“Brawny, Capable Men and No Women among Them”: Riots as Masculine Space in the Nineteenth-Century Ohio Valley

In the late nineteenth-century Ohio Valley, men used collective violence as a means of negotiating the social order and securing political power. Although women did not have the vote and could not serve on juries during the nineteenth century, that did not dampen their enthusiasm for politics and their bids for social and economic citizenship. Women were intensely interested in fights over the ballot, the right to form unions, and access to public space. When large crowds gathered and riots erupted, women often were present and even driving forces behind the violence. Yet newspapers, city and state officials, and union representatives rarely mentioned the presence of women as anything other than curiosity seekers or victims of the mob. If women’s attendance was noted at all, the National Guard, the media, and union organizers portrayed them in traditional roles as wives and mothers rather than as political actors voicing legitimate grievances. The depiction of women as irrational and weak justified excluding them from “masculine” concerns such as voting rights, the fight for a living family wage, and military service. These sympathetic portrayals of women further defined public disorder as a masculine activity and public space as masculine space. By invoking the need to protect women from violence, city and state officials directed increased funding to the National Guard as an essential force for law and order. These depictions of women contributed to the polarization of unions and the National Guard in the ongoing fights between labor and capital at the turn of the twentieth century.