In 1917, Dorothy Day was the victim of political persecution as she joined activists in Washington, D.C. standing outside the White House with picket signs demanding equality and votes for women. Day and her cohort were jailed and brutally beaten. In her account of the events to the New York Times, suffragist Eunice Dana Brannan said that Day was “thrown back and forth over the back of the bench, one man throttling her while the other two were at her shoulders” in what would become known as the Night of Terror. Eventually, Day converted to Catholicism and founded the Catholic Worker Movement to subvert political systems of oppression, even as she fully submitted to the magisterium. She never voted in an election.
Day’s experience captures the dilemma faced by Catholic women in the early 20th century: Caught between a desire to fulfill the expectations of Catholic womanhood placed upon them by the hierarchy, aspirations of self-agency, and the ever-present vulnerabilities rendered by lack of bodily autonomy, Catholic women struggled to define their place in political life.
In the early 20th century, the church did not take an official position on the question of women’s suffrage yet the majority of clergy adopted an oppositional stance. Cardinal James Gibbons, archbishop of Baltimore and popular advocate for American democracy, wrote an open letter in 1915 stating: “When I deprecate female suffrage I am pleading for the dignity of woman. . . . Woman is queen indeed but her empire is the domestic kingdom.” He seems to have expressed the prevailing sentiment among Catholic clergy and laymen. Another prominent archbishop, Henry Moeller of Cincinnati, urged his clergymen to use the pulpit to encourage female parishioners to sign anti-suffrage lists. It is worth noting that in England, the Catholic women’s suffrage league received the express approval of Pope Benedict XV, who told the leader of the movement that he would “like to see women electors everywhere.”
At the same time, and—I would guess—due in large part to clerical influence, Catholic women were divided on the issue. Insofar as the church venerates women and acknowledges their equal spiritual dignity (though, somehow, not their equal embodiment of the imago Dei), Catholic women hold special standing (at least rhetorically). In the suffrage era, many did not see the need to demand more recognition. As Mary Nash Crofoot wrote in a piece titled “Lest Catholic Men Be Misled,” Catholic women were to be content with their “husbands, fathers, and brothers voting for them.” (Ironically, there is some question as to whether she actually authored this piece herself—it is likely that her husband wrote it under her name.)
Given the tendency of Catholic leadership to demand submission to authority, especially from women, Catholic women who did organize for the right to vote were met with suspicion and outright hostility from their anti-suffragist counterparts.
Catholic women were already taking an outsized role in charitable public works—they were at the forefront of efforts to build schools and hospitals, care for orphans, and foster community networks of care. All of these efforts were thought to fall under the maternal role of women and were influenced and shaped by Catholic values. According to Cora Fernández Anderson, women in Latin America, for example, focused on the “urgent survival needs” of their communities, calling themselves “mothers of all the oppressed.”
Catholic women advocating for suffrage strained to prove themselves as patriotic citizens in the face of anti-Catholic rhetoric and as faithful and submissive Catholics under the watchful eye of the hierarchy. In their activism, many women of Catholic suffrage organizations emphasized that their main motivation was not enhancing their own political power as women but “safeguarding those things which are near and dear to the hearts of the Catholics,” which included the nuclear family and the traditional role of women within it.
Church leaders eventually began to recognize the usefulness of Catholic women voting on behalf of Catholic family values, which often aligned with secular causes. As Jeanne Petit writes, Catholic women’s suffrage groups “felt comfortable standing alongside women’s groups who advocated protective legislation for women and children because they could frame these causes within Catholic teachings. . . . At the same time, they could prove to male clergy that they were not radical feminists by standing with those same groups in opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment [because it could jeopardize such practical protective legislation].”
By 1924, with the vote secured, many Catholic suffragists in the United States began to focus their efforts on countering modern culture at the expense of advocating for social causes. For example, Petit writes, “the reports and newsletters of the NCCW [National Council of Catholic Women] rarely discussed working for welfare legislation and instead stressed that the NCCW was fighting against ‘the tendency toward the centralization of power’ and ‘attempts to legislate concerning individual rights,’ such as the ERA.” Further, NCCW advocacy for welfare issues such as mothers’ pensions and workplace protections tapered off, while advocacy for issues such as “modest dress” became the focus.
These women’s preeminent aim in political life was no longer to support women and communities in their practical need but to defend Catholic moral life—including fixed gender roles and traditional views of sexuality—against the perceived onslaught of the culture, which they saw as a “threat to the family.” And, according to Petit, “when they took political stands, they framed them much more explicitly in religious terms. For instance . . . the NCCW was fighting for ‘not the attainment of a fictitious advantage for women but for the restoration of the reign of Christ.’ ” (It is worth noting here that Indigenous women, many of whom possessed full and equal rights in their traditional tribal democracies, actually lost participatory rights when the U.S. government and the Catholic Church attempted to foster the “reign of Christ” by engaging in “Christianize and civilize” policy initiatives through such oppressive measures as boarding schools and assimilation laws.)
During the suffrage movement—and still, we might argue, today—the hierarchy viewed political participation as a means to ensure that women would fulfill their designated responsibilities at home, not as a way to promote equal rights or well-being. In fact, church leaders rejected equal rights as problematic—they promoted a concept of “similar rights” rather than “equal rights” instead. Indeed, even the support of the pope only went so far: When the Catholic Women’s Suffrage Society (CWSS) in England, for example, wanted to move their agenda beyond the bounds determined by the hierarchy, they were immediately censured, assigned a male “spiritual assistant,” and prohibited from further discourse. Eventually, the CWSS removed “Catholic” from its name to avoid hierarchical oversight.
Although Catholic social thought holds the principle of rights and responsibilities as one integrated tenet—you cannot have one without the other—women were and are told to be more concerned with their domestic responsibilities than their rights. This seems to be why “feminism” is consistently disparaged by the church. Although Catholic theological anthropology commends both male and female as made in the image of God, it seems the “feminine genius” is allowed to be genius only when it confirms the perspective of men.
Dorothy Day refused to vote once she had won the right to do so, believing that our social constructs were too corrupt and dysfunctional to foster real justice. Although most of us would agree that voting is an important part of civic engagement, maybe her witness can help us engage in a collective, liberatory reimagining of our religious, cultural, and political structures. It’s time to make space for the full participation of all.
This article also appears in the November 2024 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 89, No. 11, pages 27-28). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: Flickr.com/LSE Library
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