Mrs. A.M. Dodge, anti-suffragist

Josephine Jewell Dodge (1855-1928) was a staunch pro-childcare, anti-women’s suffrage crusader. From her homes on Park Avenue in New York City, and in Simsbury, Conn., and in the Weatogue section of Salisbury, she enjoyed comfortable travel in the early 1900s in  her Hotchkiss limousine, in which chauffeur F. Reilly drove her hither and thither.

The Hotchkiss, parenthetically, was an automobile manufactured from 1903 to 1955 in France by Hotchkiss et Cie, a subsidiary of the Sharon, Conn., Hotchkiss armaments titans.

Born in Hartford, Dodge was the daughter of leather goods manufacturer, Connecticut governor, U.S. minister to Russia and U.S. Postmaster General Marshall Jewell and his wife, Esther E. Dickinson. Josephine left her studies at Vassar to accompany her parents to St. Peterburg, Russia, when her father was assigned to the U.S. diplomatic corps there.

She married Arthur Murray Dodge (1853-1896) in 1875. His father was a New York merchant, philanthropist and U.S. Congressman. Five of their six sons reached adulthood.

She had an automobile at least by 1906, when the Hartford Courant noted she and sons had left Simsbury for New York City by car. The same year she motored to Canada. Though not by car, she ventured even farther afield, signing the guest book at the elegant Nara Hotel in Kyoto, Japan, in 1909. In 1910 she motored in a four-cylinder Hotchkiss landaulet in France.

A social activist, she sponsored the Virginia Day Nursery in New York City, a resource for working mothers. It was later called the Jewell Day Nursery. She was first president of the Association of Day Nurseries in the city and later was president of the National Federation of Day Nurseries.

She was president of the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage and edited its publication, Woman’s Protest. 

The Hotel Astor adorned the tables at an anti-suffrage meeting with a particular variety of rose, the “Mrs. Dodge,” especially named for her. 

She frequently orated at anti-Suffragist events; she once said decent dress is more important to women than the right to vote.

“When I say that the suffragists rely after all on their sex and on the appeal of their sex to men, I am repeating what men on the sidewalks and in the club windows of New York said when the suffrage parade passed up Fifth Avenue in New York last Saturday,” she said.

On another occasion, she suggested no good would come from doubling the number of voters.

“These facts are these,” Columbia Spectator quoted her. “No better government, no better laws, no better men in office and no better enforcement of laws has been accomplished in states which have the double suffrage than in states where men alone vote. The statute books all over the country proved that laws are passed, not according to whether or not women are voting there, but according to local conditions.”

Of course, women gained the right to vote with ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920.

Mrs. Dodge went on to other causes.

She died in Cannes, France.

 The columnist is senior associate editor of this newspaper.