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Interchange: Women's Suffrage, the Nineteenth Amendment, and the Right to Vote

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Interchange: Women's Suffrage, the Nineteenth Amendment, and the Right to Vote, Journal of American History , Volume 106, Issue 3, December 2019, Pages 662–694, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaz506

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Soon after the U.S. Congress approved the Nineteenth Amendment in early June 1919, state legislatures began to deliberate the question of women's suffrage. Ratification proceedings, which persisted for more than a year, unfolded against a backdrop of extraordinary rage, fear, and uncertainty in the United States. After World War I the decline of manufacturing and the demobilization of soldiers contributed to a painful recession. Across the long red summer, mobs of angry whites terrorized African American communities, lynching dozens of persons and burning homes and churches. Emboldened by union activism and the specter of Bolshevist revolution, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer launched a series of brutal raids, arresting and attempting to deport thousands of immigrant workers. In Congress, the dry majority overrode President Woodrow Wilson's veto of the Volstead Act, heralding a new era of prohibition. Amid this social and political tumult, the Nineteenth Amendment wound its way toward ratification.

What did the amendment, a milestone of American democracy, mean to a nation so deeply committed to white supremacy and immigration restriction? What were its implications for an aspiring empire then exerting military power overseas? How, if at all, did it affect politics and law in the United States?

To promote critical reflection about the Nineteenth Amendment and its many complex legacies, the Journal of American History announces a new series, Sex, Suffrage, Solidarities: Centennial Reappraisals. This series, which will run throughout the coming year, will consist of research articles, special features, and reviews published across the JAH , the JAH Podcast , and Process: a blog for American history . Our theme for the project—sex, suffrage, solidarities—is intended to provoke new questions about the Nineteenth Amendment and the political, economic, and cultural transformations of which it has been a part. Our ambition is to foster creative thinking about suffrage, its discursive and material frameworks, and its often-unanticipated consequences. We intend to examine the intricate linkages among suffrage, citizenship, identities, and differences. We aim to facilitate global, transnational, and/or comparative perspectives, particularly those that compel us to reperiodize or otherwise reassess conventional ways of thinking about campaigns for women's rights and adult citizenship.

To inaugurate this series, we invited a panel of distinguished historians—Ellen Carol DuBois, Liette Gidlow, Martha S. Jones, Katherine M. Marino, Leila J. Rupp, Lisa Tetrault, and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu—to join in conversation about the Nineteenth Amendment, suffrage, and women's political activism more broadly. The Interchange that follows reads by turns as essential historiography, compelling critique, and honest personal reflection. It offers invaluable context for, and analysis of, the study of women's rights in the United States. We are grateful to the participants and to our associate editor Judith Allen for her creative direction of this project.

Ellen Carol Dubois is Distinguished Professor (Emerita) in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author or editor of numerous books, including Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848–1869 (1978), Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches (1981; 3rd ed., forthcoming, 2020), Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage (1997), and Woman Suffrage and Women's Rights: Essays (1998). Her next work, Suffrage: Women's Long Battle for the Vote , will be published in 2020. Readers may contact Dubois at [email protected] .

Liette Gidlow is the 2019–2020 Mellon-Schlesinger Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and an associate professor of history at Wayne State University. She is the author of The Big Vote: Gender, Consumer Culture, and the Politics of Exclusion, 1890s–1920s (2004) and editor of Obama, Clinton, Palin: Making History in Election 2008 (2012). She is now preparing a book manuscript entitled The Nineteenth Amendment and the Politics of Race, 1920–1970 . Readers may contact Gidlow at [email protected] .

Martha S. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830–1900 (2007) and Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (2018), and coeditor of Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (2015). Her next book, Vanguard: A History of African American Women's Politics , will appear in 2020. Readers may contact Jones at [email protected] .

Katherine M. Marino is an assistant professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her Stanford University dissertation won the Lerner-Scott Prize for the best dissertation in U.S. women's history from the Organization of American Historians; she has since revised and published it as Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement (2019). Readers may contact Marino at [email protected] .

L Eila J. Rupp is Distinguished Professor of feminist studies and associate dean of the Division of Social Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has published nine books and more than two dozen articles, among them Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women's Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s (1987), co-authored with Verta Taylor, and Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women's Movement (1997). She is now researching queer college students in the contemporary United States. Readers may contact Rupp at [email protected] .

Lisa Tetrault is an associate professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University. She is the author of the Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women's Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898 (2014), which won the inaugural Mary Jurich Nickliss women's and gender history book prize awarded by the Organization of American Historians. She is working on a book about where and how women's suffrage fit into the political landscape after the American Civil War and another project tracing the genealogy of the Nineteenth Amendment. Readers may contact Tetrault at [email protected] .

J Udy Tzu-Chun Wu is a professor in the Department of Asian American Studies and director of the Humanities Center at the University of California, Irvine. Her books include Dr. Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: The Life of a Wartime Celebrity (2005) and Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (2013). She is now researching the career of Patsy Takemoto Mink, the first woman of color to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives. Readers may contact her at [email protected] .

JAH: U.S. historians have closely studied women's suffrage. In the 1960s and 1970s, practitioners of the new women's history wrote extensively about women's enfranchisement and citizenship, as well as the nineteenth-century reform movements that inspired support for—but also opposition to—them. These aspects of political history remained a core priority for women's historians in the 1980s and even the 1990s. The publication of numerous authoritative biographies, organizational studies, and documentary collections enriched our knowledge of these subjects.

As you think back over this field, what are your impressions? What are its distinguishing characteristics? What works, methodologies, or interventions do you find most crucial?

Leila J. Rupp : When I began my graduate work in 1972, it was pretty much possible to read all the existing scholarship on women's history. My introduction to women's suffrage began with Eleanor Flexner's Century of Struggle: The Women's Rights Movement in the United States (1959), Aileen S. Kraditor's The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (1965), Gerda Lerner's The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels against Slavery (1967), and the less well-remembered The Puritan Ethic and Woman Suffrage by Alan P. Grimes (1967). As an undergraduate in Herbert Aptheker's class on African American history, I wrote a paper on the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840, relying heavily on Lerner's work to guide me to the sources. Then in 1978 came Barbara J. Berg's The Remembered Gate: The Origins of American Feminism and the now-classic Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848–1869 , by Ellen Carol DuBois. 1

When I think about this early literature and the subsequent development of the scholarship on suffrage, citizenship, and the women's movement over time, three themes come to mind. The first is the increasing attention to the importance of race, ethnicity, and class. Both Flexner and Lerner, embedded in the progressive Left, attended to issues of race and class, but the racial complexities of the suffrage movement that grew out of the abolitionist struggle did not take center stage, as they would in later literature. DuBois, also coming out of a left feminist context, detailed the failure of a joint struggle for black suffrage and woman suffrage during Reconstruction, the inability of suffragists to forge an alliance with organized labor, and the racism and class bias that underlay and were exacerbated by these failures. Yet, the point of her book is that these developments led to the emergence of an independent women's movement, a positive development in the long run. Since 1978 we have, of course, learned much more about the role that black women, with a foot in both race and gender politics, played in achieving suffrage, from works such as Rosalyn Terborg-Penn's African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 (1998). 2

A second theme that characterizes the direction of scholarship over the decades is the continuity of the struggle for women's rights in the aftermath of suffrage victory in 1920. For a time, the Nineteenth Amendment seemed to mark the end of organized efforts to win women full citizenship until the emergence of the women's movement in the 1960s. Then a flood of studies addressed the intervening decades. What happened to the women's movement? Did it die out after suffrage was won? Scholarship on the 1920s and beyond—Susan D. Becker's The Origins of the Equal Rights Amendment: American Feminism between the Wars (1981), Nancy F. Cott's The Grounding of Modern Feminism (1987), Dorothy Sue Cobble's The Other Women's Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (2004), on labor activism, Cynthia Harrison's On Account of Sex: The Politics of Women's Issues, 1945–1968 (1988), and my work with Verta Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women's Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s (1987), to name just a few—argued persuasively that it did not die out, and that it took a variety of forms. We came to think of “waves” of the women's movement—the first suffrage wave giving way to the second wave in the 1960s, with third and fourth waves to follow—only to back off from that metaphor to emphasize greater continuity than the rise and fall of waves seems to suggest. 3

This brings me to a third theme in the scholarship: placing the U.S. suffrage movement and subsequent activism in the context of transnational developments. In my Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women's Movement (1997), I argued that a history of what I called an international women's movement, which picked up steam in the 1920s and 1930s, showed that rather than “waves” of activism we should think of “choppy seas.” Increasingly, as in other fields of U.S. history, women's historians are paying attention to the global context. Bonnie S. Anderson's Joyous Greetings: The First International Women's Movement, 1830–1860 (2000) makes it impossible to think about the Seneca Falls Convention as a purely American event. To give just a couple of other examples, Allison L. Sneider, in Suffragists in an Imperial Age: U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question, 1870–1929 (2008), connects women's suffrage to U.S. imperialism, and Katherine M. Marino's Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement (2019) details the ways that Latin American feminists in the 1920s and 1930s took the lead in fighting for economic, social, and legal equality on the global stage. 4

Ellen Carol Dubois : I begin by challenging the premise of the question itself. In the revival of women's history inspired by the women's liberation insurgence of the late 1960s into the 1970s, the American woman suffrage movement was not a topic of great interest. I believe that when I published Feminism and Suffrage in 1978, I was alone in reexamining the subject within a full-fledged scholarly monograph. 5

Other suffrage scholars—notably Eleanor Flexner and Aileen Kraditor—though highly influential, were not infused with the energies and the concerns of those women's liberation years. Others of my sister scholars in that pioneering women's generation addressed related subjects—I think particularly of Nancy Cott, Mari Jo Buhle, and Linda Gordon—and I was much influenced by them. But for the most part that entire generation of radical and social historians were not much interested in electoral politics. In our experience, established parties were indistinguishable and ineffective; many of us didn't even vote. Women's liberationists tended to dismiss the suffrage movement for leaving untouched the issues of women's oppression with which we were concerned. My challenge to that dismissal was reflected in the title of my first article on the subject, “The Radicalism of the Woman Suffrage Movement” (1975), published in an early issue of Feminist Studies . In it, I elaborated what I saw as the underlying premise of the suffrage movement, that women were full-fledged and rational individuals, not subservient to family. 6

Following the concerns of my late 1960s political generation, in Feminism and Suffrage I examined the emergence of the suffrage demand in the context of race and class politics. I considered at great length the terrible 1867–1869 schism between black suffrage and woman suffrage advocates. While lamenting the conflict, my conclusion, reflected in the book's title, was that the break freed suffrage leaders—Stanton and Anthony the boldest and most radically feminist of those—to pursue their own political path, no longer deferential to the concerns of racial equality dictated by the Republican party. Again, this argument reflected the experience of my own women's liberation generation as it separated itself from the influence of the male-dominated black power movement.

In my later JAH article, “Outgrowing the Compact of the Fathers: Equal Rights, Woman Suffrage, and the United States Constitution, 1820–1878” (1987), I came to a different conclusion, emphasizing what was lost in 1869, the solidarity of these two movements. By then I was influenced by the first works of black suffrage scholars. Paula Giddings's brilliant When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (1984) was particularly important for me; I thought of it as the Century of Struggle for black women's history in its scope and bold interpretive stance. Of course, Rosalyn Terborg-Penn's “Afro-Americans in the Struggle for Woman Suffrage” (1977) was very important, but it should be remembered that it was available only as a difficult-to-access dissertation until it was published as a book in 1998. I still believe it necessary, in reconsidering suffrage history, to return to this tragic foundational conflict, especially as what we learn about the traditions of African American suffragism continues to grow. 7

While the racial dimension of the history of woman suffrage has received ever more attention, its class aspects have not, and this is unfortunate. Two of the six chapters of Feminism and Suffrage focused on Anthony's efforts to reach out to wage-earning women and forge a bond with the labor movement of the era. Mari Jo Buhle and Christine Stansell laid the basis for further exploration of these concerns and Diane Balser, Carole Turbin, and Susan Levine pursued the subject, but it has dropped off of suffrage scholars' radar in the current century. As we look over suffragism's seventy-five-year history and its impact on women's political activism after 1920, we should surely be struck by the prominence of women, many of whom began as suffragists, in the twentieth-century labor movement. As suffrage scholars, we should make it our business to dig into the deep, complex, and crucial interactions of race and class in American feminist politics. 8

Martha S. Jones : I came to women's history in the mid-1990s and am a beneficiary of so much work that predated my own. I also came to the field as a historian of African American women. Thus, my starting place was not with, for example, Flexner's Century of Struggle , though I would eventually get to that. Ellen DuBois's Feminism and Suffrage would soon join my list of essential reads. But the work of Terborg-Penn first shaped my thinking. Her 1977 Howard University Ph.D. dissertation, “Afro-Americans in the Struggle for Woman Suffrage,” defined the field long before being published as African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote . 9

Terborg-Penn's study conveyed three enduring insights for historians of black women—indeed, for historians of all women—and the vote. The first was that the work demanded painstaking recovery across an archival terrain not built to preserve black women as political thinkers or activists. Her sheer doggedness in the combing of sources was both an instruction about method and a cautionary tale. The second lesson was that we should not defer to, or trust, the often-cited sources that had long informed histories of women's suffrage. I remember locking horns with fellow graduate students in the 1990s about how to use the six-volume History of Woman Suffrage (a project initiated by Stanton and Anthony in the 1870s, with the last volume published in 1922). A nod here to Lisa Tetrault's important contribution to this point with The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women's Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898 (2014). It was from Terborg-Penn that I learned the politics that animated those volumes and then how to set them aside and avoid being misled. Finally, Terborg-Penn taught me to be unflinching about how racism had infected the minds of some of the best-remembered white women's suffrage activists. I learned that racism had been woven into the fabric of the movement's strategies and tactics. Today, thirty years later, some historians still struggle with how to write about this dimension of the movement. Terborg-Penn put that dilemma squarely in front of us. 10

I also read Paula Giddings's When and Where I Enter in the mid-1990s. It opens with the often-quoted words of the African American scholar and activist Anna Julia Cooper from 1892: “Only the BLACK WOMAN can say ‘when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood … then and there the whole … race enters with me.’” This quotation told us much that we need to know about African American women's politics at the end of the nineteenth century. Cooper and others like her were charting their own way forward as women by the 1890s. Giddings anticipated, if not called into being, the field of African American women's history, which blossomed by the early 1990s. 11

Giddings begins her study with Ida B. Wells's antilynching campaign. This choice is a lesson in the history of women's suffrage. Black activist women such as Wells did not focus on a single issue in their view of women's rights, including the vote. Women's rights were in the service of human rights—rights that extended to women and to men. Giddings recognizes that black women's striving for the vote was interwoven with concerns about antilynching, temperance, the club movement, and Jim Crow. Challenging the periodization of the women's suffrage movement, Giddings's section on Fannie Lou Hamer sent a clear signal: for black women, the movement for suffrage extended to the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment (not unlike ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment) was only one stop along a hard-won route to political power. 12

Neither Deborah Gray White's Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985) nor Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham's Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (1993) was expressly about women suffrage. Still, I read them as essential studies of how, where, and when black women built political power. Rather than in parlors or conventions, the roots of black women's politics lay in labor, loss, and survival on plantations. There, cruel myths about black women were crafted; the battle against such ideas animated black women's suffrage politics. Higginbotham's study of black Baptist women runs parallel to the histories of the American Woman Suffrage Association ( Awsa ), the National Woman Suffrage Association ( Nwsa ), and the National American Woman Suffrage Association ( Nawsa ), as well as the so-called women's suffrage movement. But we see the Nineteenth Amendment's ratification from a new perspective when we take the point of view of hundreds of thousands of black Baptist women. They did their political work within religious communities. Locating black women's politics on the plantation and in the church changed forever the way we would tell the history of black women and the vote. 13

These threads and more run through my 2007 book, All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830–1900 . What I had learned from the earliest works in African American women's history was how the politics of suffrage, for black women, was always “bound up” with broad concerns, diverse institutions, and differences among and between women, black and white. 14

Lisa Tetrault : When I began reading in this field in the late 1990s, there was little published about post–Civil War women's suffrage. As a result, after I finished Ellen DuBois's necessary Feminism and Suffrage , and several of her seminal articles, I turned to History of Woman Suffrage simply to learn basic historical outlines. I was struck not only by the majesty of Stanton, Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage's recovery and preservation work, but also by their enormous silences and unmistakable emphases. 15

Also in the 1990s, Nell Painter published Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol (1996), which bore heavily on themes of narrativity and power. In her articles as well as her book, she emphasized how Truth had been mythologized rather than remembered as a fully rendered human being and complex historical actor. The origin of the oft-cited “ain't I a woman speech” in primary-document readers (and increasingly online) was often the History of Woman Suffrage , which reprinted that problematic formulation from Frances Dana Gage. Painter's work on narrative and its present-day legacies were deeply influential for me. 16

Rosalyn Terborg-Penn published her highly respected dissertation in that decade as well, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote . That book strove to unmask and rebuild a basic narrative around women and voting. It too underscored how Stanton and Anthony helped create many of the outlines around something bounded (if still vast) called women's suffrage that nevertheless left out many women and political projects. 17

Over the 1990s and into the early 2000s, scores of new works broke down the idea that women existed in a separate sphere removed from politics. Women need not be domestic and women need not be enfranchised to exercise political power, and women engaged in politics in plenty of places we hadn't thought to look. 18

At the same time, my reading of the rapidly transforming field of Reconstruction-era scholarship signaled the end to a debate that bled from the 1980s into the 1990s: Was women's suffrage radical or conservative? Consequential or inconsequential? The nuanced, fine-grained analyses of power, race, citizenship, gender, freedom, and voting in Reconstruction scholarship, combined with women's political history, underscored that there was no one fixed issue to assess. Whether women's suffrage was radical or conservative, consequential or inconsequential, now seemed beside the point.

Finally, historians such as Elsa Barkley Brown, Eric Foner, Heather Cox Richardson, and the political scientist Victoria Hattam all questioned whether the franchise was even a stable category. Did it too need to be contextualized, interrogated, and historically understood? They clearly answered, “yes.” 19

Liette Gidlow : I have always seen histories of women's suffrage as part of broad histories of political institutions, political culture, women, and gender. Perhaps this is because I came to the study of women's/gendered politics through a different door. When I arrived at my Ph.D. program in history I came with an undergraduate background in political science; work experience in the D.C. Public Defender's office, the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, and the Ohio legislature; and a feminist consciousness sharpened on issues of campus sexual assault and workplace harassment. My first exposure to women's studies came as an undergrad through feminist literary criticism, and my early interest in race and public policy was cultivated by working with Gary Orfield on issues of racial equity in education and by serving as a staffer to Rep. Julian Dixon in the 1980s. Representative Dixon at the time was the only African American subcommittee chair on the House Appropriations Committee, meaning that all manner of policy issues related to African American constituencies found their way to his desk, and thus mine.

All of these pieces, and a few others, came together in graduate school in the 1990s in a historically grounded way when I started investigating the League of Women Voters' Get Out the Vote ( Gotv ) campaigns of the 1920s. “Politics” clearly extended beyond electoral politics to the full range of ways power was being deployed, and yet “officialness” still mattered. I was especially interested in the nexus of the politics of representation and discourse, on the one hand, and the politics of formal governmental institutions, on the other. How has civic legitimacy historically been constructed, institutionalized, and contested, and what do race, gender, class, sexual preference, religion, and other sources of identity have to do with it? In an era of ostensibly universal suffrage, why did the members of the League of Women Voters feel they needed Gotv campaigns? Why were they trying to get out the votes of middle-class whites, who had the highest turnout, and not those of the working class and/or people of color, who were much less likely to vote? And what did it mean for anyone to be a good citizen in an era in which a majority of eligible voters did not cast ballots, as was the case in 1920 and 1924? Clearly gender, class, and race had a great deal to do with the answers to these questions.

Scholarship on suffrage and Progressive Era women reformers laid crucial foundations for my explorations, and I was especially indebted to work by Paula Baker, Jean Baker, Sarah Hunter Graham, and Robyn Muncy. More theoretical works, in particular Joan W. Scott's “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis” (1986) and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham's “African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race” (1992), helped me think about meaning-making, because I was interested in not only what the vote accomplished but also what enfranchisement signified and how that changed over time. Scholarship outside the conventional categories of “women's history” and “suffrage history” helped me explore the interplay between formal political institutions and processes and the politics of meaning-making. Nancy Fraser's essay on counterpublics, “Rethinking the Public Sphere” (1992), was essential in helping me think about discourse and resistance. Joseph R. Gusfield's The Culture of Public Problems: Drinking-Driving and the Symbolic Order (1981) made me think about the framing of public issues. James C. Scott's Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1990), and John Gaventa's Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley (1980) made me think about resistance in new ways. Works by Warren Sussman, Louis Althusser, Clifford Geertz, and Antonio Gramsci made me think about power dynamics embedded in everyday processes of meaning-making. 20

It was really after graduate school that I immersed myself more deeply in historical treatments of women's politics, broadly defined—in part because I was beginning to teach women's history surveys, and in part out of a growing appreciation for the power of narrative and the richness of stories focused on people rather than political institutions. Barbara Ransby's Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (2003), Katherine Mellen Charron's Freedom's Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark (2009), Higginbotham's Righteous Discontent , and Lisa G. Materson's study of black women's electoral activism in the context of the Great Migration ( For the Freedom of Her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877–1932 [2009]) stand out among many books that helped open the way to my current book project, “The Nineteenth Amendment and the Politics of Race, 1920–1970.” 21

JAH: Professor Gidlow mentioned biographies of Ella Baker and Septima Clark. Are there other biographies that have particularly influenced your thinking about women's suffrage, the Nineteenth Amendment, or women's political activism more broadly?

Jones : I'd like to focus on the role of biography in writing and rewriting the history of women's suffrage. Let me digress just long enough to say that I think nomenclature is important here, so I will use the phrase “women and the vote” rather than “women's suffrage.” With this, I am signaling that my discussions are generally about the broader question of women and the vote, and not about the Nineteenth Amendment in particular. A discussion too narrowly framed by the Nineteenth Amendment relegates many American women to the margins.

