Site of the Massachusetts Man Suffrage Association Office

The office of the MA Man Suffrage Association once occupied 7a Park Street at this location.

NPS Photo/Woods

Quick Facts

Location:

7a Park Street

Significance:

Site of MA Man Suffrage Association Office

OPEN TO PUBLIC:

No

MANAGED BY:

Private Building

Formally established in 1895, the Massachusetts Man Suffrage Association worked to defeat any legislative measure that would give women the vote. The association's constitution claimed that women were unfit to vote and that natural law indicated politics fell outside women's responsibilities.¹

Members included many wealthy and powerful men of the state, some of whom had been helping women anti-suffragists since the 1880s. Some of these men supported the anti-suffrage journal The Remonstrance, first published in 1890. The Man Suffrage Association continued to work alongside the Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Further Extension of Suffrage to Women, fulfilling the traditionally male, public role in the anti-suffrage campaign.²

From its office on Park Street, the Association raised money and printed many of its own posters and pamphlets to promote its position. Its efforts led to the successful defeat of the 1895 state suffrage referendum on women's suffrage.³

Footnotes:

1. James J. Kenneally, “Woman Suffrage and the Massachusetts ‘Referendum’ of 1895,” The Historian 30, no. 4 (1968): 617-633.
2. James J. Kenneally, “Woman Suffrage and the Massachusetts ‘Referendum’ of 1895,” The Historian 30, no. 4 (1968): 617-633; Lois Bannister Merk, “Massachusetts and the Woman Suffrage Movement” (Phd diss., Radcliffe College, 1961); Susan E. Marshall, Splintered Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Campaign against Woman Suffrage (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1997).
3. Ibid.