39. The Genesis of a Prank
It was not until ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 that America’s women were guaranteed the right to vote. However, in the preceding decades, numerous states had given women the franchise, in whole or in part. One such was Kansas, where the protracted struggle for women’s voting rights won its earliest partial victory in 1887, when women won the right to vote in municipal elections.
For many opponents of women’s suffrage, that heralded the world going to hell in a hand basket. Some such specimens in the town of Argonia set out to demonstrate their contempt for the concept of women in politics with what they saw as relatively harmless prank. They would place a woman’s name on the mayoral ballot, she would of course lose, and everybody would get a laugh at the absurdity of females floundering about in the manly world of politics.