Ernest Bernbaum earned his A.B., A.M., and Ph.D. degrees at Harvard University. After teaching English there from 1907 to 1916, he taught at the University of Illinois from 1916 to 1945. He chaired the Committee on War Lectures at Illinois (1917-1919) and was a speaker for the League to Enforce Peace (1922-1925). An opponent of suffrage for women, Bernbaum directed the School for Anti-Suffrage Speakers in Boston, a group affiliated with the Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Further Extension of Suffrage to Women.

This collection consists of one autograph letter signed from Alice Stone Blackwell to Anna Child Bird referencing Bird's voting as a presidential elector and mentioning anti-suffragists as electors, including Elizabeth Lowell Putnam.
[Digital content can be found through Harvard's digitized collections.]

The Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Further Extension of Suffrage to Women was formed on May 21, 1895, to "increase public interest in the great question of the extension of Suffrage to women, and to stimulate public opinion in opposition to it." This group was also known as the Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Extension of Suffrage to Women and later known as the Women’s Anti-Suffrage Association of Massachusetts.

This collection consists of a broadside published by the Nebraska Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage. The Association was founded in 1914 in response to an effort in Nebraska to place the suffrage issue on the ballot.

The New York State Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage was founded in 1897. This collection includes pamphlets, speeches, and newsletters.

Elizabeth Lowell Putnam was a political activist, philanthropist, and pioneer in prenatal care. A political conservative, Putnam worked against the Child Labor Amendment, the Sheppard-Towner Act (which called for federal protection of maternal health), women's suffrage, the Equal Rights Amendment, and Prohibition. Believing strongly that women's power lay in the private sphere, she was an avid anti-suffragist. She chaired the Education and Organizing Committee of the Women's Anti-Suffrage Association of Massachusetts, the largest committee of that organization. Following the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, however, Putnam became an equally avid Republican, declaring that she was acceding to popular will. In 1920 she was elected president of the electoral college of Massachusetts, becoming the first woman to preside over a state electoral college. For the next 15 years she was very active in politics, holding numerous positions, and died in 1935 after a two-year illness.

Frieda Osgood Silz was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1897. She graduated cum laude from Radcliffe College in 1919. After graduation, she studied astronomy for one year at Wellesley College. She taught astronomy and geology at the Cambridge Haskell School and math and algebra at the Buckingham School in Cambridge. In 1922, she married Walter Silz and continued teaching part-time at the Buckingham School. She died of Hodgkins disease in 1937. This collection consists of a scrapbook which contains souvenirs from Radcliffe College, anti-suffrage ephemera, and other items.

Leon J. Sompolinsky worked at the Bentley Historical Library and authored an unpublished article, "A Selected Bibliography of the Movement Opposed to Woman Suffrage" (1977), which makes up the contents of this collection.

Adeline Dutton Train Whitney was an author and an opponent of women's suffrage. This collection is made up of a letter to Dr. Vose, probably George L. Vose, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, asserting that a woman's place is in the home.