Suffragists sometimes struggled to present a singular message as the leaders of the movements rejected the support of the poor, ethnic immigrants, or African Americans. For instance, Frances Willard, a suffragist and leader of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), blamed “illiterate aliens” and “a plantation negro, who can neither read nor write, whose ideas are bounded by the fence of his own field and the price of his own mule” for the defeat of temperance legislation in the south.^[1] Carrie Chapman Catt, the leader of NAWSA from 1900 to 1904 and again from 1916 to 1920 was certainly reluctant to appeal to immigrant voters, but even more so to African American voters. Under her lead, NAWSA argued on several occasions that female enfranchisement would help reinforce white supremacy by giving white women votes to outnumber black men. Some members of NAWSA went so far to advocate the concept of an educated voter, who would be required to pass literacy tests for access to the ballot.^[2] 

            Some suffragists argued that only educated people – men and women – should be allowed to vote. They supported literacy tests as a measure of who could vote, which excluded both a majority of blacks and of immigrants. Some later suffragists like Harriot Stanton Blatch and Alice Stone Blackwell argued instead that less educated citizens still deserved the vote and that exercising in participatory politics would, in fact, elevate them. Other suffrage leaders
Alice Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt excluded black women and argued that added laws concerning literacy would strengthen white supremacy. In one book written to persuade southern congressmen to support woman’s suffrage, Catt wrote, “White supremacy will be strengthened, not weakened, by woman suffrage.”^[3] She provided tables and
population data to prove that the white female vote would give more political power to southern whites rather than to African Americans. She argued that regulations like property qualifications and literacy tests would further eliminate black voting power, while elevating the political power of whites, both male and female.