African American women's history has produced a robust body of book-length, scholarly biographical works. This genre makes plain that African American women have approached voting rights through campaigns directly organized around suffrage, but they also did so through many other collectives, from clubs and churches to political parties and antislavery societies. Black women's biographies inform my understanding of how to write black women's political history, including their concern with voting rights.

For example, I've come back to Jane Rhodes's biography of Mary Ann Shadd Cary ( Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century , 1998). Rhodes was most interested in Cary's fascinating work as a journalist, but she takes us through a life that includes affiliation with the Nwsa and a role in suffrage campaigns in Washington, D.C. Melba Joyce Boyd's Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E. W. Harper, 1825–1911 (1994) is at its heart a literary biography. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was the only African American woman to speak on the record during the fraught American Equal Rights Association meetings of the 1860s. Her interventions are essential to any telling of mid-nineteenth-century suffrage politics. When Harper told those gathered that they were “all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity,” she asserted a human rights vision that remained at the core of black women's thinking about the vote and perhaps remains there today. 22

Nell Painter's magnificent Sojourner Truth refuses to let Truth's memory merely serve the interests of others. We must grapple with Truth's complex, multifaceted life if we are to write about her at all. Painter's insight into racism—both as animus and as paternalism—is an essential lesson. Those who patronized Truth should not be understood as having wholly respected or made space for the entirety of Truth's humanity, even if they incorporated her into women's conventions, the History of Woman Suffrage , and more. 23

Add to these Jean Fagan Yellin's Harriet Jacobs: A Life (2004), which introduces sexual violence as a women's rights issue; two biographies of Harriet Tubman (Catherine Clinton, Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom [2004] and Kate Clifford Larson, Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero [2004]), which remind us that in the last years of her life Tubman stumped for women's suffrage; and Marilyn Richardson's pathbreaking Maria Stewart, America's First Black Woman Political Writer: Essays and Speeches (1987), which wholly resets our periodization of women's rights in the United States with 1832 Boston as a point of origin. Together these biographies are a rich portrait of how black women thought about and worked toward their political rights, while also laboring for human rights. 24

Biographical works often take the point of view of insurgent activists. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the important work on Ida B. Wells-Barnett, which spans the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and is foundational to my thinking about suffrage versus the vote versus politics versus power. Wells-Barnett was frustrated by Congress and political parties in her antilynching campaign, leading her to adapt an old internationalist vision for her own times. Here, Mia Bay's To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (2009) and Paula J. Giddings's Ida: A Sword among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign against Lynching (2008) are must-reads. 25

But when I invoke insurgent politics, I am suggesting that the history of black women's politics and power cannot be understood without appreciating those who rejected the politics of the vote for other visions. Again, biographies let us see this clearly. Consider works from Barbara Ransby— Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement and Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson (2013)—and Ula Yvette Taylor— The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey (2002) and The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam (2017). I'd also place Sherie M. Randolph's Florynce “Flo” Kennedy: The Life of a Black Feminist Radical (2015) on a shelf of histories that call into question whether frameworks such as “suffrage” and the “vote” are even central to understanding African American women's history. These insurgent histories are counternarratives that ask hard questions about whether and to what degree women who worked for inclusion and equity in parties and at the polls might have been misled, misguided, or just plain mistaken in their objectives. 26

A few works hit a sweet spot where both the mainstream and the insurgent come together in illuminating ways. First, Barbara Winslow's Shirley Chisholm: Catalyst for Change (2013), gives us a figure who both leveled a radical challenge and worked within U.S. politics, and fought her way in with integrity. And there is Chana Kai Lee's For Freedom's Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (1999), which also manages to hold on to both the critique of and the striving to gain state power. For yet another figure who just might thread that needle, I'd add Michelle Obama's memoir Becoming (2018). I can't say that Mrs. Obama is at the end of the day an insurgent, but she tells a story about how a black woman strikes a precarious balance when she engages with the mainstream. In this respect, her autobiography reaches all the way back to figures such as Sojourner Truth, black women who tried to make themselves legible to the nation by way of an intersectional analysis of their lives and of American political culture. 27

I'll pitch some biographies still to be written (better yet if they are being written at this very moment): Sarah Mapps Douglass, Jarena Lee, Sarah Parker Remond, Anna Julia Cooper, Julia A. J. Foote, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, Nannie Helen Burroughs, and Eliza Ann Gardner all come immediately to mind as women whose lives we know a good deal about and, still, whose biographies would further our understanding of how black women came to politics. There is little room left, it's safe to say, for the old view that black women were not engaged with women's issues or that they somehow placed the interests of black men above their own.

Dubois : A few crucial figures have recently received their first scholarly biographies: Alva Belmont (Sylvia Hoffert's Alva Vanderbilt Belmont: Unlikely Champion of Women's Rights [2011]) and Anna Howard Shaw (Trisha Franzen's Anna Howard Shaw: The Work of Woman Suffrage [2014]). Franzen makes a strong case that much of what we thought we knew about Shaw comes to us through the unflattering lens of Carrie Chapman Catt's evaluation. The biographies and political studies of Ida B. Wells continue to accumulate (Mia Bay's To Tell the Truth Freely , Patricia A. Schechter's Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880–1930 [2001], and the very interesting work of Crystal N. Feimster in Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching [2011]). Among other leading African American suffragists, Fannie Barrier Williams (in Wanda A. Hendricks's Fannie Barrier Williams: Crossing the Borders of Region and Race [2013]) and Mary McLeod Bethune (in Joyce A. Hanson's Mary McLeod Bethune: Black Women's Political Activism [2013]) now have their first biographies. Importantly, Alison Park is forthcoming with a new biography of Mary Church Terrell. Other especially compelling twentieth-century figures are also the subject of new biographies: Jeannette Rankin (Norma Smith's Jeannette Rankin: America's Conscience [2002]) and Inez Milholland (Linda J. Lumsden's Inez: The Life and Times of Inez Milholland [2004]). 28

Ernestine Rose has a new and interesting biography (Bonnie S. Anderson's The Rabbi's Atheist Daughter: Ernestine Rose, International Feminist Pioneer [2017]). I've also dug a little into biographies of lesser-known figures such as Lillie Devereux Blake (Grace Farrell's Lillie Devereux Blake: Retracing Life Erased [2002]), Belva Lockwood (Jill Norgren's Belva Lockwood: The Woman Who Would Be President [2007]), and Emma Devoe (Jennifer M. Ross-Nazzal's Winning the West for Women: The Life of Suffragist Emma Smith DeVoe [2011]). There are several new studies of Alice Paul (Mary Walton's A Woman's Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle for the Ballot [2010], Christine Lunardini's Alice Paul: Equality for Women [2013], and Jill Zahniser and Amelia R. Fry's Alice Paul: Claiming Power [2014]), and one of Lucy Stone (Sally G. McMillan's Lucy Stone: An Unapologetic Life [2015]). I particularly note the absence from this list of books on working-class suffragists such as Leonora O'Reilly and Rose Schneiderman. There is now, however, a much-needed study of Mary Kenney O'Sullivan (Kathleen Nutter's The Necessity of Organization: Mary Kenney O'Sullivan and Trade Unionism for Women, 1892–1912 [2000]). 29

Two recent biographies have appeared (Lori D. Ginzberg's Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life [2009], and Vivian Gornick's The Solitude of Self: Thinking about Elizabeth Cady Stanton [2005]). With the publication of Ann D. Gordon's scrupulously edited and annotated six-volume Selected Letters of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (1997–2013), hopefully more should be forthcoming. Also in the category of important biographical resources, Thomas Dublin and Kathryn Kish Sklar's incredible Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600–2000 has done spectacular work in using crowd sourcing to build biographical dictionaries of relatively unknown African American suffragists, Congressional Union/National Woman's party militants, and the moderates of Nawsa . 30

JAH: How have historians' approaches to women's suffrage and women and the vote evolved since this first effusion of scholarship? What, if anything, has changed in the early twenty-first century?

Gidlow : I see the last twenty-five-years or so of scholarship as having replaced a single dominant narrative that was constrained and bounded with a profusion of perspectives that transcend many of those limits. In its purest form, the classic interpretation treated the suffrage struggle as a self-contained American story that began in 1848 in Seneca Falls and, after many trials and tribulations, was brought to a triumphant conclusion in 1920 by heroic middle-class and elite white women with ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. Scholarship, mostly in the 1990s and early 2000s, chipped away at the temporal, geographical, racial, and class boundaries of the prevailing narrative through key works such as Ginzberg's Untidy Origins: A Story of Woman's Rights in Antebellum New York (2005), Cott's “Across the Great Divide” (1990), Anderson's Joyous Greetings (2000), Terborg-Penn's African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote (1998), Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore's Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (1996), and DuBois's Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage (1997). By the mid-2000s, the classic narrative gave way to bold new interpretations that borrowed insights from scholarship on historical memory, borders, and other fields. It was hardly possible to privilege 1848 after Tetrault's The Myth of Seneca Falls , or to see suffrage as a purely domestic political issue after Sneider's Suffragists in an Imperial Age . As the centennial of ratification approaches, more work is connecting woman suffrage to, or integrating it into, accounts of other key figures and issues in U.S. and global history, such as Charles Darwin and evolution (Kimberly A. Hamlin's From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women's Rights in Gilded Age America [2014]), and, in my own work, the mid-twentieth-century civil rights movement. These deep connections to other issues are powerful evidence, if any was needed, that “the” history of woman suffrage is not peripheral to national or transnational histories, but central and essential. 31

Katherine M. Marino : Numerous women's groups have pushed for the right to vote as one goal in multipronged and often-global platforms for birth control, labor rights, socialism, world peace, temperance, child welfare, freedom from sexual violence, antilynching legislation, and racial justice. Works that shine a light on the vital political work of African American women's rights activists that included and expanded beyond suffrage include Jones's All Bound Up Together ; Estelle B. Freedman's Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation (2013); Feimster's Southern Horrors ; Brittney C. Cooper's Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017); and Materson's For the Freedom of Her Race , in addition to already-named works by Terborg-Penn, Painter, and Giddings, and many others. 32

Vicki L. Ruiz's American Historical Review article on Luisa Capetillo and Luisa Moreno (“Class Acts: Latina Feminist Traditions, 1900–1930”), Maylei Blackwell's ¡Chicana Power! Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement (2011), Gabriela González's Redeeming La Raza: Transborder Modernity, Race, Respectability, and Rights (2018), and Emma Pérez's The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (1999) have explored the political work of turn-of-the-century Mexican, Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and Latinx women who took up “the woman question” alongside other goals for the health, education, and safety of their communities. Works that demonstrate the interrelationship between suffrage organizing and international peace, labor, and socialist movements include Rupp's Worlds of Women ; Ellen DuBois's 1991 New Left Review essay “Woman Suffrage and the Left”; Julia L. Mickenberg's American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream (2017) and her 2014 JAH article, “Suffragettes and Soviets”; Anderson's The Rabbi's Atheist Daughter ; Annelise Orleck's Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900–1965 (1995); and Melissa R. Klapper's Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women's Activism, 1890–1940 (2013), to name just a few. 33

These histories show us that suffrage was not one movement, but multiple movements. They also challenge the wave metaphor, showing us that U.S. feminism in the early twentieth century was not defined by a quest for the Nineteenth Amendment. At the same time, demands for political rights and equality have been an integral and ongoing part of U.S. feminisms.

These readings have also been useful for my own work on Pan-American feminism in the interwar years. On the heels of the Nineteenth Amendment, Anglo-American women, believing they were the global leaders of feminism because of their recent suffrage victory, sought to dictate the terms of feminism to their Latin American counterparts. U.S. leaders often instructed Latin American feminists to make a single-minded push for suffrage. However, Latin American feminists exerted their own broader meanings of feminismo , defined not only by equality under the law but also by social and economic rights, and anti-imperialism, among other goals. Anti-imperialism was a driver of suffrage activism in Latin America, especially in Central America, in the 1910s and 1920s. In the mid-1930s–1950s period, when suffrage passed in most Latin American countries, antifascism and Popular Front coalitions of socialist and labor groups vitally energized women's suffrage campaigns. This Popular Front Pan-American feminist movement was critical to developing frameworks for international human rights. It advocated a broad meaning of international human rights—for political, civil, social, and economic rights for men and women, and antidiscrimination based on race, sex, class, or religion—that it pushed into inter-American venues and eventually into the founding of the United Nations. In the Un , a group of Latin American feminists were critical to inserting women's rights in the founding 1945 Un Charter and to promoting the inclusion of both women's and human rights. This is just one example of how it can be useful to de-center the United States, while also keeping in mind the relationship between U.S. suffrage and imperial histories. 34

Dubois : I have been impressed with several clusters of recent scholarship. Political scientists are delving into the theoretical foundations of suffrage thought and the impact of enfranchisement on voting rates. Counting Women's Ballots: Female Voters from Suffrage through the New Deal (2016), by J. Kevin Corder and Christina Wolbrecht, uses sophisticated new techniques to assess how women voted in their first presidential elections. They break the vote down by state and region and thus offer an alternative to the oversimplified, long-standing, and unsubstantiated claim that women did not make use of their new voting rights. They and others have suggested that we pay attention to the role played in the political realignment of 1932 by the massive expansion of the electorate that the Nineteenth Amendment effected. Republicans had long claimed to be the party that supported woman suffrage, but that claim had grown very thin by the late 1920s. It is not without significance that while Herbert Hoover promised the first woman cabinet member, Franklin D. Roosevelt was the one who appointed her. 35

I noted in my first answer that working-class suffragism could use more research. By contrast, there is much fine scholarship on upper-class suffragism. In addition to Sylvia Hoffert's Belmont biography already noted, Johanna Neuman has written about “Gilded Age socialites” ( Gilded Suffragists: The New York Socialites Who Fought for Women's Right to Vote , 2017), and Joan Marie Johnson has done very good work on suffrage philanthropy ( Funding Feminism: Monied Women, Philanthropy, and the Women's Movement, 1870–1967 , 2017). Somewhat related is Brooke Kroeger's work on male suffrage supporters ( The Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote , 2017). Note that these last three books focus on New York suffragism, as does the work of Susan Goodier ( No Votes for Women: The New York State Anti-suffrage Movement [2017] and, coauthored with Karen Pastorello, Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State [2017]). Almost every other state has yet to receive its own study, which will be of great help in understanding the grassroots of suffragism. 36

Judy Tzu-Chun Wu : I will focus on the value of citizenship, both for those excluded from eligibility and political rights due to race and immigration status as well as for those who had citizenship forced upon them by the U.S. Empire. These perspectives illuminate how whiteness and settler colonialism underlie so-called women's suffrage. I focus my comments primarily on Asian American and Pacific Islander women, although forms of racialized exclusion and forced colonization resonate more broadly.

The ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 happened just four years before the 1924 Immigration Act, which systematically codified earlier laws and court cases that denied Asian immigrants entry into the United States and deemed them “aliens ineligible for citizenship.” This designation, a legal status that influenced social and cultural representations of Asian people in the United States, held implications not only for the right to vote but also for the right to serve on juries, own property, marry interracially, and so on. For Asian women, whose status was “covered” by that of their husbands or fathers, their alienness by association not only translated to distinctly gendered barriers at the border (where they were monitored for gender-inappropriate behavior and suspected of prostitution) but also affected their legal rights (U.S.-born women would lose their citizenship if they married men who were aliens ineligible for citizenship). The scholarship of Sucheng Chan, Martha Gardner, Judy Yung, and others reveal how U.S. citizenship fundamentally represented racialized and gendered privileges, which were out of grasp for those deemed forever foreign. This issue continues to be relevant, given the substantial undocumented population in the United States, including Asian Americans, the fastest growing segment of this community. 37

It is also important to note instances of forced incorporation into the U.S. Empire, which conferred the unwanted gift of unequal legal rights. As Allison Sneider, Kristin Hoganson, and others argue, the U.S. women's suffrage campaign blossomed in the contexts of U.S. westward expansion and overseas empire. White suffragists insisted on their political rights in response to U.S. colonial endeavors. As Susan B. Anthony stated in her 1902 testimony to the U.S. Senate Committee on Women's Suffrage, “I think we are of as much importance as are the Filipinos, Porto Ricans, Hawaiians, Cubans, and all of the different sorts of men that you have before you. When you get those men, you have an ignorant and unlettered people, who know nothing about our institutions.” As the U.S. expanded into the Caribbean and across the Pacific, Filipinos became “nationals,” neither citizens nor aliens. The last Native Hawaiian monarch, Queen Liliuokalani, was forcibly deposed by a coalition of white businessmen, U.S. military forces, and Christian missionary interests. Given this history of U.S. Empire, coerced inclusion, and racialized arguments for white women's suffrage, what is the value of attaining “equal” rights within an inherently unjust nation? 38

To help address these legacies of racial exclusion and imperial incorporation, I especially appreciate the work of Cathleen Cahill, whose forthcoming book focuses on women of color, particularly indigenous, Latina, and Asian/American women who advocated for suffrage. I'm also in awe of the substantial black women's suffrage project that Dublin and Sklar have launched as part of the Women and Social Movements in the United States journal. 39

I explore the ramifications of race and empire in a political biography of Patsy Takemoto Mink, the first woman of color U.S. congressional representative and the namesake for Title IX. Mink was elected from Hawaii and lived through the islands' transition from “territory” to “state.” She also articulated what I describe as a Pacific feminism. Mink's denizenship from islands in the middle of the Pacific framed how she understood political issues, ranging from Cold War militarism, race relations, environmentalism, and women's politics. The racial, the colonial, and the international were intertwined for Mink, a third-generation Japanese American, as they are for other racialized individuals who arrived on U.S. shores or whose homelands were crossed by U.S. borders. 40

Tetrault : I appreciate Judy Wu's reminder that extension of suffrage “rights” also implied colonization in the lives of many. In my reading about native and indigenous peoples voting “rights,” gaining citizenship and the vote meant the loss or diminishment of tribal sovereignty. We need to be careful not to reify the whiteness of the standard narrative by cheerfully adding additional dates—when native women “got” the vote, for example—or by treating voting as if it is always, on the face of it, desirable. The latter idea betrays a kind of triumphant American exceptionalism that often runs through discussions about voting “rights.” More work is needed here. Certainly, once enfranchised, colonized people creatively figure out how to leverage the ballot in their lives, for resistance and survival. And this too is an important part of the story. 41

Leila J. Rupp posed this question: Liette Gidlow's comments about the breakdown of a dominant narrative of suffrage as a self-contained and American story, along with Judy Wu's focus on the history of both systematic exclusion and imperialist incorporation of Asian and other women of color, raises for me these questions: Do we have anything to celebrate about the suffrage victory? Given the complicated history of suffrage that has emerged, are there positive developments we can point to regarding women's enfranchisement? What did women's votes bring to politics?

Gidlow : There is a sense that somehow the Nineteenth Amendment was rather a disappointment, that it doubled the electorate but didn't really change anything, in part because many women did not vote, and because those who did vote did not vote as a bloc. That is, that the Nineteenth Amendment did not produce a “women's vote.”

I argue, however, that over time a women's voting bloc did emerge, one that is cross-class and stable, with high voter turnout and a sharp preference for one party. That bloc emerged not among white women, but rather among African American women. It took the better part of a century, but by the early twenty-first century “the” black women's vote had become transformative in U.S. politics, just as southern white supremacists who had feared woman suffrage a century ago had feared.

The fear that the Anthony Amendment would enfranchise southern black women and open the door to the return of southern African American men to the polls was central to the debate over the Anthony Amendment in the late 1910s in Congress and in 1920 in Tennessee. In 1915 the Richmond ( Va ) Evening Journal editorialized that if the Anthony Amendment became law, “twenty-nine counties will go under negro rule,” a development that would force “the men of Virginia to return to defending white supremacy through fraud and violence” and “return to the slimepit from which we dug ourselves.” As I pointed out in a 2018 article in the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , southern members of Congress routinely cited these concerns when they explained their opposition to sending the amendment to the states for ratification (“The Sequel: The Fifteenth Amendment, the Nineteenth Amendment, and Southern Black Women's Struggle to Vote”). Kimberley Hamlin develops evidence along these lines beautifully in her forthcoming book, Free Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener . And Elaine Weiss's account of the ratification battle in Tennessee ( The Woman's Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote , 2018) shows frequent recourse to the fear of black women's—and men's—votes. When black women showed up in the fall of 1920 to register and vote—and they did show up—local papers reported near panic at their surging interest. 42

In some locations, the sheer number of registrants suggests that the mobilization of black women voters was cross-class. A letter writer to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( Naacp ) noted that six hundred African American women tried to register in Caddo Parish, Louisiana—a breadth that suggests working-class mobilization—but that fewer than five succeeded, most of those, as the letter-writer states, “on account of “thair propity.” In Jacksonville, Florida, thanks to painstaking data collection by Paul Ortiz, we have direct evidence of cross-class mobilization ( Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 , 2005). There, the occupations with the most female registered voters were laundry workers, maids, and cooks, but the list of registrants also included dressmakers, clerks, and teachers. 43

Voter registrars employed a variety of strategies to disfranchise middle- and upper-class African American women. They had the discretion to decide how to test applicants and whether they had done well enough to pass. Class status alone did not secure voting rights for African American women in the South after ratification. Some black women turned then to gender-based strategies, trying to enlist the help of white women who had worked and sacrificed to enact woman suffrage. They quickly learned that there was little gender solidarity across racial lines. The two major suffrage groups ( Nawsa , reconstituted in the summer of 1920 as the League of Women Voters, and the National Woman's party) both declined to get involved. 44

Class-based strategies did not work, and gender-based strategies did not work, so African American women redoubled their efforts to push forward race-based strategies, working with African American men through the Naacp , churches, institutions of higher education, and other organizations. They attacked the white primary and made for themselves a place in the “Roosevelt” Democratic party. Women such as Ella Baker and Septima Clark developed educational programs that helped community members pass literacy tests. After the Voting Rights Act, despite ongoing resistance, they registered and mobilized en masse. Their votes made a difference; sometimes they made the difference. 45

It took the better part of a century, but the Nineteenth Amendment did produce a “women's vote.” Since at least the 1990s, African American women have displayed the most intense partisan preference of any demographic group. In 2008 and 2012, they had the highest voter turnout of any group and made crucial contribution to Barack Obama's historic presidential wins. When southern white supremacists opposed the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, they feared the power of black women's votes. A century later we can see that their fears were well-founded.

