Category: Suffrage Panics

• The "Woman Suffrage" Jesuit Plot

  This theory held that woman suffrage was not fundamentally a democratic reform, but a concealed Catholic or Jesuit strategy to increase papal influence over American politics through the votes of supposedly more devout, obedient, and church-directed women. It emerged from the overlap between the woman suffrage movement and older anti-Catholic nativism, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In conspiracy form, Protestant anti-Catholics argued that enfranchising women would not broaden liberty but create a new clerically managed voting bloc.