How Mark Twain Supported Women’s Suffrage
Mark Twain’s Self-Pasting Scrap Book was favored by prominent figures in the Women’s Rights Movement like Anna Dickinson and Elizabeth Boynton Harbert.
Tag: Women’s Rights
Mark Twain, Suffragette Ally & Overprotective Father
In his 1903 essay “Why Not Abolish It?,” Mark Twain argues that the age of consent for extramarital relations should be abolished for women. Twain’s underlying premises are that young women are not responsible enough to make their own decisions about sex, that once a girl has engaged in sexual relations she is “dragged down into the mud and into enduring misery and shame,” and that, worst of all, so is […]
Livy Clemens & Mark Twain’s Moment of Enlightenment
In 1867, Mark Twain addressed letters to Missouri expressing his disgust at the thought of women’s voting rights. He expressed that women should stick to their “feminine little trifles” that consisted of “babies…and knitting.” Twain speculated that women were not capable of making decisions about politics and should let the “natural bosses do the voting” instead. Twain described women as one might antique furniture: “an ornament to the place that […]