As the suffrage movement gained momentum in the 1910s, Rutherford joined the Georgia Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage (GAOWS), an organization dedicated to blocking voting rights for women. Rutherford and other antisuffragists believed that female voters would destroy the South’s social order, unraveling the precarious balance of patriarchy, white supremacy, and states’ rights that ostensibly allowed Georgia to remain a civilized society. GAOWS members invoked the disarray of Reconstruction to stoke fears of social mayhem and political unrest should suffrage be granted to women. When the nineteenth amendment gave women the right to vote in 1920, antisuffragists warned that enfranchisement would alter relationships between men and women, Black and white. In many ways, they were right as suffrage would later help unravel the legacy of the Old South throughout the twentieth century.