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What was the Catholic Church's role in the movement for women's suffrage?
In 1917, Dorothy Day was the victim of political persecution as she joined activists in Washington, D.C. standing outside the White House with picket signs demanding equality and votes for wemen. Day and her cohort were jailed and brutally beaten. In her account of the events to the New York Times, suffragist Eunice Dana Brannan said that Day was "thrown back and forth over the back of the bench, one man throttling her while the other two were at her shoulders" in what would become known as the Night of Terror. Eventually, Day corverted to Catholicism and founded the Catholic Worker Movement to subvert political systems of oppression, even as she fully submitted to the magisterium. She never vated in an election.
Day's experience captures the dilemma faced by Catholic women in the early 20th century: Caught between a desire to fulfill the expectations of Catholic womanhood placed upon them by the hierarchy, aspirations of self-agency, and the everpresent vulnerabilities rendered by lack of bodly autonomy, Catholic women struggled to define their place in political life.
In the early 20th century, the church did not take an official position on the question of women's suffrage yet the majority of clergy adopted an oppositionel stance. Cardinal James Gibbons, archbishop of Baltimore and popular advocate for American democracy, wrote an open letter in 1915 stating: "When I deprecate female suffrage I am pleading for the dignity of woman. . . Woman is queen indeed but her empire is the domestic kingdom." He seems to have expressed the prevailing sentiment among Catholic clergy and layman. Another prominent archbishop, Henry Moeller of Cincinnati, urged his clergymen to use the pulpit to encourage female parishioners to sign anti-suffrage lists. It is worth noting that in England, the Catholic women's suffrage league received the express approval of Pope Benedict XV, who told the leader of the movement that he...