Liberals, some women's groups, and a few big-city newspapers all supported it.
The opposition said it was Big Government taking over the lives of ordinary people, and "if they can do this, they can do anything they want to us!"
Business leaders said it would hurt business.
Most churches opposed it, saying it would destroy the traditional family.
A candidate for governor of North Carolina said it was socialism, pure and simple.
What was it? The 19th Amendment to the Constitution granting women the right to vote.
Rob Christensen has his Way-Back Machine set for 1920 in his column in today's News&Observer. The showdown battle for women's right to vote landed in North Carolina in August 1920. We were potentially the 36th state to ratify the amendment. But we did not. The arguments presented above won the day (along with race fear, natch!), and it was Tennessee that had the distinction eventually of providing the ratification vote that granted women the right to participate in elections across this country.
Mixed in with the reactionary rhetoric summarized above was a good deal of open and frank racism. NC Congressman Edwin Yates Webb worried that the so-called "Susan B. Anthony Amendment" would "enfranchise 110,000 Negro women of North Carolina for the sake of letting a few active agitating white women in spots throughout North Carolina have the right to vote."
Mr. Webb was a Democrat. In fact, most of the opposition to women's suffrage came from the old Democratic machine in NC, because the old Democratic machine was reactionary and conservative to the core.
The core of that core of the old party switched to Republican along about Lyndon B. Johnson's time and are still providing the same screwy conservative and reactionary talking points about _______________ (fill in that blank however you wish. There are plenty of examples), when ______________ would advance equal rights, equal justice, or equal treatment for everyone.
North Carolina did not actually endorse/ratify the 19th Amendment until 1971.