In an op-ed commemorating the 90th anniversary of the 19th Amendment ratification that gave women the right to vote Christine Stansell, in a NYT op-ed dredges up a… pretty telling quote explaining exactly how men in the region who were nominally most committed to the “women as the fair flowers” sex really felt about them.

Thirty-six of the 48 states then needed to ratify it. Western states did so promptly, and in the North only Vermont and Connecticut delayed. But the segregated South saw in the 19th Amendment a grave threat: the removal of the most comprehensive principle for depriving an entire class of Americans of full citizenship rights. The logic of women’s disenfranchisement helped legitimize relegating blacks to second-class citizenship.

Female voters would also pose practical difficulties, described bluntly by a Mississippi man: “We are not afraid to maul a black man over the head if he dares to vote, but we can’t treat women, even black women, that way. No, we’ll allow no woman suffrage.”

She said it here

Lest I seem to be singling out southerners it’s worth remembering that 52 years earlier, in 1868, the text originally proposed for the 14th Amendment had to be watered down in order to pass in southern or northern states: Stansell reminds us the original words prohibiting the denial of voting rights to “any of the inhabitants” of the states was changed to “any of the male inhabitants” of the states. Still, I’m pretty sure the earlier, nation-wide exclusion of women wasn’t so much to avoid “mauling them over the head” to keep them from the polls.

Sigh.