in 1938, with
Walter F. George on the left and Imogene Smith in the middle Dorothy Blount was a daughter of lawyer, politician, and Confederate veteran
James Henderson Blount. Married to Walter D. Lamar, heir to a local Georgia pharmaceutical business, Dolly Lamar opposed
women having the right to vote in Georgia. Professor Michael Kreyling of Vanderbilt University characterized her as "Southern
Conservatism to the backbone — the kind of antimodern,
antiprogressive, static 'drag' that
Gunnar Myrdal and his ilk loved to hate", who "resisted change as she would have resisted
Sherman". She was elected vice-president of the Georgia Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage (GAOWS) in May 1914, and argued in her pamphlet
The Vulnerability of the White Primary that giving women the vote in the South, in particular, would have the undesirable outcome of jeopardizing the control of politics by white people, a point that she also made in an address to the Constitutional Amendment Committee of the
Georgia Legislature. In opposition to
Rebecca Latimer Felton, Lamar and GDUDC president
Mildred Rutherford made their case to the Legislature on 1914-07-07 that the (then proposed)
Susan B. Anthony Amendment was the
Fifteenth Amendment in another guise, and by giving Black women the vote would engender racial equality. The daughter of
James Henderson Blount, Lamar had graduated from
Wesleyan Female College in Macon, and had gone on to
Wellesley Women's College only after obtaining a guarantee from its officials that no "negro" girls attended that Massachusetts school. She argued, furthermore, the partisan politics was a man's world, in which the involvement of women actually diminished their power (for which she used the example of the then failure to enact
Prohibition in the states where women already had the vote), took a
states' rights position that
women's suffrage was a Northern imposition upon Southern states, and strongly criticized (her characterization of) the suffragists' assertion that men could not by themselves alleviate the (then) problem with illiteracy in Georgia. She called the
suffragists "a fungus growth of misguided women" upon the majority of women in the state who were (by her assertion) not in favour of having the vote. Other arguments that she employed were that giving
all women the right to vote, or even just all
white women, would give it to "lower class" women, and dilute the influence of women of the "best class", again criticizing the suffragists for ignoring "the fact that some women are not good, some men are good" and for (in her view) erroneously assuming that "all women will vote for uplift". She rejected a "
no taxation without representation" argument in favor of suffrage on the grounds that its logical extension would be to give
Black people the right to vote, since they were taxpayers who were not allowed to vote, too. As she put it in her autobiography: "A hidden threat to
Southern customs was of course in the amendment's grant of equal suffrage to
all women, thus upsetting the restrictions of the white primary, which since
Reconstruction days had left Southern political affairs in the hands of white voters. Obviously this encroachment on our system would lead to
universal suffrage and serious political unbalance over the South." Two years after that address, in May 1916, Lamar publicly challenged
Helen Shaw Harrold to a public debate in an open letter, with the proceeds from ticket sales to be donated to Heimath Hall; although even anti-suffragist newspapers observed the irony that this was a three hour long public debate by two women upon a purely political subject and by its very nature indicated (in the words of an editorial in the
Macon Daily Telegraph) that women were "far enough along to vote". After much back and forth over the topic for debate, and whether the winner should be judged by men (an idea to which Lamar was opposed), Lamar withdrew the challenge. After World War I, in light of the social upheavals that it caused, Lamar expanded her position to include suffragists' "alleged" association with people like
Max Eastman, a suffragist and
socialist, and criticized them as misguided and their connection to socialism as the result of their ignorance. A further irony is that as soon as
women gained that right to vote, Lamar began using it, stating in her autobiography that she was "somewhat active in politics" and was "making public my attitude on measures and candidates and speaking and writing for what I believed right". History professor Elizabeth Gillespie McRae observed in a 1998 article that whilst claiming to be a "reluctant politician" Lamar in fact took to politics quite aggressively. Lamar was a founder member of the GAOWS, and alongside fellow founding member Caroline Patterson was its primary speaker, recruiter, and legislative
lobbyist. ==Other interests==