Marino : When I teach U.S. women's and gender history, I trouble the assumption that the Nineteenth Amendment was the major turning point that students sometimes assume it was. I ask my students to consider a question my adviser Estelle Freedman instilled in us: “Which women?”—Which women benefitted from the Nineteenth Amendment? As Judy Wu has pointed out, immigration restrictions meant that most Asian and Asian American women did not. Polling taxes, literacy requirements, and violence constricted citizenship rights for many African Americans in the South. The deportation of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the 1930s further eroded men's and women's citizenship rights. Relatedly, the racism of white suffrage organizations, their use of U.S. imperial expansion as justification for a federal suffrage amendment, and their failure to organize intersectionally in the wake of suffrage, challenge the notion that the Nineteenth Amendment was a major turning point. 46

At the same time, I also emphasize that movements for suffrage were extremely important in chipping away at the legal exclusion of women from political citizenship, and that suffrage demands were a key part of broader movements that upheld multiple goals. To understand the stakes of women's suffrage it helps to realize that figures as diverse and as radical as Sojourner Truth, Clara Zetkin, Ida B. Wells, and Jovita Idár were demanding it and to great effect. One example: In 1913, the same year she rejected white suffragists' instructions to march at the end of the Washington, D.C., parade, Wells founded the first African American suffrage organization in Chicago, the Alpha Suffrage Club. That club registered over seven thousand new African American women voters who helped elect the city's first black alderman. It is important to understand that Wells's suffrage and electoral activism was connected to her activism against lynching and sexual violence. 47

Tetrault : I appreciate Liette Gidlow's deft summary of the field: from a dominant, contained narrative to a profusion of narratives that can no longer be contained and now spill over into so many other stories. At the same time, this centennial is causing quite a bit of confusion, as the old, contained narrative of the Nineteenth Amendment extending the “right to vote” to women keeps intruding onto how we now brand the amendment. I think the conventional story has contributed negatively in unseen ways to understandings of American history, by lulling (often white) Americans into believing that a “right to vote” exists. Historians constantly refer to suffrage activism as women pursuing and then winning “the right to vote.” That framing enshrines this right as something that has been realized, when it has not. It's no surprise, then, that a majority of white Americans today think that voter suppression is not currently underway, even as it is sharply on the rise. 48

Bringing the text of the Nineteenth Amendment into anniversary discussions helps us see a place where we are still getting tripped up by older, inherited—and triumphant—narratives. When the amendment was drafted in 1878 it might have been worded affirmatively, as a directive: the federal government shall protect the right of women to the elective franchise. But it wasn't, owing to complicated factors. Instead, the Nineteenth Amendment, like the Fifteenth Amendment upon which it was modeled, is negatively worded. The Fifteenth Amendment says states can't bar voting on grounds of “race,” while the Nineteenth Amendment says states can't bar voting on grounds of “sex.” The Nineteenth Amendment doesn't enfranchise anyone directly. It works indirectly, by removing the word “male” from state constitutions, where voting qualifications were defined. That's it. It's true that the opening of the short, thirty-nine-word amendment (like the Fifteenth Amendment) references a “right to vote,” but that right did not, in fact, exist. It's an illusory referent point, something the amendment leaves imagined rather than demanded. The Constitution leaves the appointment of voters up to individual states. It does not contain the right to vote.

Leading white suffragists could have seen how flaccid the Fifteenth Amendment turned out to be in protecting black men's votes, as southern states legally disfranchised them on other grounds—something permitted by the very narrow and negative wording of that amendment. Yet, even as the shortcomings of the Fifteenth Amendment became clear over the 1880s and 1890s, neither Stanton nor Anthony, nor any other suffragists, sought to revise the text of the proposed federal amendment. They left it modeled on the Fifteenth Amendment, even as that amendment crumbled before them.

This wording is, I think, a concession to American racism. Historians talk about the amendment's effect but rarely about its creation. Stanton, in particular, had always believed that voting should be extended to the “educated” and kept from the “ignorant” (read, immigrants and many folks of color). Stanton supported discrimination in voting, and the amendment ultimately made allowances for that (explored in my current work). Future, mainstream white suffragists made these same allowances by not revising the amendment's text.

Removing “male” from state-defined voter qualifications, by declaring that requirement unconstitutional, was a huge victory, particularly in an era when discrimination on the grounds of sex was thought not only permissible but also necessary given that women and men were understood to be vastly different biological entities. But how can we tell a story today that doesn't falsely enshrine a “right to vote” and still honor this amendment? There, I think, we still have work to do.

Finally, that we still narrate the mainstream suffrage story as a story of the federal amendment is, I think, another legacy of the earlier dominant narrative that centers Stanton and Anthony. The federal amendment was their baby, but many other suffragists—especially in the forgotten American Woman Suffrage Association—thought it was unconstitutional, because the Constitution clearly gave authority over voting to the states, something not discussed in references to their promotion of a state strategy.

When the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920, women were already voting, in some form, in all but eight states. We have very little history of how women on the ground, including women of color, were trying to create and safeguard a “right” to a ballot. What we do know is that we can't talk about women's first election as if it happened after 1920; millions of women were already voting before then.

If we broaden our focus beyond the federal amendment, we see that there is no single date when women gained ballot access. This is a more accurate, if a much less satisfying, story.

Dubois : It bears emphasis that the wording of the amendment that Lisa critiques was offered by senators, not by Stanton and Anthony. Through much of the 1870s, Stanton and Anthony advocated affirmative wording linking women's voting to universal national suffrage, but that phrasing received no support in Congress.

Should we celebrate the Nineteenth Amendment? I must say that I honestly don't understand how this question can be asked and so how to answer it. Perhaps it is intended as a productive provocation. Nonetheless, my strong position is that any significant political goal that women wished to achieve, any effort to effect social change for women or for the larger society, could not be secured without the fundamental tool of democratic society, the franchise. Would we want to envision a counterfactual history in which American women would wait, like the women of France, Italy, Mexico, Belgium, and many other countries, until after the Second World War to vote? Nor can we reasonably claim that these, or our, or virtually any other national enfranchisements of women could have occurred without the often-long-running, organized demands by women themselves.

The Fifteenth Amendment certainly did not secure African American men's right to vote against attack and required another century of struggle to fully reinstate it. Nonetheless, I doubt any of us would think it a better outcome if de jure suffrage rights had not been won during Reconstruction. In the modern world, where even autocratic leaders must make use of the popular vote, no one except an occasional far-right pundit seeking attention seriously asks whether women's enfranchisement should have happened. Women's votes are such a rich prize that all sides fight furiously to claim them.

Gidlow : Voting is hardly the whole story of American democracy and political participation. But there is a singular quality to enfranchisement because it certifies the enfranchised person's status as a legitimate decision maker in civic affairs. (Judith Shklar's classic 1991 work, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion , is so valuable here.) The imprimatur of official status matters, even if the act of voting does not achieve all we might wish. This is not to say that the import of enfranchisement is merely symbolic. When women cast votes, they are helping make decisions that everyone, including men, must abide. This power remains deeply contested, in politics and well beyond, even a century after ratification. 49

Jones : Should we celebrate the Nineteenth Amendment anniversary? I don't think “celebration” is a historian's approach to the past—it leans too far in the direction of hagiography for my tastes. I don't even think, as I've written elsewhere, that commemoration is the work of historians. On this point I am indebted to Michel-Rolph Trouillot and his devastating analysis of the 1992 “celebration” of Christopher Columbus in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995). Anniversary dates are an opportunity to teach history to a broader public. Some of what we teach may encourage or fuel commemoration or celebration. But if we give in to the tug of mythmaking and sanitization that these sort of rituals require, we are doing something else. 50

JAH: In what ways have histories of women and the vote contributed to our broader understanding of U.S. history? What difference has this work made to the field at large?

Dubois : Regarding the beginning and end of the suffrage period, historians of the United States have done a modestly good job of paying attention to suffrage historiography. By beginning, I mean from the period of antislavery activism to the Reconstruction era, 1836–1876. The abolitionist origins of women's rights and the controversy surrounding woman suffrage and the Fifteenth Amendment have both drawn historians' attention. I recently noticed a very good law review article by Adam Winkler on the suffrage New Departure, which made an innovative constitutional argument for women's enfranchisement largely based on the Fourteenth Amendment, as an early and underappreciated episode in the reenvisioning of the Constitution as a “living document,” an approach not recognized by virtually any jurists at the time (“A Revolution Too Soon: Woman Suffragists and the ‘Living Constitution,’” 2001). By end, I mean the Progressive Era, 1900–1920. Women's political activism in those years is so central to the social welfare dimension of state and national policies, it is hard to ignore. 51

The middle period of suffrage activism has not been integrated into general U.S. history for two reasons. First, suffrage historiography is weak in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, perhaps because there is little suffrage radicalism to inspire modern students of the movement. Second, U.S. history overall is weak in this period, with no consensus on how to narrate the era, or even what to call it: the age of class division, the age of industrialization, the woman's era, the Gilded Age, the racial nadir, post-Reconstruction reaction?

Jones : One approach to this question is to ask more directly: How have histories of women's suffrage contributed to our understanding of women's politics and power? Once we do, at least two important things happen. First, our attention is drawn away from so-called women's suffrage associations, and we focus on sites where black women were struggling over their political rights and power. This is why, for example, the Ann D. Gordon's edited collection African American Women and the Vote, 1837–1965 (1997) ranges from the 1837 Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women to the Voting Rights Act. That volume examines black women not only in suffrage associations but also throughout African American public culture: in the colored convention movement, antislavery societies, churches, the antilynching movement, the club movement, and more. To answer the question directly, the history of women's suffrage (and its shortcomings) encouraged historians of black women to rewrite the histories of black public culture as histories of women and to better understand the full range of how and where women's politics unfolded. 52

Today, in the field of African American women's history, a great deal of important work is being done on women's politics and power, but not very much of this work focuses on the history of suffrage or of voting more generally. This stands in contrast to the great interest in contemporary voter suppression, treated in Carol Anderson's excellent One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy (2018). Still, we don't think of the era before the Nineteenth Amendment as one of “voter suppression” even as many black women were barred from the polls as women after the Civil War. The histories that stick closest to black women and the vote are those that are most concerned with black women's intellectual history, such as Cooper's Beyond Respectability and Treva Lindsey's Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington, D.C . (2017). 53

African American women's history opens up onto of a set of questions, we might even say a skepticism, about political histories that center too firmly on the vote, political parties, and the state. The vast, ubiquitous, and enduring ways racism and white supremacy have been woven into people, ideas, and institutions have required that the field always understand how black Americans critiqued and then worked against racism and white supremacy. That is to say that an essential counterpoint to histories of the vote are histories of how voting was not enough.

I see the exciting new work on black women's internationalism as the cutting edge of new histories of politics and power. Examples include Keisha N. Blain's Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (2018) and the volume edited by Blain and Tiffany M. Gill, To Turn the Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism (2019). These histories defy conventional frameworks such as that of the nation-state or of electoral politics. As Grace V. Leslie's essay in that collection (“‘United, We Build a Free World,’”) illustrates, even a figure such as Mary McLeod Bethune, whom I associate with the National Association of Colored Women and Fdr 's “black cabinet,” must be remembered for her broad political vision, which included a critique of racism and colonialism and was aimed at linking women across the black diaspora. The vantage point of this work dovetails importantly with that of Marino's new Feminism for the Americas . 54

Has the history of black women and the vote remade U.S. political history? The answer is yes and no, and perhaps that is just right. Certainly we have made the case for black women in mainstream politics—from suffrage to the vote, parties, and the state. We've helped expand the notion of political history by making the case for insurgent politics as part of the American story. And we've even pressed on the geographies of political history, insisting on a politics rooted in the United States but transnational in its vision and its aims.

Marino : Histories of women's politics have, on a fundamental level, contributed to a recognition that to understand politics or political citizenship, we need to understand gender, race, class, and ethnicity, among other hierarchies of power. Decades of scholarship have shown that these areas of focus are not separate. (Women's and gender histories, however, too often still get tokenized.)

To point to a few useful contributions, Paula Baker's 1984 AHR essay, “The Domestication of Politics,” demonstrated that a changing understanding of what counted as “politics” in the United States was wrought by women's Progressive Era civil and social engagement and by a burgeoning welfare state. This “domestication” of politics abetted the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. More recently, Dawn Langan Teele's book, Forging the Franchise: The Political Origins of the Women's Vote (2018), provides a fine-grained comparative analysis of how women's suffrage was accomplished in England, France, and the United States. It underscores the importance of strategic maneuverings and alliances between suffragists and political parties seeking to gain power. Blain's Set the World on Fire not only explores the range of black nationalist women's engagements in the United States and transnationally around a range of goals but it also places women at the center of black nationalism. 55

These histories have also increasingly demonstrated that the “personal” is indeed “political.” Freedman's Redefining Rape argues that the definition of rape—including the race-, class-, and gender-specific notions of who can perpetuate it and who be a victim of it—is fundamental to political citizenship. Her book underscores the connections between sexual violence, gender, race, the vote, and broad meanings of political citizenship. “Suffrage” is in the subtitle, and she examines a diverse group of female and male activists, black and white, including suffragists from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century who sought to expand the definition of “rape” beyond the typical one of this period: a forcible attack on a chaste white woman by a nonwhite male perpetrator. The book explores the importance of women's voting power at the state and national levels to the passage of statutory rape laws. It also explains how the right to serve on a jury for white women and African American men and women was critical both to addressing sexual violence and to changing this narrow definition. 56

As Freedman's work indicates, race and class often divided women's efforts. Although some white women sought to curb white male patriarchy, many more white suffragists sought to, in Freedman's words “empower white women.” Some, such as the southern temperance activist and suffragist Rebecca Latimer Felton, allied with forces that encouraged lynching black men to “protect white womanhood.” Feimster explores Felton in great depth in her excellent book Southern Horrors , which also centrally explores Ida B. Wells's antilynching activism and work for the protection of African American women. Feimster's book illuminates the history of women's engagement around sexual violence, lynching, and political power, while also shedding light more broadly on the history of race and politics of the postbellum United States. 57

Another bourgeoning body of scholarship has underscored the centrality of white women's political power to the rise of the New Right, modern conservatism, and modern white supremacist and antifeminist politics. These works include Catherine E. Rymph's Republican Women: Feminism and Conservatism from Suffrage through the Rise of the New Right (2006); Michelle M. Nickerson's Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (2012); and Elizabeth Gillespie McRae's Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy (2018). Marjorie J. Spruill's Divided We Stand: The Battle over Women's Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics (2017) highlights women's feminist and antifeminist activism around the 1977 National Women's Conference in Houston, a key moment when debates over the body, sexuality, reproduction, and “the family” fostered schisms that continue to shape our political landscape today. 58

Gidlow : Women's enfranchisement has not shaped the development of broad narratives in and beyond U.S. history nearly as much as it could. Historians searching for short-term results of women's new power to vote have generally been disappointed. The Nineteenth Amendment did not usher in a new and powerful wave of progressive reform. Former suffragists in the 1920s remained as divided as they were before ratification, now over questions of the equal rights amendment and labor protections. Lots of women failed to cast ballots. In short, the Nineteenth Amendment seems to have landed with a thud.

Looking for the effects of women's enfranchisement over a longer time frame, however, may suggest other questions historians might fruitfully pursue. How did various political institutions respond to the fact of women's enfranchisement, whether or not women actually could or did vote? For example, did women's enfranchisement contribute to the trend that Benjamin Ginsberg and Martin Shefter once called “politics by other means”—that is, the twentieth-century shift of decision making out of bodies that were directly accountable to voters to bureaucracies that are more insulated from the electorate ( Politics by Other Means: The Declining Importance of Elections in America , 1990)? Or, here's another: Once women had the vote, what happened to white men's privileged status as civic actors? If they lost some of that status, did they shore up their civic privilege in other ways? If they retained it, how did they do that? 59

In my own work on southern African American women's efforts to vote in the 1920s and beyond, I argue that the successes and the failures of aspiring southern African American voters in the 1920s, women but also men, resonated through the decades and helped change the American political landscape in important ways. Their surge to the polls after ratification triggered violent reprisals and helped fuel the growth of the second Ku Klux Klan. Their interest in voting forced a feeble southern Republican party to affirm its identity as a white party, laying the groundwork for the late twentieth-century realignment of southern white voters that made the Republican party dominant in the region by the 1980s. The failures of white former suffragists in the National Woman's party and the League of Women Voters to stand up for southern black women's voting rights cast a shadow long enough to darken the prospects for a truly collaborative women's liberation movement across the color line five decades later. 60

Wu : These questions are particularly relevant for my current work, a biography of a woman of color political advocate who very much believed in the promise and potential of political liberalism. I envision Patsy Mink trying to dismantle or at least significantly renovate the master's house with the master's tools. Mink's strategy of full inclusion and transformation, however, also exists in tension with Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander efforts to critique U.S. empire and Asian American settler colonialism. Full inclusion in the U.S. state meant continued occupation. For example, the campaign for statehood in Hawaii, which Mink advocated, foreclosed the possibility of independence for Hawaii. Asian Americans, although discriminated against in the plantation economy and the political state, nevertheless gained economic and political power that contributed to the dispossession of Native Hawaiians. Their status led Haunani-Kay Trask to describe Asian Americans as settlers who came to steal and take. Jodi Byrd distinguishes between “arrivants,” those who arrived as racialized subjects, and settlers. However, Dean Saranillio reminds us that being an “arrivant” does not absolve one of the responsibilities of challenging the settler state. 61

The tensions between racial/gender inclusion and settler colonialism remind me of two sets of conversations related to women's political rights. First, the political scientists Pam Paxton and Melanie M. Hughes have identified three different formulations of women's citizenship: formal, descriptive, and substantive citizenship ( Women, Politics, and Power: A Global Perspective , 2017). Formal representation asks: Do women have the same rights as men to participate in politics? Descriptive representation asks: Does access to equal rights result in equal representation in terms of numbers? And substantive representation asks: Are women's interests being advocated in the political arena? Formal representation (the right to vote) clearly does not result in descriptive representation. The year 2018 marked record numbers of women in Congress: 102 women in the House and 25 in the Senate. Nearly one hundred years after the passage of suffrage, women constitute not quite 25 percent of the elected representatives in Congress and still have not cracked the glass ceiling of the White House. Despite these numbers, women and their allies have been able to secure legislation that addresses issues fundamentally important to women. Formal representation, coupled with a range of political strategies, could lead to substantive representation, despite the lack of descriptive representation. However, I look forward to the day when women might obtain proportionate representation to their demographics in the country. 62

Second, another way to consider why voting matters is to focus on the gendered and racialized process by which subjects of empire become subjects of republics. The works of Carole Pateman ( The Sexual Contract , 1988), Christine Keating ( Decolonizing Democracy: Transforming the Social Contract in India , 2011), and others emphasize the gendered dimensions of racialized state formation. Pateman argues that men who engage in political contracts to form democratic states also tended to reinforce a “hidden sexual contract” that affirms patriarchy. Keating argues that decolonizing states that transition political power from a white colonial elite to a nonwhite “native” male population may nevertheless reinforce gender, religious, and ethnic/racial hierarchies as a form of “compensatory domination.” Various postcolonial feminist scholars have pointed out how “native” women are overdetermined as symbols of the purity of home, nation, and culture as the political economies of developing nations “modernize.” These “hidden sexual contracts,” “compensatory [forms of] democracy,” and the privatization and valorization of womanhood create historical patterns of gendered political exclusion for decolonizing nations. 63

Scholars who focus on women's political exclusions and engagements have made multiple contributions to U.S. and global histories. I am struck by the continued resistance of those who persist in ignoring or tokenizing this scholarship. I'd like to quote Shirley Chisholm, the first African American woman elected to the U.S. Congress, advocating for federal funding for the 1977 National Women's Conference ( Nwc ). The supporters of the Nwc battled to receive $5 million, approximately 4 cents for every woman in the United States at the time. Female legislators constituted 4 percent of the House and 0 percent of the Senate in 1976, the U.S. bicentennial year. As Chisholm reminded her legislative colleagues, “I really do sincerely hope that the gentlemen will, for once in their lives, as this country approaches its 200th anniversary, realize that 51 percent or 52 percent of the population is a very important segment of the population.” I hope our historian colleagues will also keep these demographics in mind as they write lectures, assign readings, as well as make hiring and promotion decisions. 64

JAH: In this Interchange, we have looked back over the field of women's suffrage activism and enfranchisement. Before we close, let's look ahead. What gaps or holes remain to be filled in the history and historiographies of women and the vote? What do we have left to learn?

Rupp : There is still more to learn about how many and which women voted, how they voted, and why they voted the way they did, although I understand the difficulties of researching these questions. What might a systematic history of women's voting behavior tell us? Did antisuffrage women vote? Were those who thought women would vote the same way as their husbands, if they had them, right? When thinking of women and voting, it is difficult not to think of the contemporary question—Why did 53 percent of white women vote for Donald Trump in the 2016 election?

We also need to know much more about the impact of the final years of the suffrage movement on subsequent rounds of mobilization of all kinds of women's movements. We know that, among transnationally organized women, the winning of the vote in some places divided the movement into suffrage “haves” and “have-nots,” with consequences for debate about what were the most important issues for organizations to target. Should the movement move on to what the International Woman's Suffrage Alliance called “Equal Citizenship?” The International Woman's Suffrage Alliance in the 1920s took up the issue of women losing their citizenship if they married a noncitizen and the double standard of morality, and divided over the question of whether protective labor legislation for women was discriminatory. Increasingly, however, its focus turned to peace. 65

What did the winning of suffrage mean nationally, especially regarding social movement realignment? We know about the transformation of suffrage organizations into the League of Women Voters and the National Woman's party, but how did the Nineteenth Amendment affect the organized black women Martha Jones discusses, women in the labor movement, women in the peace movement, women in right-wing movements, and so many others?

Tetrault : We need to jettison the 1848–1920 framework and begin to tie this history to other dates and other developments. Only then can this rich and complicated history begin to grow into itself.

