In a true piece of suffragette opposition, Mary Dean Adams wrote in 1909 her counter-arguments to the suffrage movement. Mary Dean Adams was a member of the New York State Association and her words were representative of the association as a whole. Her argument was pro-feminist-but definitely anti-suffragette. In her essay she says that working women would be negatively affected by all women gaining the right to vote. It was widely believed by opposers of the amendment that voting would not improve the economic conditions of the working woman, who was often poor and over-worked.
“Those who are trying to get women’s suffrage are either ignorant of, or willfully shut their eyes to political conditions in congested centers of population. Those peaceful Western scenes of which we read so recently, where women drive to the polls accompanied by babies with dolls and teddy-bears, and children play at peek-a-boo in the booths, will hardly find a parallel in New York City.”
Adams used her platform to highlight the inequalities among women, specifically between women working in cities who did not have the time or the motivation to vote, versus non-working women in the West and the South who felt more inclined to vote.