SOCIAL HOUSEKEEPING (continued)

A series of circulars known as "The Rainbow Fliers," printed on a wide variety of colored papers, were produced and circulated by the National American Woman Suffrage Association and used also by state affiliated suffrage groups. These colorful fliers featured pro-suffrage propaganda based on arguments of motherhood, protection of the home and children, and "social housekeeping" and titles such as, "Women in the Home" and "The Woman's Reason."[21]

A classic example of mainstream suffrage rhetoric on woman's "social housekeeping" was the statement by noted reformer, settlement house leader, and peace activist Jane Addams in an article entitled, "Why Women Should Vote" in a 1909 Ladies' Home Journal . As Addams put it:

"In a crowded city . . . if the street is not cleaned by the city authorities no amount of private sweeping will keep the tenement free from grime; . . . a tenement house mother may see her children sicken and die of diseases from which she alone is powerless to shield them, although her tenderness and devotion are unbounded. She cannot even secure untainted meat for her household . . . unless the meat has been inspected by city officials . . . If a woman would keep on with her old business of caring for her home and rearing her children she will have to have some conscience in regard to public affairs lying outside of her immediate household . . . [she] must take part in legislation which is alone sufficient to protect the home from the dangers incident to modern life."[22]

As an earlier suffragist had put it: "The new truth, electrifying, glorifying American womanhood today, is the discovery that the State is but the larger family, the nation the old homestead, and that in this national home there is a room . . . and a duty for 'mother.' "[23]

Even radical economic theorist and woman's movement leader Charlotte Perkins Gilman stated in an interview that her ideal was "social motherhood." "Mrs. Gilman . . . contends that the rapidly enlarging range of woman's activity is a social duty . . ." and stated further that the ideal of social service would be made possible by "a new and better kind of home."[24]