As just a few examples, Martha Jones has shown how important it was for churchwomen to be advocating for the vote inside their churches, as early as the 1870s, yet this is still not a conventional piece of suffrage history (“Overthrowing the ‘Monopoly of the Pulpit’: Race and the Rights of Church Women in the Nineteenth-Century United States,” 2005). Lori Ginzberg ( Untidy Origins ) and now Dawn Winters (“‘The Ladies Are Coming!’: A New History of Antebellum Temperance, Women's Rights, and Political Activism,” 2018) have shown that women were petitioning for the vote in 1846. In Winters's work that demand was coming out of temperance, not abolition, upending the standard narrative. The 1965 Voting Rights Act, when most women became enfranchised, was legislation that women fought for, alongside men. Vast expanses before and after 1920 are begging to be connected to this story, which will surely reposition 1920 as important, but not definitive. Meanwhile, without a positive assertion of the right to vote in our Constitution, voter disfranchisement proceeds apace, especially since the gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013. This story is, in fact, multiple stories, with multiple antecedents, and it is far from over. 66

Marino : I would like to make a special plug for U.S. historians to do more research outside the United States. Engaging seriously with histories of women's voting rights outside the United States promises not only to shed light on post-1920 activism, including that of women of color and women in the labor and peace movements, but also to stretch our understandings of what is politically possible. Exploring these histories would de-center the idea that the United States or Western Europe “invented” feminism and challenge U.S.-exceptionalist understandings of voting activism and feminism globally.

In my research on Latin American histories of suffrage, I have investigated frente popular (popular front groups) in Latin America, which were social movements, often electoral coalitions of political parties. Many of them believed that including women in the electorate would enhance frente popular political power nationally. In the 1930s and 1940s, these groups aligned with multiple causes: a new inter-American labor movement, the republican cause in the Spanish Civil War, Puerto Rican independence, solidarity with Ethiopia after Italy's invasion, antiracism, and, because of the power of inter-American feminism, women's rights, including women's voting rights. Popular front groups in Latin America had strong ties to labor activists and peace activists in the United States, and to women of color. These groups were aware of the antifeminism of right-wing dictatorships throughout the world. 67

Women's suffrage legislation passed throughout Latin America in the years after World War II, many times after new governments had overthrown dictatorships, often thanks to antifascist women's long-standing activism and international decrees such as the 1945 United Nations Charter and 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I'm currently researching Felicia Santizo, an Afro-Panamanian feminist and educator. A leading suffragist from the 1920s through 1930s, Santizo called for universal suffrage without race, class, or sex restrictions, which was adopted in Panama's 1946 constitution. She also organized an important new antifascist women's group that focused on school lunches for impoverished children and child and adult literacy programs. She later became a leader of the Partido del Pueblo (the communist party of Panama), which had vital transnational connections, including with the Women's International Democratic Federation.

Relatedly, it's important to continue interrogating how U.S. international suffrage debates mapped onto global empire. U.S. occupations in Central America, the Caribbean, and the Philippines utilized the idea that U.S. political culture was superior because of the supposed “freedoms” given to U.S. women. More research could be done in diplomatic and foreign relations archives to complement existing works on this topic. We still know more about British and French imperial feminism than about U.S. imperial feminism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Doing this work continues the project Leila Rupp laid out for us in Worlds of Women , of interrogating “who's in” and “who's out” of these international networks and how language, class, race, nation, among other categories, shaped these boundaries. 68

Language provides a particularly rich lens through which we can analyze transnational and imperial feminisms. I recently found that the Spanish feminist María Espinosa expressed outrage, in her 1920 book, Influencia del feminismo en la legislación contemporanea (Influence of feminism in contemporary legislation), that the International Alliance of Women had asked Spanish suffragists to host a conference in Spain but refused to include Spanish as an official language. Espinosa invoked a Pan-Hispanism that expressed solidarity with Latin America. At the same time, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spanish-speaking feminists were often imperialist in their own ways. They often excluded women who spoke indigenous languages. 69

From Tetrault's book The Myth of Seneca Falls I learned more about the founding of the International Council of Women by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in 1888. These large Euro-American-led organizations (the International Alliance of Women and International Council of Women) inspired feminists around the world, but they also forwarded the idea that Anglo-American leaders invented feminism. It would be useful to explore the reverberations of that idea. U.S. and Western European feminists' pretentions to superiority often encouraged women's groups in various parts of the world to ally with each other more strongly in opposition to empire. 70

These insights connect to points made in Tetrault's book and by Martha Jones when she invoked Trouillot's Silencing the Past . We need to continue thinking critically about who had the power and the resources to create the archives and to tell the story. We should consider how inequalities in historical preservation along lines of class and race, and between the “global North” and “global South,” have deeply shaped our historical understandings. Exploring transnational movements and non-U.S. histories sheds light on the vital work of activists and groups that did not always have the ability to create archives (or whose archives are not as easily accessible to U.S. researchers). They also help us de-center a history of feminism that places the United States, and Anglo-American players specifically, at the forefront, and avoid what the writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has called “the danger of a single story.” 71

Dubois : I would identify three areas of future research. The most obvious is to dig into local records (starting with the History of Woman Suffrage ) to examine activism at the rank-and-file level. How will the interests and arguments of those involved, and the political activities at these levels, challenge or enlarge what we claim about the movement when we study national leaders and major state and city environments? Just as historians of the women's liberation movement have shown that New York City and Boston feminism is in no way representative of the national range of activism, so too can we do similar work for suffrage activism.

The second direction that I would like to see explored more closely are the devices used by national, state, and even local politicians to oppose woman suffrage demands. Suffrage historians have tended to look at factors internal to the suffrage movement to explain slow progress and repeated defeats. But the more I look, in virtually every period, suffragists confronted the deliberate mobilization of good old-fashioned political opposition. Doing this work will deepen historians' sense of suffrage as a genuinely political movement, using political tools.

Finally, I look forward to increasing scholarship on the post-1920 years and on the impact (or lack thereof) of the Nineteenth Amendment. Recently political scientists have begun the important work of digging into voting activity in the first two or three postsuffrage elections, with excellent results. We know southern African American women faced powerful tools of disfranchisement. What else can we learn? I would especially like to see more work done on the impact of women's enfranchisement on the dramatic political shift, four presidential elections later, from which emerged the modern Democratic party and the Roosevelt New Deal. Surely the doubling of the electorate had an impact.

Wu : As a scholar invested in analyzing immigration, race, and empire, I am interested in what histories of the long suffrage movement (before and after 1920, in and beyond U.S. national boundaries) might reveal about the meaning and practice of democracy. How is the political right to vote linked to or distinct from cultural and economic forms of citizenship? How does women's suffrage reinforce U.S. exceptionalism and justify settler colonialism and militarism? And, how do various women who occupy a range of marginal and privileged statuses simultaneously, due to intersecting forms of social hierarchy, position themselves to claim political power? I look forward to new scholarship to help us understand the complex relationship between suffrage, citizenship, and the nation-state.

Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Women's Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 1959); Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (New York, 1965); Gerda Lerner, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels against Slavery (Boston, 1967); Alan P. Grimes, The Puritan Ethic and Woman Suffrage (New York, 1967); Barbara J. Berg, The Remembered Gate: The Origins of American Feminism—The Woman and the City, 1800–1860 (New York, 1978); Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca, 1978).

Rosalyn Terborg-Penn's dissertation had wide impact for years before the book appeared. Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, “Afro-Americans in the Struggle for Woman Suffrage” (Ph.D. diss., Howard University, 1977); Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 (Bloomington, 1998).

Susan D. Becker, The Origins of the Equal Rights Amendment: American Feminism between the Wars (Westport, 1981); Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, 1987); Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women's Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton, 2004); Cynthia Harrison, On Account of Sex: The Politics of Women's Issues, 1945–1968 (Berkeley, 1988); Leila J. Rupp and Verta Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women's Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s (New York, 1987).

Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women's Movement (Princeton, 1997), 48; Bonnie S. Anderson, Joyous Greetings: The First International Women's Movement, 1830–1860 (New York, 2000); Allison L. Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age: U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question, 1870–1929 (New York, 2008); Katherine M. Marino, Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement (Chapel Hill, 2019).

DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage .

Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman's Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven, 1977); Mari Jo Buhle, Women American Socialism, 1870–1920 (Urbana, 1981); Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right: Birth Control in America (New York, 1976). Ellen DuBois, “The Radicalism of the Woman Suffrage Movement: Notes toward the Reconstruction of Nineteenth-Century Feminism,” Feminist Studies , 3 (Autumn 1975), 63–71.

Ellen Carol DuBois, “Outgrowing the Compact of the Fathers: Equal Rights, Woman Suffrage, and the United States Constitution, 1820–1878,” Journal of American History , 74 (Dec. 1987), 836–62; Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York, 1984); Terborg-Penn, “Afro-Americans in the Struggle for Woman Suffrage”; Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Right to Vote .

Buhle, Women and American Socialism ; Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (New York, 1986); Diane Balser, Sisterhood and Solidarity: Feminism and Labor in Modern Times (Boston, 1987); Carole Turbin, Gender, Class, and Community in Troy, New York, 1864–1886 (Urbana, 1992); Susan Levine, Labor's True Women: Carpet Weavers, Industrialization, and Labor Reform in the Gilded Age (Philadelphia, 1984).

Flexner, Century of Struggle ; DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage ; Terborg-Penn, “Afro-Americans in the Struggle for Woman Suffrage”; Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote .

Elizabeth Cady Stanton et al., eds., History of Woman Suffrage (6 vols., Rochester, 1881–1922). Lisa Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women's Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898 (Chapel Hill, 2014).

Giddings, When and Where I Enter , unpaginated front matter.

Deborah Gray White, Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York, 1985); Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, Mass., 1993).

Martha S. Jones, All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830–1900 (Chapel Hill, 2007).

DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage ; Ellen Carol DuBois, Woman Suffrage and Women's Rights (New York, 1998); Stanton et al., eds., History of Woman Suffrage .

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Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote .

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Elsa Barkley Brown, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom,” Public Culture , 7 (Fall 1994), 107–46; Barkley Brown, “To Catch the Vision of Freedom: Reconstructing Southern Black Women's Political History, 1865–1880,” in African-American Women and the Vote, 1837–1965 , ed. Ann D. Gordon (Amherst, Mass., 1997), 66–99. Eric Foner, “Rights and the Constitution in Black Life during the Civil War and Reconstruction,” Journal of American History , 74 (Dec. 1987), 863–83. Heather Cox Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post–Civil War North, 1865–1901 (Cambridge, Mass., 2001); Victoria Hattam, “Economic Visions and Political Strategies: American Labor and the State, 1865–1896,” in Studies in American Political Development , 4 (Spring 1990), 82–129; Victoria C. Hattam, Labor Visions and State Power: The Origins of Business Unionism in the United States (Princeton, 1993).

Paula Baker, “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780–1920,” American Historical Review , 89 (June 1984), 620–47; Jean H. Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-nineteenth Century (Ithaca, 1983); Sarah Hunter Graham, Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy (New Haven, 1996); Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 (New York, 1991). Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review , 91 (Dec. 1986), 1053–75; Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs , 17 (Winter 1992), 251–74. Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere , ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 109–43; Joseph R. Gusfield, The Culture of Public Problems: Drinking-Driving and the Symbolic Order (Chicago, 1981); James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1990); John Gaventa, Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley (Urbana, 1980). Warren I. Sussman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1984); Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays , trans. Ben Brewster (London, 1971); Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture: Selected Essays (London, 1993); Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, eds. and trans., Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (New York, 1972).

Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill, 2003); Katherine Mellen Charron, Freedom's Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark (Chapel Hill, 2009); Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent ; Lisa G. Materson, For the Freedom of Her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877–1932 (Chapel Hill, 2009).

Jane Rhodes, Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington, 1998); Melba Joyce Boyd, Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E. W. Harper, 1825–1911 (Detroit, 1994). H. M. Parkhurst, Proceedings of the Eleventh National Woman's Rights Convention, Held at the Church of the Puritans, New York, May 10, 1866 (New York, 1866), 46.

Painter, Sojourner Truth .

Jean Fagan Yellin, Harriet Jacobs: A Life (Cambridge, Mass., 2004); Catherine Clinton, Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom (New York, 2004); Kate Clifford Larson, Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero (New York, 2004); Marilyn Richardson, ed., Maria Stewart, America's First Black Woman Political Writer: Essays and Speeches (Bloomington, 1987).

Mia Bay, To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (New York, 2009); Paula J. Giddings, Ida: A Sword among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign against Lynching (New York, 2008).

Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement ; Barbara Ransby, Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson (New Haven, 2013); Ula Yvette Taylor, The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey (Chapel Hill, 2002); Ula Yvette Taylor, The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam (Chapel Hill, 2017); Sherie M. Randolph, Florynce “Flo” Kennedy: The Life of a Black Feminist Radical (Chapel Hill, 2015).

Barbara Winslow, Shirley Chisholm: Catalyst for Change (New York, 2013); Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom's Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Urbana, 1999); Michelle Obama, Becoming (New York, 2018).

Sylvia Hoffert, Alva Vanderbilt Belmont: Unlikely Champion of Women's Rights (Bloomington, 2011); Trisha Franzen, Anna Howard Shaw: The Work of Woman Suffrage (Urbana, 2014); Bay, To Tell the Truth Freely ; Patricia A. Schechter, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill, 2001); Crystal N. Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Cambridge, Mass., 2011); Wanda A. Hendricks, Fannie Barrier Williams: Crossing the Borders of Region and Race (Urbana, 2013); Joyce A. Hanson, Mary McLeod Bethune: Black Women's Political Activism (Columbia, Mo., 2013); Norma Smith, Jeannette Rankin: America's Conscience (Helena, 2002); Linda J. Lumsden, Inez: The Life and Times of Inez Milholland (Bloomington, 2004).

Bonnie S. Anderson, The Rabbi's Atheist Daughter: Ernestine Rose, International Feminist Pioneer (New York, 2017); Grace Farrell, Lillie Devereux Blake: Retracing Life Erased (Amherst, Mass., 2002); Jill Norgren, Belva Lockwood: The Woman Who Would Be President (New York, 2007); Jennifer M. Ross-Nazzal, Winning the West for Women: The Life of Suffragist Emma Smith DeVoe (Seattle, 2011); Mary Walton, A Woman's Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle for the Ballot (New York, 2010); Christine Lunardini, Alice Paul: Equality for Women (Philadelphia, 2013); J. D. Zahniser and Amelia R. Fry, Alice Paul: Claiming Power (New York, 2014); Sally G. McMillan, Lucy Stone: An Unapologetic Life (New York, 2015); Kathleen Nutter, The Necessity of Organization: Mary Kenney O'Sullivan and Trade Unionism for Women, 1892–1912 (New York, 2000).

Lori D. Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life (New York, 2009); Vivian Gornick, The Solitude of Self: Thinking about Elizabeth Cady Stanton (New York, 2005); Ann D. Gordon, ed., Selected Letters of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (6 vols., New Brunswick, 1997–2013); Thomas Dublin and Kathryn Kish Sklar, Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600–2000 , http://womhist.alexanderstreet.com/ .

Lori D. Ginzberg, Untidy Origins: A Story of Woman's Rights in Antebellum New York (Chapel Hill, 2005); Nancy F. Cott, “Across the Great Divide: Women in Politics before and after 1920,” in Women, Politics, and Change , ed. Louise A. Tilly and Patricia Gurin (New York, 1990), 153–76; Anderson, Joyous Greetings ; Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote ; Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow ; Ellen Carol DuBois, Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage (New Haven, 1997); Tetrault, Myth of Seneca Falls ; Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age ; Kimberly A. Hamlin, From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women's Rights in Gilded Age America (Chicago, 2014).

Jones, All Bound Up Together ; Estelle B. Freedman, Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation (Cambridge, Mass., 2013); Feimster, Southern Horrors ; Brittney C. Cooper, Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (Urbana, 2017); Materson, For the Freedom of Her Race .

Vicki L. Ruiz, “Class Acts: Latina Feminist Traditions, 1900–1930,” American Historical Review , 121 (Feb. 2016), 1–16; Maylei Blackwell, ¡Chicana Power! Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement (Austin, 2011); Gabriela González, Redeeming La Raza: Transborder Modernity, Race, Respectability, and Rights (New York, 2018); Emma Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (Bloomington, 1999); Rupp, Worlds of Women ; Ellen DuBois, “Woman Suffrage and the Left: An International Socialist-Feminist Perspective,” New Left Review (no. 186, March–April, 1991), 20–45; Julia L. Mickenberg, American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream (Chicago, 2017); Julia L. Mickenberg, “Suffragettes and Soviets: American Feminists and the Specter of Revolutionary Russia,” Journal of American History , 100 (March 2014), 1021–51; Anderson, Rabbi's Atheist Daughter ; Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900–1965 (Chapel Hill, 1995); Melissa R. Klapper, Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women's Activism, 1890–1940 (New York, 2013).

Katherine M. Marino, “Transnational Pan-American Feminism: The Friendship of Bertha Lutz and Mary Wilhelmine Williams, 1926–1944,” Journal of Women's History , 26 (Summer 2014), 63–87; Marino, Feminism for the Americas .

J. Kevin Corder and Christina Wolbrecht, Counting Women's Ballots: Female Voters from Suffrage through the New Deal (New York, 2016).

Hoffert, Alva Vanderbilt Belmont ; Johanna Neuman, Gilded Suffragists: The New York Socialites Who Fought for Women's Right to Vote (New York, 2017); Joan Marie Johnson, Funding Feminism: Monied Women, Philanthropy, and the Women's Movement, 1870–1967 (Chapel Hill, 2017); Brooke Kroeger, The Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote (Albany, N.Y., 2017); Susan Goodier, No Votes for Women: The New York State Anti-suffrage Movement (Urbana, 2017); Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello, Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State (Ithaca, 2017).

Sucheng Chan, ed., Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882–1943 (Philadelphia, 1991); Martha Gardner, The Qualities of Citizens: Women, Immigration, and Citizenship, 1870–1965 (Princeton, 2005); Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley, 1995).

Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age ; Susan B. Anthony quoted in Kristin Hoganson, “‘As Badly off as the Filipinos’: U.S. Women's Suffragists and the Imperial Issue at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Journal of Women's History , 13 (Summer 2001), 17.

Cathleen D. Cahill, Raising Our Banners: Women of Color Challenge the Mainstream Suffrage Movement (Chapel Hill, forthcoming, 2020); Dublin and Sklar, Women and Social Movements in the United States .

Judy Tzu-Chun Wu and Gwendolyn Mink, The First Woman of Color in Congress: Patsy Takemoto Mink's Politics of Peace, Justice, and Feminism (New York, forthcoming).

Jeanette Wolfley, “Jim Crow, Indian Style: The Disenfranchisement of Native Americans,” American Indian Law Review , 16 (no. 1, 1991), 167–202; Jennifer L. Robinson, “The Right to Vote: A History of Voting Rights and American Indians,” in Minority Voting in the United States , ed. Kyle Kreider and Thomas Baldino (Santa Barbara, 2015); Daniel McCool, Susan M. Olson, and Jennifer L. Robinson, Native Vote: American Indians, the Voting Rights Act, and the Right to Vote (Cambridge, Eng., 2007).

Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States (New York, 1993), 128; Liette Gidlow, “The Sequel: The Fifteenth Amendment, the Nineteenth Amendment, and Southern Black Women's Struggle to Vote,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , 17 (July 2018), 433–49. Kimberly Hamlin, Free Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener (New York, forthcoming, 2020); Elaine Weiss, The Woman's Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote (New York, 2018). “Disfranchisement in Congress,” Crisis , 4 (Feb. 1921), 165.

T. G. Garrett to “The N.A.A.C.P.,” Oct. 30, 1920, Records of the Naacp (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.). Paul Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 (Berkeley, 2005).

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “Clubwomen and Electoral Politics in the 1920s,” in African American Women and the Vote, 1837–1965 , ed. Ann D. Gordon and Bettye Collier-Thomas (Amherst, Mass., 1997), 150; Mrs. Lawrence Lewis to the Editor, Nation , March 26, 1921.

Charron, Freedom's Teacher ; Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement ; Steven F. Lawson, Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944–1969 (New York, 1976).

On the connections between U.S. empire, race, and suffrage, see, for instance, Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age ; Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, “Enfranchasing Women of Color: Woman Suffragists as Agents of Imperialism,” in Nation, Empire, Colony: Historicizing Gender and Race , ed. Ruth Roach Pierson and Nupur Chaudhuri (Bloomington, 1998), 41–56; Louise Edwards and Mina Roces, eds., Women's Suffrage in Asia: Gender, Nationalism, and Democracy (London, 2004); Patricia Grimshaw, “Settler Anxieties, Indigenous Peoples, and Women's Suffrage in the Colonies of Australia, New Zealand, and Hawai'i, 1888 to 1902,” in Women's Suffrage in Asia , ed. Edwards and Roces, 220–39; Rumi Yamusake, “Re-franchising Women of Hawai'i, 1912–1920: The Politics of Gender, Sovereignty, Race, and Rank at the Crossroads of the Pacific,” in Gendering the Trans-Pacific World , ed. Catherine Ceniza Choy and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu (Leiden, 2017), 114–39; Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven, 1998); Gladys Jiménez-Muñoz, “Deconstructing Colonialist Discourse: Links between the Women's Suffrage Movement in the United States and Puerto Rico,” Phoebe , 5 (Spring 1993), 9–34; and Laura Prieto, “A Delicate Subject: Clemencia López, Civilized Womanhood, and the Politics of Anti-imperialism,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , 12 (April 2013), 199–233.

On the Alpha Suffrage Club work and voter registration, see Alfreda M. Duster, ed., Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (Chicago, 1970), 346; Giddings, Ida , 523–46; Susan Ware, Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote (Cambridge, Mass., 2019), 99–110; Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote , 139–40; and Materson, For the Freedom of Her Race .

Vann R. Newkirk II, “Voter Suppression Is Warping American Democracy,” Atlantic , July 17, 2018.

Judith Shklar, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).

Michel-Roph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, 1995).

Adam Winkler, “A Revolution Too Soon: Woman Suffragists and the ‘Living Constitution,’” New York University Law Review , 76 (Nov. 2001), 1456–1526.

