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Even working to eliminate what they considered to be the
"deadliest vice that ever cursed the lives of men"did not give Baptist women justification for politicization or seeking to exercise direct, individual power in voting, much less smashing barrooms in a physical fight. They waited for men to voice women's need for power and finally accepted the public struggle only to fill a gap in legislating morality they felt men were neglecting.BS , April 8, 1897, p. 4.
"When you encourage [a woman] to become a politician, you have inflicted a serious wrong on her,"it was explained;
"if her husband is of any account, he ought to represent her in the outside contact with the world.”One Woodville womanBS , January 16, 1913, p. 12.
"had solved the suffrage problem in the best possible way by rearing six sons who will vote for the Prohibition candidate."
BS , September 18, 1902, p. 5.
During the second decade of the twentieth century Texas Baptists admitted that men no longer adequately represented the family unit. Many families had abandoned their isolated, common life on farms for the separation of responsibilities and interests that accompanied urban living. "Social conditions," a Baptist Standard reprint from The Atlantic noted,
"have divided the labor of the world between the sexes, and the work of men is almost entirely concerned with the production and distribution of things, the work of women almost entirely with the production and sustenance of persons.”
BS , March 14, 1918, p. 17, quoting The Atlantic , March, 1916.
This reasoning formed a basis in the minds of some for granting women suffrage, recognizing that they"had an interest in many questions which men do not understand and would not properly consider and act upon."Responsibility rested on women to set forward those matters, specifically the ones dealing with morals and with the protection of women and children.
BS , October 15, 1914, p. 3.
Spokesmen against women's suffrage continued to make their traditional protest, insisting that the home was woman's sphere and that she would reduce her dignity and refinement by associating with the political world, but key Baptists foresaw the inevitability of change.
"President Brooks of Baylor has set the girls to studying civic questions in view of the certain coming of female suffrage,"reported J. B. Gambrell in a 1912 editorial entitled "Why Female Suffrage is Coming." He assumed that Baptist women would adequately meet the challenge because they were schooled in a democratic church government in which they had always taken their place
"to pray, pay, vote and do the ordinary acts of a responsible human being." "The old life
of seclusion is no longer possible for women,"he claimed,
no matter what they might wish nor men fear. And following these changes the dearest interests of women are vitally affected by legislation more and more; interests that concern home, bread, rights in children, in property, and even virtue itself. All these things are in the hands of legislators, elected by men alone and many of the men interested in things detrimental to women. But beyond these things there is another factor of tremendous potency making for the rights of women. This is the day of democracy. The bonds that have bound the race to kingcraft and hierarchal programs have to an unprecedented degree been cast off. Whoever now, in pants or petticoats, claims special prerogatives for a class must show cause. . . .
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