Letter from Booker T. Washington to Charles Monroe Lincoln, 14 December 1908 with enclosed "The Woman Suffrage Movement"

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Letter from Booker T. Washington to Charles Monroe Lincoln, 14 December 1908 with enclosed "The Woman Suffrage Movement" Document Five: Letter from Booker T. Washington to Charles Monroe Lincoln, Tuskegee, Alabama, 14 December 1908 with enclosed "The Woman Suffrage Movement" which appeared in the New York Times on 20 December 1908, The Booker T. Washington Papers, Library of Congress. Published in Louis R. Harlan and Raymond W. Smock, eds., The Booker T. Washington Papers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 9:700-01.

Introduction

Washington's importance as an African American leader extended far beyond the Tuskegee community and by 1908 he was being called upon for his official position on woman suffrage. Washington sent the following letter and statement on the woman suffrage movement to Charles Monroe Lincoln, a man who had worked for a variety of newspapers. Lincoln was on the editorial staff of the New York Times and subsequently printed the enclosure entitled The Woman Suffrage Movement by Booker T. Washington in the Times on December 20, 1908.

In this statement, Washington recognized women's influence through means other than voting. Washington's point that women were not silent and powerless members of society is well taken. Women did assert a measure of public influence through their involvement in family life, churches, and community organizations. [12] Washington was not advocating the oppression of women. His was a traditional nineteenth-century approach to women's appropriate spheres. He even ended his official statement on a seemingly diplomatic note by stating that he thought that this was an issue that women were best prepared to handle themselves.

Despite the feminist rhetoric in which Washington couched his statement it was still an open criticism of women's right to vote. Washington made a clear distinction between women's public and private realms of influence. In accordance with the principles guiding the Tuskegee Institute, political power was a responsibility to be achieved rather than a right that must be granted. His closing sentence labeling woman suffrage as a woman's question was an attempt to distance himself from the cause. Regardless of the subtlety of Washington's statement against suffrage it was a dismissal nonetheless. Suffragists and anti-suffragists alike interpreted it as such. In the months directly following the publication of his statement, Washington received two letters in particular which highlighted the degree to which participants in the woman suffrage debate recognized the implications of Washington's remarks.

[Tuskegee, Ala.]
December Fourteenth, 1908
Dear Sir: Inclosed, please find a statement as to my views on the question of the

WOMAN'S SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT

Thank you very much for your letter. Very truly yours,
1[Enclosure]

The Woman Suffrage Movement
By Booker T. Washington

I am in favor of every measure that will give to woman, the opportunity to develop to the highest possible extent, her moral, intellectual, and physical nature so that she may make her life as useful to herself and to others as it is possible to make it. I do not, at the present moment, see that this involves the privilege or the duty, as you choose to look upon it, of voting.
The influence of woman is already enormous in this country. She exerts, not merely in the homes, but through the schools and in the press, a powerful and helpful influence upon affairs. It is not clear to me that she would exercise any greater or more beneficent influence upon the world than she now does, if the duty of taking an active part in politics were imposed upon her.
But this is a question concerning which, it seems to me, the women know better than men, and I am willing to leave it to their deliberate judgment. [A]


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A. It is important to point out that the editors of The Booker T. Washington Papers note that many of the letters used in the following argument were in fact signed by Emmett J. Scott, Washington's personal secretary. Even if this is true it does not invalidate the interpretations offered. Emmett Scott is recognized as Washington's right-hand man. He was Washington's personal secretary and principal lieutenant. More importantly as Basil Mathews pointed out in Booker T. Washington, Educator and Interracial Interpreter (College Park, Md.: McGrath, 1948): "[f]or some eighteen years he was the most intimate of all the Principal's associates" (147). As his private secretary and close personal friend Scott had the authority to respond to these letters as he believed Washington would like and if anyone would ultimately know Washington's official position it would have been Scott. Instead of undermining the argument for Washington's desire to distance himself from the woman suffrage cause it strengthens it by revealing that Washington was so uninterested in suffrage that he didn't even take the time to handle letters referring to this topic himself.

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