Ann D. Gordon, ed., African American Women and the Vote, 1837–1965 (Amherst, Mass., 1997).

Carol Anderson, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy (New York, 2018); Cooper, Beyond Respectability ; Treva Lindsey, Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington, D.C . (Urbana, 2017).

Keisha N. Blain, Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (Philadelphia, 2018); Keisha N. Blain and Tiffany M. Gill, eds., To Turn the Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism (Urbana, 2019); Grace V. Leslie, “‘United, We Build a Free World’: The Internationalism of Mary McLeod Bethune and the National Council of Negro Women,” ibid. , 192–218; Marino, Feminism for the Americas .

Baker, “Domestication of Politics”; Dawn Langan Teele, Forging the Franchise: The Political Origins of the Women's Vote (Princeton, 2018); Blain, Set the World on Fire .

Freedman, Redefining Rape .

Feimster, Southern Horrors .

Catherine E. Rymph, Republican Women: Feminism and Conservatism from Suffrage through the Rise of the New Right (Chapel Hill, 2006); Michelle M. Nickerson, Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (Princeton, 2012); Elizabeth Gillespie McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy (New York, 2018); Marjorie J. Spruill, Divided We Stand: The Battle over Women's Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics (New York, 2017).

Benjamin Ginsberg and Martin Shefter, Politics by Other Means: The Declining Importance of Elections in America (New York, 1990).

Liette Gidlow, “More than Double: African American Women and the Rise of a ‘Women's Vote,’ Journal of Women's History , 32 (Spring 2020).

Haunani-Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaii (Honolulu, 1999); Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis, 2011); Dean Itsuji Saranillio, Unsustainable Empire: Alternative Histories of Hawai'i Statehood (Durham, N.C., 2018).

Pam Paxton and Melanie M. Hughes, Women, Politics, and Power: A Global Perspective (2007; Los Angeles, 2017).

Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, 1988); Christine Keating, Decolonizing Democracy: Transforming the Social Contract in India (University Park, 2011). See also Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, 1999). Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, eds., Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington, 1991); Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, N.C., 2003).

Shirley Chisholm, “Providing for a National Women's Conference,” Congressional Record—House , Dec. 10, 1975, H12201-2, folder 7, box 562, Patsy T. Mink Papers (Manuscript Division). These remarks are also available at Congressional Record , 94 Cong., 1 sess., Dec. 10, 1975, p. 39719.

On the International Woman's Suffrage Alliance and “equal citizenship,” see Rupp, Worlds of Women .

Martha S. Jones, “Overthrowing the ‘Monopoly of the Pulpit’: Race and the Rights of Church Women in the Nineteenth-Century United States,” in No Permanent Waves: Recasting Histories of U.S. Feminism (New Brunswick, 2010), 121–43; Ginzberg, Untidy Origins ; Dawn Winters, “The Ladies Are Coming!”: A New History of Antebellum Temperance, Women's Rights, and Political Activism” (Ph.D. diss., Carnegie Mellon University, 2018); Anderson, One Person, No Vote .

Numerous works have illuminated different national iterations of popular-front feminism in Latin America, including Yolanda Marco Serra, “Ser ciudadana en Panamá en la década de 1930” (Being a citizen in Panama in the 1930s), in Un siglo de luchas femeninas en América Latina (A century of female struggles in Latin America), ed. Asunción Lavrin and Eugenia Rodríguez Sáenz (San José, 2002), 71–86; Esperanza Tuñón Pablos, Mujeres que se organizan: El frente único pro derechos de la mujer, 1935–1938 (Women who organize: The single front for women's rights, 1935–1938) (Mexico City, 1992); Enriqueta Tuñón, ¡Por fin … ya podemos elegir y ser electas! El sufragio femenino en México, 1935–1953 (At last … we can now choose and be elected! Female suffrage in Mexico, 1935–1953) (Mexico City, 2002); Jocelyn Olcott, Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Durham, N.C., 2005); Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, Gendered Compromises: Political Cultures and the State in Chile, 1920–1950 (Chapel Hill, 2000); Corinne A. Antezana-Pernet, “Mobilizing Women in the Popular Front Era: Feminism, Class, and Politics in the Movimiento Pro-Emancipación de la Mujer Chilena (MEMCh), 1935–1950” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Irvine, 1996); Sandra McGee Deutsch, “Argentine Women against Fascism: The Junta de la Victoria, 1941–1947,” Politics, Religion, and Ideology 13 (no. 2, 2012), 221–36; Sandra McGee Deutsch, “The New School Lecture—‘An Army of Women’: Communist-Linked Solidarity Movements, Maternalism, and Political Consciousness in 1930s and 1940s Argentina,” Americas , 75 (Jan. 2018), 95–125; and Adriana María Valobra, “Formación de cuadros y frentes populares: Relaciones de clase y género en el Partido Comunista de Argentina, 1935–1951” (Formation of cadres and popular fronts: Class and gender in the Communist party of Argentina, 1935–1951), Revista Izquierdas (no. 23, April 2015), 127–56. On suffrage activism in Latin America, see Asunción Lavrin, Women, Feminism, and Social Change in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, 1890–1940 (Lincoln, 1995); Francesca Miller, Latin American Women and the Search for Social Justice (Hanover, 1991); Christine Ehrick, The Shield of the Weak: Feminism and the State in Uruguay, 1903–1933 (Albuquerque, 2005); K. Lynn Stoner, From the House to the Streets: The Cuban Woman's Movement for Legal Reform, 1898–1940 (Durham, N.C., 1991); Rina Villars, Para la casa más que para el mundo: Sufragismo y feminismo en la historia de Honduras (For the house more than the world: Suffragism and feminism in the history of Honduras) (Tegucigalpa, 2001); June E. Hahner, Emancipating the Female Sex: The Struggle for Women's Rights in Brazil, 1850–1940 (Durham, N.C., 1990); Susan K. Besse, Restructuring Patriarchy: The Modernization of Gender Inequality in Brazil, 1914–1940 (Chapel Hill, 1996); Victoria González-Rivera, Before the Revolution: Women's Rights and Right-Wing Politics in Nicaragua, 1821–1979 (University Park, 2011); Elizabeth S. Manley, The Paradox of Paternalism: Women and the Politics of Authoritarianism in the Dominican Republic (Gainesville, 2017); Charity Coker Gonzalez, “Agitating for Their Rights: The Colombian Women's Movement, 1930–1957,” Pacific Historical Review , 69 (Nov. 2000), 689–706; Patricia Faith Harms, “Imagining a Place for Themselves: The Social and Political Roles of Guatemalan Women, 1871–1954” (Ph.D. diss., Arizona State University, 2007); Takkara Keosha Brunson, “Constructing Afro-Cuban Womanhood: Race, Gender, and Citizenship in Republican-Era Cuba, 1902–1958” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2011); and Grace Louise Sanders, “La Voix des Femmes: Haitian Women's Rights, National Politics, and Black Activism in Port-au-Prince and Montreal, 1934–1986” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2013).

Rupp, Worlds of Women .

María Espinosa, Influencia del feminismo en la legislación contemporanea (Influence of feminism in contemporary legislation) (Madrid, 1920).

Tetrault, Myth of Seneca Falls .

Trouillot, Silencing the Past ; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story,” July 2009, https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story .

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Women's Rights

The 19th Amendment guarantees American women the right to vote. Achieving this milestone required a lengthy and difficult struggle; victory took decades of agitation. Beginning in the mid-19th century, woman suffrage supporters lectured, wrote, marched, lobbied, and practiced civil disobedience to achieve what many Americans considered radical change.

First introduced in Congress in 1878, a woman suffrage amendment was continuously proposed for the next 41 years until it passed both houses of Congress in 1919 and was ratified by the states in 1920. The campaign for woman suffrage was long, difficult, and sometimes dramatic, yet ratification did not ensure full enfranchisement. Many women remained unable to vote long into the 20th century because of discriminatory laws.

Explore photographs, textual, and other records related to suffrage in the National Archives Catalog.

Educational Resources

Explore teaching and learning resources for the Women's Suffrage, including primary sources, online tools, lesson plans, and multimedia on DocsTeach.org, our online tool for teaching with documents.

• Woman Suffrage and the 19th Amendment, Primary Source Set
• DocsTeach: Women’s Suffrage
• DocsTeach:  Petitions & Letters in Support of Women's Suffrage
• DocsTeach:  Photos of Women's Suffrage Protests & Activities
• DocsTeach:  Women of Color in the Suffrage Movement
• DocsTeach:  The Anti-Suffrage Movement
• DocsTeach:  Passage & Ratification of the 19th Amendment

Research at the National Archives: Suffrage

While many resources are available online for research, there are many more records to discover in National Archives’ research rooms across the country. The following records have been described at the Series and File Unit level, but have not yet been digitized. This list is not exhaustive; please consult our Catalog to browse more records, and contact the Reference Unit listed in each description for more information.

• The Committee on Woman Suffrage was created in 1917 and continued to exist until 1927, when it was abolished during the 70th Congress. The resolution to establish the committee gave it jurisdiction over all proposed legislation touching the subject of woman suffrage, a subject that had been in the jurisdiction of the Judiciary Committee. Committee Papers, 1919 - 1920 : This series contains the committee papers for the Committee on Woman Suffrage from the 66th Congress.
• Petitions of the Senate Committee on Privileges and Elections, 3/10/1871 - 1946 . The records of the committee include woman suffrage, voting rights, direct election of Senators, and campaign financing.

Articles, Blog Posts, and Other Resources:

• Woman’s Place in America: Congress and Woman Suffrage
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• Putting the “Rat” in Ratification – Tennessee’s role in the 19th amendment : Pieces of History blog
• The Women of World War I in photographs : The Unwritten Record blog
• Taking a Stand for Voting Rights : Prologue Magazine

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Article contents

The woman suffrage movement in the united states.

• Rebecca J. Mead Rebecca J. Mead Department of History, Northern Michigan University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.17
• Published online: 28 March 2018

Woman suffragists in the United States engaged in a sustained, difficult, and multigenerational struggle: seventy-two years elapsed between the Seneca Falls convention (1848) and the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment (1920). During these years, activists gained confidence, developed skills, mobilized resources, learned to maneuver through the political process, and built a social movement. This essay describes key turning points and addresses internal tensions as well as external obstacles in the U.S. woman suffrage movement. It identifies important strategic, tactical, and rhetorical approaches that supported women’s claims for the vote and influenced public opinion, and shows how the movement was deeply connected to contemporaneous social, economic, and political contexts.

• woman suffrage
• voting rights
• women’s rights
• women’s movements
• constitutional amendments

Winning woman suffrage in the United States was a long, arduous process that required the dedication and hard work of several generations of women. Before the Civil War, most activists were radical pioneers frequently involved in the antislavery or other reform movements. Later, educational advances and the growth of the women’s-club movement mobilized large numbers of middle-class women, while wage work and trade-union participation galvanized working-class women. In the early 20th century , woman suffrage became a mass movement that effectively utilized modern publicity and outreach methods. Woman suffrage was never a “gift.” Skillful organization, mobilization, and activism were required to build a powerful social movement and achieve the long-sought goal.

Woman suffrage was a radical idea in the 19th century . Suffrage for non-elite white men was still limited in most countries and became the norm in the United States only in the decades before the Civil War—a time when women and people of color were considered deficient in the rational capacities and independent judgment necessary for responsible citizenship. Woman suffrage challenged the legal principle of coverture, which subsumed a married woman’s political and economic identity into her husband’s; it also challenged dominant gender roles that confined women to the domestic sphere. Additionally, suffragists often associated themselves with other radical or reformist political groups who supported the demand as a basic right, a strategy for enhancing democracy, or a practical way to gain allies.

Women’s Status and Women’s Rights in the New Republic

Prior to the American Revolution, property restrictions limited even white male suffrage. Yet some colonial women voted if they paid taxes, owned property, or functioned as independent heads of households, although this was uncommon. The idea of universal suffrage (i.e., voting rights for all citizens) arose from the democratic ideology of the Enlightenment. Revolutionary rhetoric did not automatically result in equal citizenship rights, but it did provide powerful philosophical arguments that supported future struggles. In 1776 , New Jersey enfranchised “all inhabitants” who were worth “fifty pounds” and had resided in the county for a year prior to an election. Coverture still prevented married New Jersey women from voting. But especially after 1797 , unmarried women voted with enough frequency to generate complaints about “petticoat electors” who played critical roles in contested elections, and in 1807 New Jersey disenfranchised women altogether as well as African Americans and aliens. 1

The American Revolution gave rise to the ideal of the “Republican Mother” who educated her children to become future citizens and exerted beneficial moral influences within her family, an ideal that ultimately held important implications for citizenship and voting. To meet the new country’s need for responsible citizens, many schools were established for women (although they did not meet the standards of comparable men’s schools), while the expansion of public elementary education increased the demand for female teachers. By definition, women farmers, slaves, textile-mill operatives, and indigents could not meet emerging middle-class norms of female domesticity. 2

Rapid economic, political, and social change exacerbated prostitution, excessive alcohol consumption, and other problems associated with poverty, particularly in the urbanizing northeast. In response, some urban middle-class women became involved in “moral reform” societies, the most significant of which was the antislavery movement. Both white and African American abolitionist women formed female antislavery societies, but they were criticized when they assumed public roles. Most famously, when Sarah and Angelina Grimké, the transplanted daughters of a slave owner, began to speak before large mixed-race and mixed-sex (“promiscuous”) audiences, they were harshly, even violently, attacked. When the Massachusetts Council of Congregational Ministers issued a pastoral letter in 1837 denouncing their behavior as unwomanly, the sisters responded by defending equality of conscience, emphasizing the importance of female participation in the abolitionist movement, and drawing parallels between slavery and the disadvantaged status of women. 3

The Seneca Falls Convention and the Beginnings of an Organized Women’s Movement

Elizabeth Cady was already deeply embedded in various reform networks in upstate New York when she married fellow activist Henry Stanton and accompanied him to London to attend the World Anti-Slavery Conference in 1840 . At the meeting, a fierce debate erupted over seating female delegates, and the women were forced to retreat to the gallery, where William Lloyd Garrison, the most prominent and radical of the American abolitionists, joined them in protest. Furious, Stanton discussed this injustice with another attendee, Quaker reformer Lucretia Mott, and the two conceived the idea of holding a women’s-rights convention. For the next few years, Stanton was preoccupied with her growing family, but she and Mott met again in 1848 and decided to organize a women’s-rights convention in the small town of Seneca Falls. They placed an announcement in the local newspaper and were astonished when 300 people showed up (including 40 men, most notably Frederick Douglass, a former slave and the country’s most prominent black abolitionist). Stanton opened the meeting by reading the “Declaration of Sentiments,” a document she had prepared by adapting the Declaration of Independence to address women’s issues. Stanton listed many grievances, including lack of access to education, employment opportunities, and an independent political voice for women. Companion resolutions were all approved unanimously except the demand for woman suffrage, which passed by a small margin after a vigorous discussion. The convention at Seneca Falls is traditionally seen as the beginning of the American women’s-rights movement, as well as launching Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s long career as its premier intellectual force. The enthusiasm generated at Seneca Falls quickly led to more women’s-rights conventions. Beginning in 1850 , similar gatherings were held nearly every year of the decade. 4

Conventions and new women’s-rights publications, including The Lily (Amelia Bloomer) and The Una (Paulina Wright Davis), helped activists stay in contact, discuss ideas, develop leadership skills, gain publicity, and attract new recruits, including Susan B. Anthony, a Quaker, temperance activist, and abolitionist. Initial efforts focused on convincing state legislatures to rectify married women’s legal disadvantages with regard to property rights, child guardianship, and divorce. In 1854 , Anthony traveled throughout New York State, organized a petition drive, planned a women’s-rights convention, and secured a hearing before the legislature that was addressed by Stanton. Thus Anthony and Stanton began their fifty-year partnership.

1a. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, ca 1891. Their partnership lasted for over 50 years, although neither lived to see the final accomplishment of their goal.

1b. “The Apotheosis of Suffrage” (1896). Stanton and Anthony’s founding role in the women rights movements is acknowledged by their elevation to the national pantheon by their NAWSA colleagues.

Other important early white activists included Lucy Stone, Abby Kelley Foster, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Clarina Howard Nichols, and Frances Gage. Important African American suffragists included Sojourner Truth, Sarah Redmond, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Amelia Shadd, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Harriet Forten Purvis, Charlotte Forten, and Margaretta Forten. 5 The early women’s-rights movement included both black and white activists, yet relations sometimes became tense when white women ignored or appropriated African American experiences to suit their own purposes. For example, at a women’s-rights convention in 1851 , Sojourner Truth made brief remarks describing the hard work of slave women and citing religious examples to support women’s rights. Some accounts report resistance to allowing Truth to speak and introducing slavery references, but convention president Frances Gage intervened. Gage subsequently edited and reported Truth’s speech in the form of the famous “Ain’t I a Woman” version, which is problematic in its use of dialect and other editorial interventions. 6 After the Civil War, connections between race and gender equity became more problematic as racial attitudes hardened. Racial violence escalated during Reconstruction and continued for decades, while legal discrimination became firmly entrenched, legitimated by scientific racialist theories.

Reconstruction, Civil Rights, and Woman Suffrage

Women’s-rights advocates interrupted their efforts during the Civil War to concentrate on war work, but subsequent debates over the Reconstruction Amendments created new opportunities to reintroduce demands for women’s enfranchisement. Woman suffragists objected strenuously when the Fourteenth Amendment defined national citizenship and voting requirements by introducing the word “male” into the Constitution for the first time. The Fifteenth Amendment established the right of freed black men to vote, but failed to extend the vote to any women, creating a controversy that split the suffrage movement. Some suffragists, including Lucy Stone, her husband and fellow reformer Henry Blackwell, and most (but not all) prominent black activists supported the Fifteenth Amendment, arguing that black men needed the vote more urgently than women did, and expressing concerns that woman suffrage might prevent the amendment from passing. Stanton and Anthony vehemently disagreed and publicly opposed the amendment as they continued to demand universal suffrage. The American Equal Rights Association (AERA), organized in 1866 to promote both causes, supported the Reconstruction Amendments, and proposed the submission of a separate woman-suffrage amendment, first introduced as a Senate resolution in December 1868 . 7

In 1867 , the AERA became involved in two Kansas state suffrage referenda relating to woman and African American suffrage amendments. Stone, Blackwell, Stanton, and Anthony all actively participated, but the growing rift among suffragists soon became evident. The AERA tried to link the issues of black and women’s rights, but suffragists were disappointed when the Republican Party publicly opposed the woman-suffrage referendum. Stanton and Anthony’s overtures to dissenting Democrats—especially George Francis Train, an Irish Democrat, controversial financier, and outspoken racist, generated additional controversy. After a bitter struggle, the Kansas referenda for woman and black suffrage both failed. This crucial campaign effectively severed the connection between voting rights for blacks and women. 8

Convinced by their Kansas experiences that male political support was unreliable, Stanton and Anthony established the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), an independent women’s-rights organization under female leadership, in 1869 . Several months later, Stone, Blackwell, Julia Ward Howe, and others established the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). Initially these two groups pursued different strategies. A federal woman-suffrage amendment seemed unlikely to pass, so the AWSA concentrated on changing state constitutions. The NWSA articulated a broader women’s-rights agenda and sought suffrage at the federal level. The two organizations worked independently until they merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in 1890 . Each group published a women’s-rights journal. With Train’s financial backing, Anthony founded The Revolution early in 1868 and published many articles related to the problems of working women, prostitution, the sexual double standard, discriminatory divorce laws, criticisms of established religion, and denunciations of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The Revolution was very influential but unable to compete with the Woman’s Journal , introduced by the AWSA in 1870 . Although the Woman’s Journal was widely read until it ceased publication in 1931 , it was only one of many women’s-rights periodicals published during this period. 9

As part of its federal strategy, the NWSA also proposed a bold reinterpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, the “New Departure,” arguing that suffrage was a right of national citizenship and since women were citizens they should be able to vote. The Revolution urged women to go to their local polls and use the New Departure argument to try to vote, and a few succeeded. Anthony’s own attempt led to her trial and conviction for violating election laws, but she was not punished (except for a $50 fine, which she refused to pay), eliminating the possibility of legal appeal. In 1875 , the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the New Departure, reasoning in Minor v. Happersett . A Missouri suffrage leader, Virginia Minor, had sued the state for the right to vote, but the court unanimously held that while Minor was indeed a citizen, the right to vote was not one of the “privileges and immunities” that the Constitution granted to citizens. 10

The national woman-suffrage organizations were influential, but there were many independent, often regional, journalists and activists who addressed women’s rights during the postwar period. Few were as colorful or sensational as Victoria Woodhull, who addressed the House Judiciary Committee in 1871 —the first woman ever to do so—and made powerful constitutional arguments that persuaded a minority of representatives. Both Woodhull and her sister, Tennessee Claflin, aroused controversy. At various times one or both were journalists, stockbrokers, Spiritualists, and labor activists, but Woodhull’s public advocacy of “free love” generated the most vehement criticism. Her basic position was that the right to divorce, remarry, and bear children should be individual decisions, but most of her contemporaries considered these ideas quite scandalous. Woodhull ran for president in 1872 as the nominee of the Equal Rights party, the first woman to do so. Initially Woodhull received some support from other suffragists, but as her notoriety grew, so did suffragists’ concerns about being compromised by association, and many began to repudiate or distance themselves from her ideas and activities (at least in public). 11

Social Change, Women’s Organizations, and Suffrage in the Late 19th Century

Many women became interested in suffrage through their membership in other activities and organizations, especially as a result of the rapid growth of the women’s-club movement. When the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC) was established in 1890 , it represented 200 groups and 20,000 women; by 1900 , the GFWC claimed 150,000 members. Often initiated for educational or cultural purposes, discussions frequently turned to social issues such as child welfare, temperance, poverty, and public health. Women who became interested in reform soon realized that they had little political influence without the vote. The GFWC did not officially endorse suffrage until 1914 , however, because the diversity of its constituent groups made the subject contentious and consensus difficult.

