Bill Haltom

Why Can't Mother Vote? Bill Haltom

On August 18, 1920, thirty-year-old State Representative Joseph Hanover of Memphis walked through the grand lobby of The Hermitage Hotel to be greeted by deafening cheers and jeers from women wearing yellow or red roses. Yellow roses symbolized their support for the proposed Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution granting women the right to vote; red roses opposed it. Joe Hanover had become the nation's leading male voice in the fight for woman suffrage. The most powerful forces in Tennessee politics opposed him. But Joe Hanover was not going to back away from the fight. Joe Hanover and his family had immigrated from Poland 25 years earlier to escape the Czar of Russia's tyranny. Joe asked: "Why can't Mother vote?"

Pro-suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt summoned the freshman legislator to her suite in The Hermitage Hotel in Nashville on Aug. 8, 1920, to ask Joe Hanover to become the floor leader in the Tennessee House of Representatives. Hanover, a Jewish immigrant who won his election as an Independent, spoke passionately about his family's flight from oppression in Poland. He said he was a true conservative who believed deeply in the Bill of Rights and that the rights set forth therein should be afforded to all Americans. For this, he was threatened in phone calls and physically assaulted in a hotel elevator. Governor A. H. Roberts assigned Hanover a bodyguard. But Hanover was determined. He held together the pro-suffrage faction votes for woman suffrage when Tennessee became the Perfect 36, the last state that could possibly ratify the Nineteenth Amendment. Hanover, Banks Turner of Yorkville and Harry Burn of Niota were the votes in the end that made the difference.

"Why Can't Mother Vote: Joseph Hanover and the Unfinished Business of Democracy" is a stirring account of the people who led the fight in Tennessee's pivotal vote to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment granting women the right to vote.