"Politics are bad for women and women are bad for politics."
So read the banner that hung in the Hotel Raleigh headquarters of the forces opposed in 1920 to ratification of a constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote.
By August 1920, 35 of the necessary 36 states had ratified the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. All eyes were on North Carolina when a special session of the legislature convened to consider the amendment.
Pro-suffrage sentiment was on the rise in the state, thanks in part to women's groups, liberals and support from newspapers, most notably The News and Observer.
But much of North Carolina's Democratic machine, headed by its powerful boss, U.S. Sen. Furnifold Simmons, opposed the 19th Amendment. There was strong opposition in Eastern North Carolina with its large black population, because some feared that if the federal government could order states to allow women to vote, it could also enfranchise blacks.
There was also resistance from textile areas, which depended heavily on women and girls to work in the mills. And there was opposition from many churches, which saw women voting as a threat to the traditional family, according to an account of the fight by Elna Green in the July 1990 edition of The North Carolina Historical Review.
Congressman Edwin Yates Webb wrote that he could not "possibly see any good that will flow from forcing our noble women into politics; I can see in the future much harm to motherhood, to wifehood and to womanhood."
Webb worried that it 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."
In a speech in Oxford, Cameron Morrison, Democratic candidate for governor, compared women's suffrage to socialism.
There was strong opposition from the clergy, particularly from the Episcopal Church. Bishop Joseph Blount Cheshire wrote a friend that giving women the right to vote "seems to me opposed to the fundamental conception of the very important and sacred function of women in the scheme of human life."
An anti-suffrage tract published in Raleigh said there is "a scheme afoot which has for its purposes the overthrow of the man as the head of the family, a disruption of the marital relations and a reorganization of society upon a basis inconsistent with these Bible teachings" and predicted "a disaster fatal to all our present institutions."
Others were bogged down in stereotypes.
Kemp Battle, a former University of North Carolina president, said women would vote as their husbands told them, so suffrage would merely double the vote of married men.
One leaflet warned: "A Vote for Federal Suffrage is a Vote for Organized Female Nagging Forever."
The state Senate tabled the Susan B. Anthony Amendment in a 25-23 vote on Aug. 17, 90 years ago. Later that month, Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the amendment, and women voted that fall.
The North Carolina legislature passed the suffrage amendment in 1971 - a half century after it mattered.
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