African American clubwomen, barred from membership in white women’s organizations, formed the National Association of Colored Women in 1896 . In addition to community work and suffrage agitation, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary Church Terrell, and other prominent black women challenged contemporary negative stereotypes about African Americans and worked to increase public awareness of racial segregation, disfranchisement, and violence.

2. Ida B. Wells-Barnett (L) and Mary Church Terrell (R). Both women were prominent African American journalists and activists. Both were founding members of the NAACP and active in NAWSA. Among their many achievements, Wells-Barnett established the Alpha Suffrage Club of Chicago, while Terrell was the first president of the National Association of Colored Women.

Many white women were indifferent to these issues, however, and some openly expressed the prejudices of the dominant society in their exclusionary rhetoric and organizational policies. 12

The largest of the many new national women’s organizations was the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), established in 1874 . Under the dynamic leadership of Frances Willard, the WCTU emphasized the impact of alcohol abuse on women and families in its agenda of “home protection,” but quickly adopted a much broader social-welfare program, established alliances with labor and reform groups, and supported woman suffrage as a means to achieve its goals. Liquor-control efforts provoked powerful opposition, leading many woman suffragists to distance themselves publicly from the temperance movement even as they appreciated the dedication of WCTU suffragists. 13

The expansion of women’s opportunities for higher education provided another catalyst for suffrage activism. In addition to the many public agricultural and technical colleges established under the 1862 Morrill Land-Grant Act, the establishment of a number of private women’s colleges began with Vassar in 1861 . Believing that education would be the key to women’s advancement, founders and administrators set high standards and offered curricula very similar to those at men’s institutions. After graduation, many women who found themselves largely excluded from professional training and employment opportunities channeled their skills and energies into civic engagement and social reform, especially with the rapid expansion of the American settlement house movement after the establishment of Hull House in Chicago in 1889 . As community centers located in poor neighborhoods, settlement houses offered a variety of classes and services, but when social workers realized that their efforts alone could not eradicate problems related to chronic poverty, many became active in reform politics. In addition, new protective and industrial associations tried to help impoverished working women living alone in the cities. While middle-class moral judgments often alienated their intended beneficiaries, these efforts began to establish ties with working-class constituencies and labor organizations that would eventually gain support for woman suffrage. 14

As industrial development, urbanization, and immigration increased, the growing numbers of women in the work force provided new arguments for woman suffrage. Working men understood that few working-class women could depend upon adequate male support, but they were hostile to low-wage female competition because it undermined their own abilities to fulfill the dominant male gender role of family breadwinner. The skilled trades and craft unions discouraged or discriminated against women, although the more progressive Knights of Labor included minorities and women. Urban working-class men were understandably reluctant to grant more power to middle-class women who condemned them as dirty, drunken immigrants and/or violent radicals. Their opposition defeated many state campaigns until working-class suffragists began to characterize the vote as a way to protect female wage earners and to empower the working class as a whole. 15

These socioeconomic and political developments would eventually strengthen support for woman suffrage, but suffragists still faced enormous difficulties. Small, poorly funded groups gathered signatures on petitions and lobbied state legislators to authorize public referenda on the right of women to vote. When successful, they faced the daunting challenge of organizing a statewide campaign. Many suffragists were politically inexperienced and criticized for violating prescriptive gender norms, but over time they built organizations, developed management and leadership skills, articulated effective arguments, and learned to maneuver through the political system. They experienced many disappointing defeats in the process: between 1870 and 1910 , seventeen states held referenda on woman suffrage, but most failed. By 1911 , only twenty-nine states allowed some form of partial woman suffrage: school, tax, bond, municipal, primary, or presidential. Partial suffrage was better than nothing, but it reduced the pressure for full suffrage and did not always motivate women to vote; when women did not turn out to vote, opponents asserted that they were not interested in politics. 16

Women Win the Vote in the West

Reviewing the record in 1916 , NAWSA president Carrie Chapman Catt counted 480 state legislative campaigns and forty-one state referenda resulting in only nine state or territorial victories, all in the western United States. 17 Indeed, by the end of 1914 , almost every western state and territory had enfranchised its female citizens.

3. “The Awakening” by Henry Mayer (1915). This poster highlights the significance of the western woman suffrage state victories, which enfranchised four million women in the region and established important examples and precedents.

These western successes stand in profound contrast to the east, where few women voted until after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment ( 1920 ), and to the South, where no women could vote and most African American men were effectively disfranchised. Early explanations attributed this unusual history to a putative “frontier” effect (a combination of greater female freedom and respect for women’s contributions to regional development), or western boosterism (efforts to attract settlers), but these reasons are too simplistic. 18 Western women gained the right to vote largely due to the unsettled state of regional politics, the complex nature of race relations, broad alliances between suffragists and farmer-labor-progressive reformers, and sophisticated activism by western women. The success of woman suffrage required building a strong movement, but it was inseparable from the larger political environment, and the west provided suffragists with unusual opportunities. 19

Initially the territorial status of most western areas gave Congress and tiny territorial legislatures the power to decide who could vote. Every application for statehood required a proposed constitution, and the process always involved debates about voting qualifications. Wyoming Territory surprised the nation by adopting woman suffrage in 1869 , although its reasons for doing so remain unclear since there were some dedicated individuals, but no organized movement and little prior discussion. Most likely, the Democratic legislature hoped to embarrass the Republican governor, who signed the bill partly in deference to his wife. In Utah woman suffrage became entangled in the polygamy controversy. Determined to abolish this practice, some Republicans in the U.S. Congress suggested the enfranchisement of Utah women so that they could vote against polygamy. State Democratic Mormon politicians believed correctly that Utah women would vote to support polygamy and authorized woman suffrage in 1870 . In 1887 , Congress punitively disfranchised all Utah voters until the Mormons repudiated polygamy in 1890 , and the church leadership capitulated. The men of Utah were re-enfranchised in 1893 , but women had to wait until statehood in 1896 . In 1883 , the Washington territorial legislature passed a woman suffrage with bipartisan support, as an experiment which could be corrected, if necessary, when Washington became a state. Feeling threatened, vice and liquor interests organized a series of court challenges until the territorial supreme court finally dismissed the law in 1888 . Delegates to the 1889 constitutional convention refused to include the provision because they feared rejection by Congress, but the convention authorized separate suffrage and prohibition referenda on the ratification ballot. Organizers had little time to prepare for statewide campaigns, and both measures met firm defeat. 20

In the 1890s, the rise of the Populist movement provided the context for the first two successful state referenda in Colorado ( 1893 ) and Idaho ( 1896 ). Largely characterized as a western agrarian insurgency advocating an anti-monopoly and democratization agenda, Populism arose from predecessor organizations, such as the Grange and the Farmers Alliances, in which women were actively involved. At the state level, Populist suffragists had some success convincing their colleagues, but at the national level Populists sacrificed their more radical demands to gain broader support, especially after they merged with the Democratic Party in 1896 . Woman suffrage referenda failed in South Dakota in 1890 , and in Kansas and Washington in 1894 despite energetic efforts. NAWSA organizer Carrie Chapman Catt rose to national prominence as a result of her work in the 1893 Colorado campaign, and in 1896 , Susan B. Anthony personally took charge in California. During these campaigns, Anthony and other suffragists made strenuous and sometimes successful efforts to gain endorsements from political parties, but they already knew from bitter experience that unless all the parties supported the measure, the issue of woman suffrage succumbed to divisive partisanship. 21

Challenges and Opportunities at the Turn of the Century

These disappointments had a chilling effect on the suffrage movement leading to a period sometimes described as “the doldrums.” The older first-generation radicals passed on (Stanton died in 1902 , Anthony in 1906 ), and most of the younger leaders (e.g., Rachel Foster Avery, May Wright Sewall, and Harriet Taylor Upton)—privileged women who shared prevailing notions about proper female behavior and resisted radical public-outreach methods—failed to bring innovative new ideas and strategies to the movement. They also alienated key constituencies by complaining publicly that they could not vote but “inferior” (racial-ethnic, working-class, immigrant) men could. Suffrage leaders used economic arguments focused on the growing population of “self-supporting women,” but they rarely cooperated with working-class women and usually chose avoidance or discrimination over collaboration with African American suffragist colleagues. 22

In the 1890s, NASWA turned its attention to the South. Activists in that region’s nascent movement argued that enfranchising white women would provide a gentler way to maintain white supremacy than the harsh measures being implemented to disfranchise African American men. Anti-black sentiments had marred the suffrage movement for many years. Indeed, Southern suffragists like Kate Gordon and Laura Clay protested that the presence of African American women in the suffrage movement undermined their strategy of enfranchising and mobilizing white women to outvote African Americans in order to preserve white hegemony. Personally uncomfortable with these attitudes, Anthony endeavored to keep the race issue separate from woman suffrage, but she did so by reluctantly endorsing “educated suffrage” (i.e., literacy qualifications) and rejecting appeals for help from black suffragists. She even asked her old friend, Frederick Douglass, not to attend the 1895 NAWSA convention in Atlanta for fear of offending southern suffragists. In New Orleans in 1903 , the NAWSA convention excluded black suffragists and approved of literacy requirements, though it was already clear that this “southern strategy” was not working. In the 1890s, southern states passed many measures to disfranchise black men but firmly rejected woman suffrage even with literacy and other restrictions attached. NAWSA retreated from blatant racism and from hopeless Southern state campaigns, but continued to tolerate segregationist policies within the organization and blocked efforts to address issues of racial injustice. NAWSA’s racist practices persisted throughout the struggle for a federal woman suffrage amendment and into the ratification process partly due to the difficulty of overcoming the implacable opposition of conservative states’ rights Southern politicians. 23

During the 1890s, state anti-suffrage organizations began to form, and the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage (NAOWS) was established in New York in 1911 . Suffragists routinely blamed their losses on the “liquor interests” (although political bosses and manufacturers also worried about the consequences of enfranchising reform-minded women) and dismissed women who opposed suffrage as pawns of these interests, but this was not always the case. Some female anti-suffragists supported reform more broadly, belonged to the same clubs as suffragists, and adopted many of the same innovative public-outreach and mass-marketing techniques. Yet many anti-suffragists opposed enfranchisement because they believed that direct female engagement in the dirty business of party politics and voting would deprive women of their claims to moral superiority and nonpartisanship. 24

Modern Suffragists and the Progressive Movement

By 1900 , a new generation of suffragists was growing impatient with what they perceived as timid leaders and tired, ineffective methods and began to employ more assertive public tactics. It was a period of massive political discontent throughout the entire country as many people felt disoriented by rapid modernization and concerned about its consequences. Ideas that had seemed too radical or regional when articulated by Populists in the 1890s now found mainstream support among middle-class urbanites involved in the Progressive reform movement. In the 1890s, Populism failed as a national political force, but it remained influential locally and regionally and appeared, reincarnated, in western Progressivism. 25 Although similar developments were occurring in the east, politically innovative western environments once again contributed to suffrage success. The breakthrough suffrage victories occurred in Washington state ( 1910 ) and California ( 1911 ), quickly followed by Oregon and Arizona ( 1912 ), and Nevada and Montana ( 1914 ). In Washington state, NAWSA organizer Emma Smith DeVoe became the leader of the state organization. DeVoe stressed the importance of good publicity and systematic canvassing while insisting upon ladylike decorum. Suffragists attended meetings of churches and ethnic associations and won endorsements from farmer and labor groups, often through the activism of working-class women. Those who rejected DeVoe’s leadership or moderate approach worked independently, often organizing parades and large public meetings. In 1910 , the referendum passed in every county and city in Washington state, breathing new life into the movement. 26

In California, where a strong progressive political insurgency won the referendum in 1911 , suffragists organized a massive public campaign. They held large public rallies, used automobiles to give speeches on street corners and in front of factories, produced a flood of printed material utilizing striking designs and colors, and coordinated professional press work. Working-class women organized their own suffrage group, the Wage Earners Suffrage League, while Chinese, Italian, African American, and Latina suffragists also worked within their communities. The NAWSA provided foreign-language literature generated locally by the members of the College Equal Suffrage League. Members of the WCTU worked vigorously but quietly. On election day, volunteers carefully watched polling places to discourage fraud, then held their breath for two days until they learned that the measure had passed by a mere 3,587 votes. They realized that victory would not have been possible without an impressive increase in urban working-class support since the last failed referendum in 1896 . 27

These new campaign tactics were quickly adopted by suffragists in other western states, frequently causing tensions between cautious older women and younger activists. In Oregon, for example, the region’s pioneer veteran suffragist, Abigail Scott Duniway, rejected public campaigns, arguing that they alerted and mobilized powerful opponents (mainly the liquor and vice interests). She insisted upon what she called the “still hunt” approach: quiet lobbying and speaking to groups to gain endorsements. Duniway also antagonized WCTU activists by insisting on a strict separation between suffrage and prohibition, especially if both measures were on the same ballot.

In 1902 , Oregon was the second state to adopt the initiative, a Progressive reform that allowed reformers to bypass uncooperative legislature and place measures directly on the ballot. Oregon suffragists subsequently utilized this process to place woman suffrage before voters every two years, but it did not pass until 1912 after frustrated younger women finally wrested control of the state organization from Duniway and implemented the modern model. 28

By 1915 , all western states and territories except New Mexico had adopted woman suffrage. These successes validated the efficacy of dramatic new tactics and created four million new women voters who could be enlisted to support the revived struggle for the federal amendment. In addition, many experienced western suffragists headed east, where similar developments were occurring, most notably in the rise of the National Woman’s Party, but where the opposition was also better organized and funded.

Catalyzed by the Progressive impetus and the excitement surrounding the 1912 presidential campaign, six states held suffrage referenda that year. Three western successes in Oregon, Kansas, and Arizona were counterbalanced by defeats in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan. In Ohio, the “liquor interests” publicly boasted of defeating the measure; failure in Wisconsin was also attributed to the opposition of the state’s important brewing industry. In Michigan, massive electoral irregularities turned initial reports of victory into a loss (by only 760 votes). In 1914 , two western states approved woman suffrage (Montana and Nevada), but in North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Missouri, and Ohio, hard-fought campaigns resulted in defeat. In 1915 , there were referenda in four major eastern states, New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. If any of these large, urbanized, industrial states passed the measure, the eastern stalemate would be broken, but all failed in spite of massive efforts. The opposition seemed insurmountable in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, where state laws prohibited immediate resubmission, thus suffragists focused on New York, the most heavily industrialized, urbanized, and populated state, and the one with more representatives in Congress than any of the others. 29

The NAWSA Struggles to Keep Up

The still quite frequent assertion that the U.S. suffrage movement was languishing in “the doldrums” during these years rests partly on unquestioned and erroneous assumptions that “the suffrage movement” means events in the east and the activities of the NAWSA. Indeed, the NAWSA leadership seemed to lack the ability to develop more successful strategies and tactics, could not consolidate or focus the energies and innovations of the new generation of suffragists, and were often resistant or openly hostile to their ideas and methods. When Anthony relinquished the NAWSA presidency in 1900 , two women emerged as potential successors, Carrie Chapman Catt and Anna Howard Shaw. For several years, Catt had urged major administrative changes and systematic campaign plans coordinated by a strong central state organization under national supervision. Shaw was an old friend of Anthony who had overcome an impoverished background to earn divinity and medical degrees. She has often been described as a brilliant orator but a poor administrator, but a recent study has challenged this conclusion (while not completely overturning it) by noting that this judgment reflects biases in the original sources and overlooks the growth and diversification of the NAWSA membership, its increasingly sophisticated organizational structure, improved fund-raising techniques, and other significant developments during the decade of Shaw’s leadership. 30 Shaw succeeded Catt as president in 1904 when family health issues forced Catt to “retire,” but she remained actively involved in the international suffrage movement and later reestablished herself on the national scene through her work in New York state.

Transnational connections and influences had been important from the earliest days of the movement. In 1888 , American leaders established the International Council of Women (ICW) hoping to promote international suffrage activism, but were disappointed because the organization avoided controversial issues (like suffrage) to focus on moral reform and pacifism. In 1902 , Catt and other frustrated suffragists established the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA). The topic of transnational suffrage activism has received significant scholarly attention recently, revealing extensive and dynamic connections among suffragists worldwide from the mid-1800s well into the 20th century . 31

By the time Catt returned to the U.S. movement in New York in 1909 , she observed many promising developments, especially the growing numbers of women at work and involved in various social-reform activities. Suffragists used affiliations with labor unions and reform groups to form cross-class suffrage coalitions and to appeal to urban working-class voters. They largely abandoned elitist, nativist, and racist rhetoric (at least in public) and emphasized arguments that linked political rights and economic justice for women of all classes. In New York, Harriot Stanton Blatch (Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s daughter) formed the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women in 1907 , which included experienced women trade unionists and suffragists like Leonora O’Reilly and Rosa Schneiderman. Blatch, a suffragist with strong labor and socialist sympathies, had previously lived in England and formed close associations with the British suffragettes. American suffragists consciously repudiated British militancy and violence, however, preferring clever, creative, and colorful activities that gained public attention and sympathy, like the annual suffrage parades Blatch began organizing in 1910 .

4. Suffrage parade in New York City, 23 Oct. 1915. In the early 1900s, the struggle for woman suffrage became a mass and public movement. Suffragists organized highly visible and colorful events, such as this pre-referendum parade in which 20,000 women marched in clear order to send a clear message of their determined purpose.

The basic demand for equal economic justice did not eliminate internal class conflict, however. Late in 1910 , the Equality League became the Women’s Political Union (WPU), indicating a shift to elite leadership and increasing British influence. In 1911 , O’Reilly left to form a separate Wage Earners’ League for Woman Suffrage. 32

In 1909 , Catt formed the Woman Suffrage Party (WSP) hoping to channel these energies and coordinate the movement under her direction. She soon controlled the state association and consolidated most of the state suffrage groups (with the notable exception of the WPU). After an intense lobbying effort, the legislature authorized a referendum vote in 1915 , and the suffragists mounted a huge campaign over the next ten months. They held thousands of outdoor meetings and events, targeted outreach to crucial constituencies, and flooded the state with literature. Catt’s plans included systematic door-to-door canvassing, which eventually reached over half the state’s voters. On election day, the measure lost by a narrow margin, but within days suffragists raised $100,000 and began the work all over again. After another massive campaign, woman suffrage passed in New York in 1917 by over 100,000 votes. The same year, seven states, including Arkansas, granted some form of partial suffrage. In 1918 , woman-suffrage referenda passed in Michigan, South Dakota, and Oklahoma. The eastern blockade was broken, and the South had begun to crack. 33

While Catt exercised masterful managerial and strategic skills in New York, the NAWSA was having trouble keeping up, and Shaw came under increasing criticism from her NAWSA colleagues. Prominent suffragists such as Katherine McCormick, Harriet Laidlaw, and Jane Addams attempted to fill the perceived leadership gap, but many believed that Catt was the only one with the organizational skills to rescue what she herself described as a “bankrupt concern.” Catt resumed the NAWSA presidency in 1915 and began implementing her ideas for bureaucratic reorganization, legislative and partisan lobbying, and systematic campaigning. The previous year, Catt had secretly introduced her “Winning Plan,” which included winning a few targeted campaigns in the east and South under national direction, gaining party endorsements, and renewing the struggle for a federal amendment. Women voters were instructed to lobby their legislators; suffragists in states where referenda successes were considered possible were to coordinate their efforts under national direction; and the goal in the South was some form of partial suffrage. 34 None of these were new ideas, but Catt brought them together in this master plan, which she eventually implemented with remarkable success, but her hostility to militancy, independent activism, and rival leaders intensified when confronted with a dynamic new force, Alice Paul.

Alice Paul and the Congressional Union

Paul did not single-handedly reinvigorate a moribund U.S. suffrage movement, but she was a brilliant organizer and an inspiring leader who soon attracted a cadre of radical and committed activists frustrated by the apparent conservatism and inefficacy of the NAWSA leadership. Determined to win the federal amendment, they aimed to make life miserable for politicians until they achieved their objective. Paul learned this strategy from the British suffragettes during her involvement with them and transplanted it to the United States. As a Quaker, however, Paul rejected their violent tactics and developed other provocative and militant methods. She had an extraordinary talent for organizing highly public suffrage events. Her spirit was contagious and her goal compelling even for mainstream suffragists opposed to radical tactics.

Early in 1913 , Paul and her friend Lucy Burns revived the NAWSA’s quiescent Congressional Committee, initially with that organization’s blessing, but controversy and schism soon followed. Within two months of their arrival in Washington, DC, they had organized a massive suffrage parade, held on March 3, the day before Woodrow Wilson’s presidential inauguration. When the marchers were attacked by a mob and the police failed to protect them, the suffrage movement gained massive publicity and considerable sympathy. In April, Paul and Burns formed an independent organization, the Congressional Union (CU), quickly gathered 200,000 signatures on petitions, and started lobbying President Wilson and other prominent politicians. Paul lost her position as chair of the NAWSA Congressional Committee at the 1913 convention because she defied the national leadership’s efforts to tame her, and she rejected all subsequent reconciliatory approaches. 35

The split deepened when the CU implemented the British suffragette policy of “holding the party in power responsible” by sending organizers into nine western states to persuade women voters to oppose Democratic candidates during the 1914 election. Although politicians insisted that this effort had no impact on their campaigns, half of them lost, and soon thereafter woman suffrage was reintroduced in Congress for the first time in two decades. The proposed Shafroth-Palmer Amendment was not the “Anthony Amendment,” however, which since 1878 had simply stated that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” The Shafroth-Palmer Amendment defined woman suffrage as a “states’ rights” issue, dictated a return to arduous state campaigns (which had largely been unsuccessful), and allowed discrimination against black women. The current NAWSA Congressional Committee chair, Hannah McCormick, endorsed it without consulting the organization’s board, and the proposal received some support from suffragists who saw no alternative to compromise with the Southern states’ rights bloc in Congress. Most suffragists rejected it, however, and continued to demand action at the federal level. After formally organizing the National Woman’s Party (NWP), Paul’s group reprised their attacks on western Democrats in the 1916 election.

5. “Women of Colorado” (1916). One of the first efforts of the NWP was to “hold the party in power” (i.e., the Democrats) responsible for lack of progress on the woman suffrage amendment. In 1914, their efforts to persuade western women voters to vote against the Democratic party were not very effective, but frightened politicians soon moved the amendment forward in Congress. In 1916, the NWP repeated this operation and posted this billboard.

