Eugene Debs Supported Women's Suffrage Before It Was Cool
In my last couple posts, I’ve focused on how moderate, even conservative, Eugene Debs was as a young man. He hated strikes. He blamed the poor for their poverty. He blamed the jobless for their joblessness.
But there was one interesting exception: women’s suffrage. Decades before the passage of the 19th amendment, when the image of women entering the polling booth provoked either laughter or denunciation, Debs supported expanding the franchise.
In 1880, Debs personally brought Susan B. Anthony to Terre Haute after the debating society of which he was a member refused to do so. It was an unusual act not just because Debs was a moderate, but because he was ambitious — “the blue-eyed boy of destiny,” one local paper called him — and backing women’s suffrage wasn’t exactly the surest way to ascend the ladder.
Decades later, Debs recounted his experience meeting Anthony:
I recognized the distinguished lady or, to be more exact, the notorious woman, the instant she stepped from the train. She was accompanied by Lily Devereaux Blake and other woman suffrage agitators and I proceeded to escort them to the hotel where I had arranged for their reception.
I can still see the aversion so unfeelingly expressed for this magnificent woman. Even my friends were disgusted with me for piloting such an “undesirable citizen” into the community. It is hard to understand, after all these years, how bitter and implacable the people were, especially the women, toward the leaders of this movement.
As we walked along the street I was painfully aware that Miss Anthony was an object of derision and contempt, and in my heart I resented it and later I had often to defend my position, which, of course, I was ever ready to do.
Debs’s admiration of Anthony persisted. In the same article, published in 1909 by Socialist Woman, Debs praised Anthony in rapturous tones: “Susan B. Anthony freely consecrated herself to the service of humanity; she was a heroine in the highest sense and her name deserves a place among the highest on the scroll of the immortals.”
By that point, Debs was the country’s most prominent socialist, the leader of a party that from its founding favored giving women the vote. But however far Debs had had to travel on other issues, he was already there on women’s suffrage in 1880. In fact, he would claim he had never been anywhere else.
“There was never a time in my life,” Debs wrote, “when I was opposed to the equal suffrage of the sexes. I could never understand why woman was denied any right or opportunity that man enjoyed.”
Debs’s youthful defense of women’s suffrage is also noteworthy because, in general, he held fairly conventional views on gender. But that’s for another post.
Images of the Week
Debs, circa 1880.
Eugene Debs with his younger brother, Theodore (left), and father, Daniel (center). (Photo Credit: Indiana State University Library)
Housekeeping
If you missed last week’s post, “When Eugene Debs Began Moving Left,” you can read it here.
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