In 1919, after Missouri granted women the right to vote in presidential elections, she had wondered whether they would use the ballot “intelligently.”4 Were women “careless” about becoming well informed, she wondered? A note of superiority crept in when she speculated whether “home-loving, home-keeping women” might stay away from the polls, leaving the voting to a “rougher class of women.”5 Overall, Wilder’s remarks on suffrage were doubtful, discouraging, and oddly prim. “To my mind the ballot is incidental,” she had written dismissively a few years earlier, “only a small thing in the work
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