This tactic infuriated Catt since it undermined her efforts to lobby politicians to gain their support. 36

Suffrage during World War I

When the United States entered the war in April 1917 , neither organization abandoned the suffrage struggle. In spite of earlier pacifist activism by Catt and others, the NAWSA urged women to engage in both war work and suffrage agitation, hoping that patriotic efforts would gain additional public support for the cause. The NWP concentrated exclusively on suffrage, continued using militant tactics, and introduced propaganda ridiculing claims that America could fight for democracy while denying women at home the right to vote. Most famously, in January 1917 the NWP began silent picketing outside the White House. Initially tolerated by the Wilson administration, harassment and violence by onlookers escalated, and in June arrests of the picketers began, ultimately affecting 218 women.

6. Picketing the White House. By August 1917, the Congressional Union (later the NWP) had been silently picketing the White House since January, tensions were running high, and crowd attacks on picketers increased. Arrests had begun in June, followed by months-long prison sentences, for the charge of “obstructing traffic.”

At first, charges were dismissed or sentences minimal, but penalties increased over the next few months. Some of the women began hunger strikes to protest the heavy punishment, bad conditions, and brutal treatment in prison; in response, authorities subjected them to forced feeding. Faced with terrible publicity, officials finally released all picketers in late November. That fall, both houses of Congress began to move toward voting on a federal amendment. By this time, all suffragists were focused intently on the federal amendment, but the NWP activists made it clear that they were not going to stop until they got it or died trying. 37

Women’s contributions to national war efforts did affect public opinion, but female enfranchisement did not follow immediately or easily. In January 1918 , President Wilson endorsed suffrage the day before the House of Representatives would vote again on the federal amendment, but the outcome was highly uncertain. Great efforts were made to guarantee every positive vote: several ailing representatives dragged themselves or were carried in, while another left his wife’s deathbed (at her urging), then returned for her funeral. Three roll calls were necessary to establish that the measure had passed with exactly the required two-thirds majority, supported by a significant number of western congressmen responding to pressure from enfranchised female constituents.

The Final Struggle for the Federal Amendment

Hopes for a quick victory were soon shattered. Wilson was preoccupied with the war, so an impatient NWP resumed militant demonstrations that generated more arrests, jail sentences, and publicity. It took a year and a half for the Senate to vote, and only at the instigation of hostile senators confident that it would lose. On September 30, Wilson took the unusual step of addressing the Senate during the debate, describing enfranchisement as only fair considering all the contributions women had made to the war effort, but states’-rights advocates remained adamantly opposed, and it lost by two votes. By December, even the NAWSA threatened to mobilize against unsympathetic politicians in the 1918 elections, and both suffrage organizations did so. In February 1919 , the Senate defeated the amendment again—by one vote—but six more state legislatures had granted women the vote by the time Wilson called Congress into special session in May. This time the measure carried in the House by a wide majority (thanks to the election of over one hundred new pro-suffrage legislators) and passed the Senate on June 4 by a two-vote majority. 38

Ratification of the amendment required another long struggle. It came quickly in states where suffrage organizations remained active, but the process dragged on into 1920 . Finally only one more state was needed, but most of the holdouts were in the South. The battle came to a head in August in Tennessee, with relentless lobbying by pro- and anti-suffrage forces and reports of threats, bribes, and drunken legislators. The state senate passed the measure easily, but in the house there were numerous delays engineered by the opposition, and suffragists believed that they lacked the last votes needed for passage. When the roll call reached Harry Burn, a young Republican from the eastern mountains, he unexpectedly voted “aye,” later explaining that his mother had written urging him to support the measure.

7. Alice Paul and NWP members in August 1920 celebrating passage of the Nineteenth Amendment with a toast to the final 36 th star on the woman suffrage flag.

Thus the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution squeaked to victory. 39

Gaining the right to vote was a huge accomplishment, but it did not automatically guarantee women other political rights (e.g., running for office or serving on juries), nor did it rectify many other discriminatory practices embedded in the law. To address these issues, the NWP introduced the federal Equal Rights Amendment in 1923 , but nearly a century later, it remains unratified. To prepare women for their new civic responsibilities, in 1920 Catt converted the NAWSA into the League of Women Voters (LWV), an organization still dedicated to nonpartisan educational activity. Until recently, analyses of the impact of female enfranchisement focused on the national level during the conservative decade of the 1920s and found little to report: women did not form a solid voting bloc, so major parties soon lost interest in cultivating their support, and few women were elected to office. More recent research suggests a more complicated dynamic, especially at the state level. Although technically enfranchised, spurious restrictions and violence prevented African American women and men from voting for decades, especially in the South. Thus winning the vote did not guarantee all American women full equality, but it recognized their fundamental right of self-representation, permanently changed the composition of the polity, and provided the necessary foundation for subsequent achievements.

Discussion of the Literature

There has been relatively little scholarly interest in the U.S. suffrage movement in recent years. Since this topic was the primary focus of attention as the field of women’s history began to develop, perhaps people think it has been thoroughly examined. That assumption is incorrect for at least two reasons. First, more recent research has identified and investigated previously unexplored aspects, resulting in many new insights, while other topics still deserve fuller attention. Second, we still lack an up-to-date synthetic account that incorporates the findings of these studies, although several excellent essay collections are available. Scholars continue to rely upon the monumental work, The History of Woman Suffrage , compiled by NAWSA activists conscious of the need to document their historic struggle, but it is best treated with caution as a collection of primary sources. In 1959 , Eleanor Flexner published a now-classic synthesis, Century of Struggle (enlarged by Ellen Fitzpatrick and reprinted in 1996 ). This book remains the standard account, but it includes discussions of various contributing factors that have since been well studied as separate topics (e.g., women’s access to education and wage work). No one since has taken on the daunting task of producing a comprehensive account of this vitally important movement.

With surprisingly few modifications, the narrative of the U.S. suffrage struggle has remained static: the Seneca Falls convention was the moment the movement began; it split over controversies precipitated by the Reconstruction Amendments, western victories were anomalous, and the “doldrums” of the 20th century were followed by reinvigoration in the 1910s, culminating in the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. The many summary essays available online and books for young people may or may not integrate recent findings, but they all repeat this dominant narrative, so it is past time for a new synthesis that amends, refines, and expands our understanding of this long, complicated, and difficult struggle.

Heavily influenced by the publication of Aileen Kraditor’s book, The Ideas of the Woman’s Suffrage Movement ( 1965 ), subsequent studies thoroughly disrupted any lingering notions about a coherent suffrage “sisterhood.” Kraditor argued that late 19th-century suffragists stopped emphasizing the “justice” of their cause in favor of “expediency” arguments focused on how the vote could be used to achieve other goals. This argument set up a false dichotomy since suffrage arguments based on rights and justice continued to be frequently and powerfully employed, while the exercise of the vote has always been a commonly accepted means to achieve political objectives. Yet there is no doubt that Kraditor’s work made a huge contribution by revealing a movement deeply affected by the elitism, racism, and nativism of many suffragists. It stimulated extensive investigation into problematic tensions among different groups of suffragists as well as analyses of the negative impacts on their audiences.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the feminist movement revived interest in women’s history and in the suffrage movement. The connections to a contemporaneous women’s-rights struggle led some writers to adopt an excessively heroic interpretation, but it did rescue several major figures from relative obscurity, most notably Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Alice Paul. Beginning in 1975 with the publication of Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869 , Ellen DuBois produced a series of carefully researched works that have had a major impact on the field. For several decades, many studies appeared that identified various groups of previously unrecognized activists (especially African American women, but also anti-suffragists), produced detailed regional studies, examined the influence of suffrage journalism, traced transnational suffrage connections, and reevaluated the consequences of female enfranchisement. In addition, many other scholars considered suffrage as an important element of other women’s reform initiatives, or examined the vote in the context of larger discussions of citizenship. Suffrage itself has not always fared well in these analyses. Was it a narrow goal that diverted attention and energy away from a larger feminist agenda? Ultimately was it even much of an achievement? These questions have received much attention in recent scholarship, especially those considering the impacts of women voters on political processes.

Regional studies of the South and the west have expanded our knowledge of suffrage activity beyond a narrow, eastern-based, focus on NAWSA, but this information remains inadequately integrated into “national” histories of the movement. Ironically, Southern stumbling blocks and the baneful effects of the “southern strategy” are better understood than the contributions of western victories to ultimate success. Many of the most recent studies examine important but previously overlooked state leaders and organizations, but they remain largely isolated from the national context. Some scholars have explored beyond U.S. borders, examining suffrage movements in other countries, the importance of transnational interconnections from the beginning of the movement, and associations with U.S. imperialism. Suffrage rhetoric, media strategies, advertising, and imagery have also received attention, but many texts present pictures and narrative without much analysis, especially those written for popular audiences.

Historians who study woman suffrage tend to focus on women’s organizations and activities, including efforts to build coalitions and influence politicians. Studies by political scientists have often focused on identifying the situations and processes by which the idea appealed to some groups of men and worked its way through the political system. Early efforts to find correlations between demographic characteristics and voting patterns on other issues found few links (with the exception of support for prohibition, even though the suffragists were aware of how problematic that relationship could be). Corinne McConnaughy’s recent book, The Woman Suffrage Movement in America , analyzed the successes and/or failures of efforts to establish political or reform coalitions and influence legislators, but her study is limited to five states and the U.S. Congress. An extensive body of work of Holly J. McCammon and others has emphasized the “various political and gendered opportunities” that encouraged the mobilization of women, as well as and the ways in which they adapted their tactics to fit specific circumstances and framed their arguments to appeal to particular groups. Thus better interdisciplinary integration would be valuable in future research and essential in any new synthetic account.

Currently, much of the interest in suffrage relates to its impact after the vote was won, with considerable debate over the consequences. Such studies examine female voter turnout, women’s relationships with the major political parties, their success (or lack thereof) in running for office, and the impact of the vote on achieving various reforms. Several recent publications by Kristi Anderson, Melanie Gustafson, and others reveal a great deal of female political involvement in the 1920s, usually at the local, state, or regional levels. Other analysts, including Nancy Cott and Anna Harvey, are more pessimistic in discussing how the national women’s movement split and fizzled out in the 1920s once the common goal had been achieved, racial and class divisions increased, political parties became indifferent, and inexperienced women voters adapted poorly to partisan politics.

In a recent essay, “Getting Right with Women’s Suffrage,” Jean Baker reviewed these various developments and suggested ways to revitalize suffrage studies. These include: better integration into survey courses and related examinations of the American political system, renewed attention to organizational requirements for individual and associational leadership, expanded emphasis on transnational activism, and continued discussion of suffrage in the context of citizenship definitions and nation building. Additional work on specialized aspects will always be welcome, but better integration of our existing knowledge is necessary to provide a firmer foundation for future scholarship in this important field.

Primary Sources

The best collection of primary sources remains the six-volume History of Woman Suffrage , edited by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Ida Husted Harper. Keenly aware of the historic significance of their work, suffragists thoroughly documented their efforts and published the first volume in 1887 . As a collection of reports, conference proceedings, state histories, and other material, it remains invaluable. Because the authors were themselves activists in the suffrage movement, however, this volume also reveals their biases and rivalries and must be used carefully in conjunction with other sources. It is available in a reprint edition, as a CD, and online ( Internet Archive ). 40 A selection of these materials is available in The Concise History of Woman Suffrage, edited by Mari Jo and Paul Buhle. A more recent book of primary sources is Women’s Suffrage in America , edited by Elizabeth Frost-Knappman and Kathryn Cullen-Dupont , which combines a variety of documents with introductory essays and chronologies. 41

Available on microfilm are The Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony and History of Women Microfilm Collection . 42

Major archival repositories include the following: the Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Washington, DC, contains the Susan B. Anthony Papers, Blackwell Family Papers, Nannie Helen Burroughs Papers, Carrie Chapman Catt Papers, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, Mary Church Terrell Papers, National American Woman Suffrage Association Records, the National Woman’s Party Papers, and the League of Women Voters Collection. The Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, holds the Blackwell Family Papers, Carrie Chapman Catt papers, Olympia Brown Papers (microfilm), Elizabeth Boynton Harbert Papers, Harriet Burton Laidlaw Papers, Catharine Waugh McCulloch Papers, Leonora O’Reilly Papers, Anna Howard Shaw Papers, Sue Shelton White Papers, Matilda Joslyn Gage Papers, Maud Wood Park Papers (microfilm), New York Association Opposed to Political Suffrage for Women Papers, and the Women’s Rights Collection. Many of these collections are available on microfilm.

Other major repositories holding specific archival collections, and much additional related material, include the New York Public Library and the Sophia Smith Collection, Women’s History Archives at Smith College, Northampton, MA. A wealth of information can be found all over the country in university collections, and in state and local historical societies and archives.

Links to Digital Materials

• The Library of Congress , The Seneca Falls Convention.
• The Library of Congress , Woman Suffrage Teacher’s Guide .
• National Archives: Teaching With Documents: Woman Suffrage and the 19th Amendment .
• National Women’s History Museum , including online exhibits on “Political Culture and Imagery of American Woman Suffrage” and “Votes for Women”.
• The History Channel , “History of Woman’s Suffrage in America”.
• “The Fight for Woman Suffrage” .
• PBS , “Not for Ourselves Alone.”
• Alexander Street Press , “‘Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600–2000” (database available through subscription only).

Further Reading

• Adams, Katherine H. , and Michael L. Keene . Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign . Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008.
• Anderson, Bonnie . Joyous Greetings: The First International Women’s Movement, 1830–1860 . New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
• Anderson, Kristi . After Suffrage: Women in Partisan and Electoral Politics before the New Deal . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
• Baker, Jean H. , ed. Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited . New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
• Baker, Jean H. “Getting Right with Women’s Suffrage.” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 5.1 (January 2006): 7–17.
• Beeton, Beverly . Women Vote in the West: The Woman Suffrage Movement, 1869–1896 . New York: Garland Press, 1986.
• Cott, Nancy F. The Grounding of Modern Feminism . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987.
• DuBois, Ellen Carol . Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869 . Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978.
• DuBois, Ellen Carol . Woman Suffrage and Women’s Rights . New York: New York University Press, 1998.
• Finnegan, Margaret . Selling Suffrage: Consumer Culture and Votes for Women . New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
• Flexner, Eleanor , and Ellen Fitzpatrick . Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States . Revised edition. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1996.
• Gordon, Ann D. , and Bettye Collier-Thomas , eds. African American Women and the Vote, 1837–1965 . Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997.
• Graham, Sara Hunter . Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996.
• Green, Elna C. Southern Strategies: Southern Women and the Woman Suffrage Question . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
• Gustafson, Melanie , Kristie Miller , and Elisabeth Israels Perry , eds. We Have Come to Stay: American Women and Political Parties, 1880–1960 . Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999.
• Harvey, Anna L. Voters without Leverage: Women in American Politics, 1920–1970 . Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
• Kraditor, Aileen S. The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 . New York: W. W. Norton, 1965.
• McConnaughy, Corrine M. The Woman Suffrage Movement in America: A Reassessment . Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
• Marilley, Suzanne M. Woman Suffrage and the Origins of Liberal Feminism in the United States, 1820–1920 . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.
• Materson, Lisa G. For the Freedom of Her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877–1932 . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
• Mead, Rebecca J. How the Vote Was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868–1914 . New York: New York University Press, 2004.
• Scott, Anne F. , and Andrew W. Scott . One Half the People: The Fight for Woman Suffrage . New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1975.
• Sherr, Lynn . Failure is Impossible: Susan B. Anthony in Her Own Words . New York: Random House, 1995.
• Sneider, Allison . Suffragists in an Imperial Age: U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question, 1870–1929 . New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
• Terborg-Penn, Rosalyn . African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 . Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998.
• Wheeler, Marjorie Spruill . New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States . New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
• Wheeler, Marjorie Spruill , ed. One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement . Troutdale, OR: New Sage Press, 1995.
• Zahniser, J. D. , and Amelia Fry . Alice Paul: Claiming Power . New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

1. Jan Ellen Lewis , “Rethinking Women’s Suffrage in New Jersey, 1776–1807,” Rutgers Law Review 63.3 (2011): 1017–1035.

2. Linda Kerber , Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998); and Margaret A. Nash , Women’s Education in the United States, 1790– 1840 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

3. Kathryn Kish Sklar , Women’s Rights Emerges within the Antislavery Movement, 1830–1870: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2000).

4. Many authors have addressed these events and their significance; see, for example, Ellen Carol DuBois , Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), 21–52, and Sally M. McMillen , Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). In addition to Stanton’s autobiography, there are many biographies, most recently Lori Ginzberg , Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009).

5. Eleanor Flexner , Century of Struggle: The Women’s Rights Movement in the United States , rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1975), 82–92; and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn , African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 13–35.

6. There is no definitive version of the text and no agreement whether Truth was met with approval or resistance when she rose to speak. It took almost 150 years for the historical record to be corrected; see Nell Irvin Painter , “Representing Truth: Sojourner Truth’s Knowing and Becoming Known,” The Journal of American History 81.2 (September 1994): 461–492.

7. DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage , 52–78, 162–202; Terborg-Penn, African American Women , 23–35; and Flexner, Century of StruggleI , 145–152.

8. DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage , 84–103.

9. DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage , 79–161; Flexner, Century of Struggle , 153–156; and Martha M. Solomon , ed., A Voice of Their Own: The Woman Suffrage Press, 1840–1910 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002).

10. Ellen Carol DuBois , “Taking the Law into Our Own Hands: Bradwell, Minor, and Suffrage Militance in the 1870s,” in Woman Suffrage and Women’s Rights , ed. Ellen Carol DuBois (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 114–138; and Flexner, Century of Struggle , 156–158;

11. For a recent review of several biographies of Woodhull, see Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz , “A Victoria Woodhull for the 1990s,” Reviews in American History 27.1 (March 1999): 87–97.

12. Karen J. Blair , The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868–1914 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1980).

13. Ruth Bordin , Frances Willard: A Biography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986).

14. Barbara Miller Solomon , In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986); Robyn Muncy , Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform: 1890–1935 (New York, Oxford University Press, 1991); and Kathryn Kish Sklar , Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work: The Rise of Women’s Political Culture, 1830–1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).

15. Flexner, Century of Struggle , 134–144, 197–207, 236–240.

16. Flexner, Century of Struggle , 228, 269–270, 300, 319–320.

17. NAWSA , Victory: How the Women Won It: A Centennial Symposium (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1940), 53, 72–73.

18. Alan P. Grimes , The Puritan Ethic and Woman Suffrage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967); T. A. Larson produced many articles about woman suffrage in various states that are still factually informative, but the analytical arguments of both these authors are now considered obsolete.

19. Rebecca J. Mead , How the Vote Was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868–1914 (New York: New York University Press, 2004); Holly J. McCammon and Karen E. Campbell , “Winning the Vote in the West: The Political Successes of the Women’s Suffrage Movements, 1866–1919,” Gender and Society 15.1 (February 2001): 55–82; and Beverly Beeton , Women Vote in the West: The Woman Suffrage Movement, 1869–1896 (New York: Garland Press, 1986).

20. Mead, How the Vote Was Won ; 35–52; and Allison L. Sneider , Suffragists in an Imperial Age: U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question, 1870–1929 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 57–86.

21. Mead, How the Vote Was Won , 53–95; Suzanne M. Marilley , Woman Suffrage and the Origins of Liberal Feminism in the United States, 1820– 1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 124–158; Flexner, Century of Struggle , 228–231; Michael L. Goldberg , An Army of Women: Gender and Politics in Gilded Age Kansas (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); and Susan Scheiber Edelman , “‘A Red Hot Suffrage Campaign’: The Woman Suffrage Cause in California, 1896,” California Supreme Court Historical Society Yearbook 2 (1995): 51–131.

22. Aileen S. Kraditor , The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965), 123–218.

23. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement , 213–214; and Terborg-Penn, African American Women , 109–135. The Southern suffrage movement was not monolithic in its goals and methods, but it was dominated by elite women, some more volubly racist or conservative than others. See Marjorie Spruill Wheeler , New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States (New York, Oxford University Press, 1993); and Elna C. Green , Southern Strategies: Southern Women and the Woman Suffrage Question (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

24. Susan E. Marshall , Splintered Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Campaign against Woman Suffrage (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997); and Susan Goodier , No Votes for Women: The New York State Anti-suffrage Movement (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013).

25. The Progressive movement has been studied exhaustively, and there are many studies describing women’s involvement. For a general review of its impact on woman suffrage, see Eileen L. McDonagh and H. Douglas Price , “Woman Suffrage in the Progressive Era: Patterns of Opposition and Support in Referenda Voting, 1910–1918,” American Political Science Review 79.2 (June 1985): 415–435.

26. Mead, How the Vote Was Won , 97–118. After winning the vote, DeVoe organized a National Council of Women Voters to focus the power of western women voters on the federal amendment effort, working briefly with the Congressional Union until shifting to support Catt’s Winning Plan; see Jennifer M. Ross-Nazzal , Winning the West for Women: The Life of Suffragist Emma Smith DeVoe (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011).

27. Mead, How the Vote Was Won , 119–149; Gayle Anne Gullett , Becoming Citizens: The Emergence and Development of the California Women’s Movement, 1880–1911 (Urbana, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000); and Susan Englander , Class Coalition and Class Conflict in the California Woman Suffrage Movement, 1907–1912: The San Francisco Wage Earners’ Suffrage League (Lewiston, NY: Mellen Research University Press, 1989).

28. Mead, How the Vote Was Won , 101–107; see also Ruth Barnes Moynihan , Rebel for Rights: Abigail Scott Duniway (London: Yale University Press, 1983).

29. Flexner, Century of Struggle , 269–270, 279–281.

30. Trisha Franzen , Anna Howard Shaw: The Work of Woman Suffrage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 1–15.

31. See, for example, Bonnie Anderson , Joyous Greetings: The First International Women’s Movement, 1830–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Leila J. Rupp , Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); and Patricia Greenwood Harrison , Connecting Links: The British and American Woman Suffrage Movements, 1900–1914 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000).

32. Ellen Carol DuBois , Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 88–147; and Annelise Orleck , Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 87–113.

