A Pandora box of embarrassment

President Roosevelt holds his “presidential letter” big stick over an open box labeled “woman suffrage” that has female ghosts coming out of it. A teddy bear cowers behind him.

comments and context

Comments and Context

Theodore Roosevelt was one of the earliest American political leaders to forcefully advocate for women’s suffrage, in 1912, and at that time his wife Edith was relatively lukewarm on the issue. In a long letter to his son Ted shortly before this cartoon appeared (and in which he released a letter, to Ted and to the public, about women’s voting rights sent to a suffrage leader), the president confided that his sisters Bamie and Corinne were opposed to women having the franchise. “I do not myself think it makes much difference one way or the other,” he wrote. “I do not think that either enough good or enough harm has been done [where women had the vote] to warrant much interest in the movement.”

It is interesting that Roosevelt in 1908 was results-oriented, as if women voting would affect crime rates or military budgets. He soon recognized that it was a question of rights, not arbitrary social conditions, that mattered.

The November letter that, when made public, caused a stir, was addressed to Harriet Taylor Upton, treasurer of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. In that communication he wrote, “Personally I believe in woman’s suffrage, but I am not an enthusiastic advocate of it because I do not regard it as a very important matter,” and admonished her, “I do not desire to get into a public discussion of this matter, so I will be obliged if you will treat this letter as private.”

Elsewhere in the letter he wrote his memorable maxim, “I do not believe that equality of right[s] means identity of function,” which he later conceded that this was true as concerns family and household, but not citizenship.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1908-12-05

Creator(s)

Berryman, Clifford Kennedy, 1869-1949

Language

English

Period

U.S. President – 2nd Term (March 1905-February 1909)

Page Count

1

Production Method

Printed

Record Type

Image

Resource Type

Cartoon

Rights

These images are presented through a cooperative effort between the Library of Congress and Dickinson State University. No known restrictions on publication.

Citation