October 1, 1915 – Statesman Elihu Root Weighs In Against Women’s Suffrage

Elihu Root, born in 1845, was an American lawyer and statesman who served as Secretary of War for both William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt.

Root was the son of a professor of mathematics at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. Attending Hamilton himself, Root graduated first in his class in 1864 at the age of nineteen. He taught school for one year, graduated from the Law School of New York University in 1867, and founded a law firm after one year of practice. By the time he was thirty Root had established himself as a prominent lawyer specializing in corporate affairs.

In 1899, President McKinley invited him to become his Secretary of War, saying that he needed a lawyer in the post, not a military man. Root served in this capacity from 1899 to 1904. The much-later appointed Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson said of Root “no such intelligent, constructive, and vital force” had occupied that post in American history.

Elihu Root in 1902

As the biography on the Nobel Prize website (Root won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1912) reports:

Root reorganized the administrative system of the War Department, established new procedures for promotion, founded the War College, enlarged West Point, opened schools for special branches of the service, created a general staff, strengthened control over the National Guard, restored discipline within the department. He was most concerned, however, about the three dependencies acquired as a result of the war. He devised a plan for returning Cuba to the Cubans; wrote a democratic charter for the governance of the Philippines, designing it to insure free government, to protect local customs, and to bring eventual self-determination; and eliminated tariffs on Puerto Rican goods imported into the United States.”

Root returned to his private legal practice in 1904, but answered President Theodore Roosevelt’s call to serve as his Secretary of State in 1905. Again, Root compiled an impressive record.

From 1909 to 1915, Root served as a United States Senator from New York, but he declined a candidacy for reelection thereafter.

By 1915, women’s suffrage was a hot topic nationally, but Root was not a fan. Opponents of suffrage bruited statements made by the highly respected Root in The Idaho Twin Falls Weekly Times on this day in history, October 1, 1915. He stated:

I am opposed to the granting of suffrage to women. Suffrage is not a natural right, but is simply a means of government, and the sole question to be discussed is whether government by the suffrage of men and women will be better government than by the suffrage of men alone.”

Hedging a bit, he allowed:

It is not that woman is inferior to man, but it is that woman is different from man. Woman rules today by the sweet and noble influences of her character. Put woman into the arena of conflict and she abandons those great weapons which control the world.

Woman in strife becomes hard, harsh, unlovable and repulsive; as far removed from the gentle creature to whom we all owe allegiance and to whom we confess submission, as the heaven is removed from the earth.”

Indeed, much of the opposition to such strong women as Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Elizabeth Warren, inter alia, stems from similar sentiments, over 100 years later. Recall, for example, the reaction to Hillary Clinton when in 1992 she defended her continued work as a lawyer when her husband was Governor of Arkansas, stating:

I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life.”

As the online magazine Quartz reported:

The comment provoked a firestorm of backlash, as expressed in letters to Time Magazine in 1992:

‘If I ever entertained the idea of voting for Bill Clinton, the smug bitchiness of his wife’s comment has nipped that notion in the bud.’”

Women, as Elihu Root averred, should stick to being “gentle creatures” who bake cookies, lest they seem “hard, harsh, unlovable and repulsive.”

First lady Hillary Clinton offers cookies to the Arkansas press corps during an interview with President Bill Clinton in the Roosevelt Room at the White House in 1993. Elihu Root would approve.