“Anti-Woman Suffrage: Don’t Fail to Read This,” Leaflet, 1893 (Women. Suffrage. Newspaper clippings), Western History Collection, The Denver Public Library, Denver, Colorado.

Anti-suffragists mobilized for a second statewide referendum in 1893:

   History does not show a single instance in which woman suffrage has improved society or government; on the contrary, the municipal affairs of towns in Kansas where women have voted and were elected to office, are in worse shape than ever before.

   After a trial of twenty-four years in Wyoming, it is conceded that it has failed to bring about reforms of any kind.

   Utah furnishes us with the most striking example of what women cannot do. There the right to vote was early conferred upon women by the territorial assembly and if there ever was a magnificent opportunity offered women to assert herself at the ballot—it was there. But instead of abolishing polygamy or lending her influence in that direction, she became a powerful agency in upholding that evil….

   The great cry of our female agitators, "Taxation without representation," may be a very good argument if rightly applied, but as the percentage of women paying taxes is much smaller than that of men, and as there are 100 women who pay no taxes where there is one woman who does, we utterly fail to see how equal suffrage will increase the representation of tax paying women.

—"Anti-Woman Suffrage: Don't Fall to Read This,"
Leaflet, 1893

13. What did the writer argue happened when women in Kansas and Utah were given the right to vote?

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14. Why did the writer claim that the women's complaint against taxation without representation was a weak argument for their cause?

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15. Did this document offer effective arguments against woman suffrage? Why or why not?

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