By Lee Ballard

The 19th Amendment — the one that gave women the right to vote — was passed by Congress in June 1919.

Fourteen months later, enough states had voted “yes” to make it part of the Constitution.

 But along the way...Virginia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Maryland and Delaware voted “no.”

Let me repeat that: these Southern and Border States voted against giving women the right to vote. (North Carolina and Florida apparently didn’t vote on the amendment in this time period.)

 With 90 years of hindsight, what they did seems ridiculous, ignorant. But not at the time. These states were ─ and mostly still are ─ conservative, and that means, as Webster says, they have “a disposition to preserve what is established.”

 I was raised in Georgia in the ‘40s and ‘50s. I remember constant opposition to everything that was “liberal” ─ playing cards, modern dancing, lipstick, movies, Sunday retail, women in men’s clothes or with “bobbed” hair. And in another category altogether, something that was not threatened pre-1954, segregation of the races.

I went away as a missionary, experienced other cultures, and came to see my native culture more objectively. It was sadly a culture living in fear.

 In 1919-1920, liberals were threatening to topple the world as Southerners had known it. They were changing the role of women.

 Time and again, social conservatives fought last-ditch battles against change. Desegregation in the  1960s almost reached the fever pitch of 1861. And they always lost ─ sometimes from outside pressure, sometimes from within as their own people accepted change (like divorce, working mothers).

 This battle over the 19th Amendment gives us powerful clues toward understanding today’s social conservatism.

 First and foremost, they hate and fear “liberals” ─ a faceless force that brings disruptive ideas.  

 Second, social conservatives change their targets as American society leaves them behind. They’ve stood, figuratively speaking, in one schoolhouse door after another.

 Third, socially conservative positions aren’t open to debate. They aren’t the product of weighing competing ideas in search of truth. On the contrary, most social conservatives feel themselves engaged in spiritual warfare. They anchor their social views in Scripture and fight for absolute right against absolute wrong.

 This is historic social conservatism. In the 19th century, Southern preachers found abundant support for slavery in the Bible, as in Ephesians 6:5, where slaves are told to obey their masters as if they were obeying Christ. (Interestingly, abolitionists argued more from the American principles of liberty and equality than from the Bible.) 

Those opposing the vote for women might well have quoted First Timothy 2:11 (“Let a woman learn in silence with all submission.”)  I remember the biblical arguments I heard as a kid in support of segregation.

 What will be said 90 years from now about the battles that today’s social conservatives are waging – opposition to evolution, homosexuality, stem cell research and the “morning after” pill?

I think I know. Don’t you?

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Lee Ballard lives in Mars Hill.