Midwestern states like South Dakota had large immigrant populations, the majority from Germany, who tended to view woman suffrage with a mix of skepticism and hostility. Often living on farms in isolated ethnic enclaves, some opposed the cause because they espoused conventional gender roles and thought politics too corrupt for women. Others feared that women voters would seek to curtail cherished cultural practices like drinking, and argued that suffragists merely wanted the ballot to institute prohibition.
Indeed, many Midwestern suffragists had come to support woman suffrage through the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, or WCTU. These Midwestern suffragists were also often Yankees, either born in the Northeast or to parents from the region—and mostly white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant—who saw the ballot as necessary to protect their homes and communities from corruption caused by vices like drunkenness. But by the early 1910s, most Yankee suffragists in the Midwest had begun to distinguish their work in the WCTU from their work for suffrage. State associations elected new leaders with no formal ties to the WCTU, hoping to send a message that their desire to vote had nothing to do with Prohibition.
Still, immigrants opposed the cause, and Midwestern suffragists grew increasingly frustrated. They began to disparage their foreign-born neighbors as stubbornly and irrevocably ignorant. “They probably know little of our American ideals,” declared one Iowa suffragist.
By 1914, the suffragists’ frustration had turned to outright prejudice—and Shaw expertly tapped into those long-simmering fears. World War I had just erupted in Europe, and while the United States did not join the flight until April 1917, the conflict weighed heavily on the people in her audience. Native-born Americans were suspicious of South Dakota’s large German population, and as Germany invaded Belgium and northern France, many in the state—men and women—had begun to cast Germans as lawless aggressors. At the podium at the Congregational Church, Shaw amended her usual pro-suffrage lecture to unveil a novel argument: that citizenship was a civic responsibility, that the vote was a duty rather than just a right, and that politically-active native-born women were more deserving of the franchise than their ignorant male immigrant neighbors.