33. Flexner, Century of Struggle , 258–263, 281, 300–301. DuBois, Harriot Stanton Blatch , 88–181. Convinced that a second campaign in 1917 would fail, Blatch did not participate.

34. Flexner, Century of Struggle , 266–267, 281–285; and Robert Booth Fowler, “Carrie Chapman Catt, Strategist,” in One Woman, One Vote , ed. Wheeler, 295–314. There are several biographies of Catt available; see, for example, Jacqueline Van Voris , Carrie Chapman Catt: A Public Life (New York: Feminist Press of the City University of New York, 1987).

35. J. D. Zahniser and Amelia Fry , Alice Paul: Claiming Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); and Katherine H. Adams and Michael L. Keene , Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008).

36. Adams and Keene, Alice Paul , 141–156; Inez Haynes Irwin Gilmore , The Story of the Woman’s Party . Reprint. (New York: Kraus Reprint, 1971); and Linda G. Ford , “Álice Paul and the Triumph of Militancy,” in One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement , ed. Marjorie Spruill Wheeler (Troutdale, OR: New Sage Press: 1995), 277–294.

37. Adams and Keene, Alice Paul , 157–241; see also Kimberly Jensen , Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008).

38. Eileen L. McDonagh , “Issues and Constituencies in the Progressive Era: House Roll Call Voting on the Nineteenth Amendment, 1913–1919,” Journal of Politics 51.1 (February 1989): 119–136.

39. Flexner, Century of Struggle , 286–303, 317–337.

40. Salem, NY: Ayer, 1985; and Louisville, KT: Bank of Wisdom.

41. Facts on File Eyewitness History Series (2005).

42. The Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony , eds. Patricia G. Holland and Ann D. Gordon (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, c. 1991); History of Women Microfilm Collection (New Haven, CT, Research Publications, 1976–1979).

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Women's Suffrage and Children's Education

While a growing literature shows that women, relative to men, prefer greater investment in children, it is unclear whether empowering women produces better economic outcomes. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in U.S. suffrage laws, we show that exposure to suffrage during childhood led to large increases in educational attainment for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, especially blacks and Southern whites. We also find that suffrage led to higher earnings alongside education gains, although not for Southern blacks. Using newly-digitized data, we show that education increases are primarily explained by suffrage-induced growth in education spending, although early-life health improvements may have also contributed.

We thank Doug Miller, Marianne Page, Hilary Hoynes, Scott Carrell, and Peter Lindert for many helpful conversations and support. We are also grateful for the input that we received from Marcella Alsan, Celeste Carruthers, Bill Collins, Andrew Goodman-Bacon, Elizabeth Cascio, Claudia Goldin, Jonathan Homola, JaeWook Jung, Erzo Luttmer, Paco Martorell, Bhash Mazumder, Chris Meissner, Claudia Olivetti, Giovanni Peri, Sarah Reber, Shu Shen, Dawn Teele, Marianne Wanamaker, and seminar participants at the APSA Annual Meeting, the Chicago Fed, the Economic Demography Workshop, the Historical Women's Movement Workshop at UPenn, NBER DAE Summer Institute, SoCCAM, the Stata Texas Empirical Microeconomics Conference, UC Davis, UC Berkeley Political Economy Seminar, the University of Oklahoma, and Wellesley College. We benefited from data made publicly available by Daniel Aaronson and Bhash Mazumder; Daron Acemoglu, David Autor, and David Lyle; Claudia Goldin; Lawrence Kenny; and Adriana Lleras-Muney. Our work was supported by a generous grant from the All-UC History Group, a Sam Taylor Fellowship, and a National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship. An earlier version of this paper circulated under the titles "Who Benefited from Women's Suffrage?" and "Women's Enfranchisement and Children's Education: The Long-Run Impact of the U.S. Suffrage Movement." All errors are our own. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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Women’s Suffrage

By: History.com Editors

Updated: February 20, 2024 | Original: October 29, 2009

The women’s suffrage movement was a decades-long fight to win the right to vote for women in the United States. It took activists and reformers nearly 100 years to win that right, and the campaign was not easy: Disagreements over strategy threatened to cripple the movement more than once. But on August 18, 1920, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was finally ratified, enfranchising all American women and declaring for the first time that they, like men, deserve all the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.

Women’s Rights Movement Begins

The campaign for women’s suffrage began in earnest in the decades before the Civil War . During the 1820s and '30s, most states had extended the franchise to all white men, regardless of how much money or property they had.

At the same time, all sorts of reform groups were proliferating across the United States— temperance leagues , religious movements, moral-reform societies, anti- slavery organizations—and in many of these, women played a prominent role.

Meanwhile, many American women were beginning to chafe against what historians have called the “Cult of True Womanhood”: that is, the idea that the only “true” woman was a pious, submissive wife and mother concerned exclusively with home and family.

Put together, all of these contributed to a new way of thinking about what it meant to be a woman and a citizen of the United States.

Seneca Falls Convention

In 1848, a group of abolitionist activists—mostly women, but some men—gathered in Seneca Falls, New York to discuss the problem of women’s rights. They were invited there by the reformers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott .

Most of the delegates to the Seneca Falls Convention agreed: American women were autonomous individuals who deserved their own political identities.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” proclaimed the Declaration of Sentiments that the delegates produced, “that all men and women are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

What this meant, among other things, was that they believed women should have the right to vote.

Civil Rights and Women's Rights During the Civil War

During the 1850s, the women’s rights movement gathered steam, but lost momentum when the Civil War began. Almost immediately after the war ended, the 14th Amendment and the 15th Amendment to the Constitution raised familiar questions of suffrage and citizenship.

The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, extends the Constitution’s protection to all citizens—and defines “citizens” as “male”; the 15th, ratified in 1870, guarantees Black men the right to vote.

Some women’s suffrage advocates believed that this was their chance to push lawmakers for truly universal suffrage. As a result, they refused to support the 15th Amendment and even allied with racist Southerners who argued that white women’s votes could be used to neutralize those cast by African Americans.

In 1869, a new group called the National Woman Suffrage Association was founded by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. They began to fight for a universal-suffrage amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Others argued that it was unfair to endanger Black enfranchisement by tying it to the markedly less popular campaign for female suffrage. This pro-15th-Amendment faction formed a group called the American Woman Suffrage Association and fought for the franchise on a state-by-state basis.

Gallery: The Progressive Campaign for Suffrage

This animosity eventually faded, and in 1890 the two groups merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the organization’s first president.

By then, the suffragists’ approach had changed. Instead of arguing that women deserved the same rights and responsibilities as men because women and men were “created equal,” the new generation of activists argued that women deserved the vote because they were different from men.

They could make their domesticity into a political virtue, using the franchise to create a purer, more moral “maternal commonwealth.”

This argument served many political agendas: Temperance advocates, for instance, wanted women to have the vote because they thought it would mobilize an enormous voting bloc on behalf of their cause, and many middle-class white people were swayed once again by the argument that the enfranchisement of white women would “ensure immediate and durable white supremacy, honestly attained.”

Did you know? In 1923, the National Woman's Party proposed an amendment to the Constitution that prohibited all discrimination on the basis of sex. The so-called Equal Rights Amendment has never been ratified.

Winning the Vote at Last

Starting in 1910, some states in the West began to extend the vote to women for the first time in almost 20 years. Idaho and Utah had given women the right to vote at the end of the 19th century.

Still, southern and eastern states resisted. In 1916, NAWSA president Carrie Chapman Catt unveiled what she called a “Winning Plan” to get the vote at last: a blitz campaign that mobilized state and local suffrage organizations all over the country, with a special focus on those recalcitrant regions.

Meanwhile, a splinter group called the National Woman’s Party founded by Alice Paul focused on more radical, militant tactics—hunger strikes and White House pickets, for instance—aimed at winning dramatic publicity for their cause.

World War I slowed the suffragists’ campaign but helped them advance their argument nonetheless: Women’s work on behalf of the war effort, activists pointed out, proved that they were just as patriotic and deserving of citizenship as men.

Finally, on August 18, 1920 , the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified. And on November 2 of that year, more than 8 million women across the United States voted in elections for the first time.

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Series: Essays: Overview of Women's Suffrage

Women in America collectively organized in 1848 at the First Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, NY to fight for suffrage (or voting rights). Over the next seventy years, not everyone followed the same path in fighting for women's equal access to the vote. The history of the suffrage movement is one of disagreements as well as cooperation. Explore this essay series to learn more about the women's suffrage movement and the legacy of the 19th Amendment.

Article 1: Introduction: Women's Suffrage

In 1848 women and men met in Seneca Falls, New York to advance the cause for women’s rights. Learn more about convention organizers Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and Susan B. Anthony and how they started the women's suffrage movement. Read more

Article 2: Ratification: Women's Suffrage

Discover the story behind the ratification of the 19th Amendment and how it empowered women in America. Read more

Article 3: In the Press: Women's Suffrage

Explore how the debate for women's suffrage played out in newspapers across America. Read more

Article 4: Anti-Suffragists: Women's Suffrage

Find out why some women and men were against women's suffrage. Read more

Article 5: Who was excluded?: Women's Suffrage

Not all women shared the same freedom to vote after the passage of the 19th Amendment. Find out why. Read more

Article 6: What happened after?: Women's History

Find out what happened after the passage of the 19th Amendment. Read more

92 Women’s Suffrage Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best women’s suffrage topic ideas & essay examples, 📌 most interesting women’s suffrage topics to write about, 👍 good research topics about women’s suffrage, ❓ research questions about women’s suffrage.

• Women’s Suffrage Movement: Historical Investigation The historical event under investigation is the women’s suffrage movement and the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. First, the book Women’s Suffrage: The Complete Guide to the Nineteenth Amendment by Wayne presents a […]
• The Women’s Suffrage Movement It shows the cause-and-effect relationship between the lack of substantial funds for the campaigns of activists and the subsequent decision to accept money from the person ideologically opposed to the female participants with their agenda. We will write a custom essay specifically for you by our professional experts 808 writers online Learn More
• Women’s Suffrage and the Nineteenth Amendment Though the early Suffrage movement lacked diversity and the associated perspectives, it did lay the foundation for the 19trh Amendment despite quite vocal claims against change among some of the more racist Tennessee women, who […]
• American Women in History: Feminism and Suffrage It is important to note that the key sharp issues discussed in this chapter are: a finding of the independent women suffrage movement, the role of the constituency in this process, the role of war […]
• The Women’s Suffrage Movement in England in 19th Century It can also be claimed that the attempts of women to enter the sphere of politics have become the most important determinant in the construction of ideas about British democracy and culture. In this period, […]
• Women Suffrage in Carrie Chapman’s Rhetoric The paper is a bright example of the in-depth analysis of the problem and a perfect insight into the future of womens participation in the political life of the country.
• Women’s Suffrage: The Nineteenth Amendment The abolition movement, which dealt with the attempt to stop slavery, and the women’s rights movement, which was meant to allow females to enter the political life of the country.
• Sojourner Truth: Slavery Abolitionist and Women’s Suffrage The main aim of this step was to show that black people should also be given the right to participate in elections and chose the future of their own state.
• Women’s Suffrage Movement The struggle for women suffrage augmented in the middle of the nineteenth century with the establishment of diverse associations. The formation of the International Council of Women occurred in the year 1888.
• Views on Women’s Suffrage by E.Kuhlman, L.Woodworth-Ney and E.Foner They have presented similar examples as factors in the enactment of women’s voting rights; these examples include the participation of women in wars at the home front and the contribution women made to build the […]
• Women’s Suffrage in America Suffrage is the right to vote, and women’s suffrage is the right of women to take part in the process of voting.
• Women’s Suffrage Discussion The entrenchment of equal rights of women and men and more noticeably the right of every American woman to vote came into being after the enactment of the nineteenth amendment.
• How Did Women Change Their Stature in Society: Women’s Suffrage The status of women in society has been considerably changed and, now, women take leading positions in different spheres: women in education choose proper approaches to study children and help them develop their skills; women […]
• Partisan Competition and Women’s Suffrage in the United States
• The First World War and Women’s Suffrage in Britain
• The Right for Women’s Suffrage
• Emily Stowe and the Women’s Suffrage Movement of Canada
• Reconstruction, Progressivism, Labor Unions and Women’s Suffrage
• Did Women’s Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government
• Methods Used in the Women’s Suffrage Movement
• Women’s Suffrage Movement Throughout the History of the United States
• Latin American Feminism and Women’s Suffrage
• Political Practices, Women’s Suffrage and Changes in California
• Municipal Housekeeping: The Impact of Women’s Suffrage on Public Education
• Reconstruction Through Black Suffrage and Women’s Rights
• What Was the Women’s Suffrage Movement, and How Did It Change America
• The National League for Opposing Women Suffrage
• The Women Suffrage Movement in the United States History and the Ability to Vote
• Men, Women, and the Ballot Woman Suffrage in the United States
• Feminism and Its Impact on Women’s Suffrage Movement
• Local North West Indiana Groups in Support of Women’s Suffrage
• Ireland’s Women’s Suffrage Movement
• Historical Events Surrounding the Women Suffrage Movement in the U.S.
• Link Between Women’s Suffrage and Education
• Californian Women Suffrage During the Election of 1912
• Women’s Suffrage Movement During the Progressive Era
• Campaigns for Women Suffrage and Their Effectiveness
• The National American Women Suffrage Association
• The Reasons Behind the Development of Women’s Suffrage Campaign
• Women Leaving the Playpen: The Emancipating Role of Female Suffrage
• The Pros and Cons of the Women’s Suffrage Movement
• The American Legal System: Women’s Suffrage Movement
• Why Suffrage for American Women Was Not Enough
• 19th Century Women’s Suffrage in Europe
• The Foundation and Impact of the Women’s Suffrage Movement in the United States
• Gender Roles, Sexuality, and Women’s Suffrage
• Frederick Douglass and the Fight for Women’s Suffrage
• Woman Suffrage: The Issue of Women’s Voting Rights
• The Life During the Women’s Suffrage
• The Women’s Suffrage and the Role of Women in Society
• 20th Century Women’s Suffrage Movement
• Chartism: Women’s Suffrage and National Political Movement
• The Fight for Universal Women ‘s Suffrage
• Women’s Suffrage and the Role of Women in Society
• The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Historical Perspective
• The Second Great Awakening and the Women’s Suffrage Movement: The Democratic Deals
• Campaign for Women’s Suffrage in 1870
• Women Suffrage Citizenship and Be Respected Just the Same as Men
• Early 20th Century Temperance and Women’s Suffrage
• Women’s Lasting Battle Towards Suffrage
• Katie Stanton and Susan Anthony Gave Women’s Right to Suffrage a Voice
• How Did the Industrial Revolution Influence Women Suffrage
• What Is a Consequence of Women’s Suffrage in New Zealand?
• When Did the Women’s Suffrage Movement Start and End?
• What Was the Main Purpose of the Women’s Suffrage Movement?
• How Did WWI Have an Impact on Women’s Suffrage?
• Was F.D. Roosevelt for or Against Women’s Suffrage?
• What Was the First Women’s Suffrage Movement?
• Who Ended Women’s Suffrage?
• What Changed After Women’s Suffrage?
• What Did the Women’s Movement Accomplish?
• Which Amendment Allowed For Women’s Suffrage?
• Did President Franklin Pierce Support Women’s Suffrage?
• Did Any States Vote Against Women’s Suffrage?
• What Was the Impact of the Women’s Suffrage Movement?
• What Was the Biggest Accomplishment of the Women’s Movement?
• What Were the Causes and Effects of Women’s Suffrage Movement in the US?
• Did Women’s Suffrage Cause the Collapse of Western Civilization?
• When Did the Women’s Suffrage First Start in India?
• Why Was Women’s Suffrage Granted in the West Before the East?
• What Were Some Challenges Women Faced During Women’s Suffrage?
• How Did the Civil Right Act Influence Women’s Suffrage, or How Are They Similar?
• Who Was the President During the Women’s Suffrage Movement?
• What Is the Cost of Progress in Women’s Suffrage Movement?
• How Did Irish Women Relate to the British Women’s Suffrage Movement?
• Why Was the Women’s Suffrage Movement So Important?
• What Were the Three Major Events in the Women’s Rights Movement?
• Who Started the Women’s Suffrage Movement and Why?
• What Is Controversial About Women’s Suffrage?
• Why Did the Women’s Suffrage Movement Fail?
• Which Party Voted for Women’s Suffrage?
• What Were Major Issues in the Women’s Movement?
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The campaign for women’s suffrage has been the most visible feature of that broader historical movement for ending  women’s subordination to men that  we now call feminism.  Demands  for  women’s  vote  and  full citizenship have arisen as part and parcel of efforts to democratize  political  participation, during  the  transition from absolutist monarchies to democratic republics. These efforts first began in western Europe and  North America  where citizenship,  including  the right to vote, was accorded first to adult men, initially as propertied heads  of households  and  increasingly, from the mid-nineteenth century onward,  as male individuals.  Advocates  of women’s suffrage  demand that  the franchise  be accorded  without  distinction  of sex, in parallel  with other  campaigns  that  argued  for ending  exclusions  based  on  property  qualifications (i.e., class) or race. They argued that women constitute half the human  race and  must not be excluded from political decision-making.

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Get 10% off with 24start discount code, 1.    women’s suffrage and democratization.

In some European societies, critiques of women’s subordination—by women and men alike—antedated by several centuries the demands for women’s suffrage that erupted  with the advent of the French  revolution in 1789. From that time forth, however, voting quickly became a symbol of full citizenship and personal independence—for women as well as for men. Women’s suffrage advocates saw the vote not as a goal in itself but  rather  as the key to all other  reforms,  a means for women to acquire the political power necessary to improve or transform their disadvantaged situation in the short run (primarily through improved educational and economic opportunities), and, in the long run, of dismantling the laws, structures, attitudes, practices, and knowledge that undergirded male dominance. Women’s suffrage advocates argued that women’s participation in community decision-making could be effective at various levels: in school boards, in workers’  or  business  councils,  in local,  regional,  or provincial affairs. But the most desirable and seriously contested form of voting in the newly emerging representative governments  was at the national, federal, or parliamentary level. It was there that questions about  the  national  budget  and  taxation, and  about war, peace, and social and economic policy were being decided.  It was also there—where  power,  authority, and control  over collective resources were most concentrated—that the strongest  resistance to woman suffrage would be found. The problem  suffrage advocates faced in these new male-dominated regimes was to convince already  established  and  exclusively male bodies to acknowledge women’s capabilities and equality and to admit them to full citizenship, not as a privilege  but  as  a  right.  In  virtually  all  countries women suffrage advocates included some sympathetic men. In some countries,  however, anti-suffrage  forces mobilized substantial numbers  of supporters of both sexes  on  the  grounds   that   women  should   not  be permitted  in, or were unsuited  for, public affairs.  In their view, public business was exclusively men’s business, and women, as legal dependents,  should consider   their   interests   represented   by  husbands, fathers, or guardians.

Despite  very  substantial resistance,  the  twentieth century  ultimately   witnessed  the  mass  enfranchisement  of  women  throughout the  world,  along  with proclamations of (and sometimes even the granting of) their  equal  legal, educational, and  economic  rights. The  United   Nations   Convention  on  the  Political Rights of Women (1952) firmly underscored women’s equal  right  to  vote.  Only  in  authoritarian  societies where political  representation and  community  decision-making have not been permitted  has the demand for woman suffrage been muted.  At the beginning of the twenty-first century, only a few sovereign states in the Middle East, such as Saudi Arabia  (where no one votes)  and  Kuwait,  have unconditionally refused  to enfranchise women. What political power the vote actually   provides   to   women   or   men  in  different countries,  however,  varies greatly,  depending  on the size and  strength  of  political  parties,  the  modes  of election, and many other factors.

2.    History Of Women’s Suffrage

The first explicit arguments  for women’s participation in  political  decision-making   were  expressed  at  the outset   of  the  French   Revolution,  initially  by  the Marquis  de Condorcet in 1787 and  1790, and  in a number  of anonymous pamphlets  that  turned  these arguments into demands to be admitted to exercise the droit de cite, denouncing  masculine  aristocracy  and challenging men’s right to make the rules for women. As revolutionary French  assemblies proceeded to declare the Rights of Man,  to draft constitutions and reshape old laws for a new society, individual women such as Olympe  de Gouges  and  men such as Pierre Guyomar insisted  on  women’s  full inclusion  in the decision-making  process. After four years of resisting eloquent arguments for women’s inclusion, revolutionary  political  leaders shut  women out  of political life  on  the  grounds   that   women  and  government should not be mixed, an argument that had centuriesold roots. These demands  were widely repeated  in the 1830s and  again,  in early 1848, when leaders  of the revolutionary Second Republic decreed universal (manhood) suffrage, and a group  of Parisian  women immediately organized to protest their exclusion. Deliberate  choices of words from ‘male’ to the more subtle  ‘en age viril’ signaled the exclusion of women from political affairs, and campaigns ensued to change the  wording   of  electoral   laws,  as  from  ‘male’  to ‘person’ or to stipulate  ‘and women’ following ‘men,’ or  to  add  the  term  ‘of  both  sexes’ to  qualify  the masculine ‘Francais.’  Despite  these early beginnings, however,  French  women  only  acquired  the  vote  in 1944; the French campaign for woman suffrage began earlier than elsewhere and lasted far longer. Resistance to  women  in positions  of authority was deeply embedded  in France.  There  the  ‘Rights  of Man’  were constantly   qualified   on  grounds   of  ‘public  utility’ when it came to women’s rights.

In  the  English-speaking   world,   governing   elites began  to  re-examine  their  electoral  laws in the  late eighteenth and  early nineteenth  centuries.  Demands for women’s suffrage were strongly  expressed during the 1820s. The Reform  Act of 1832 in England added the word ‘male’ to qualify electors, even as it broadened the franchise greatly, and in the next few decades a number  of other  European countries  moved to do the same. The campaign  for a Second Reform  Act in the  late  1860s mobilized  women  to  seek  inclusion. John  Stuart  Mill  brought their  demands  to  change ‘male’ to ‘person’ to the floor of Parliament during his brief  tenure   as  representative  of  Westminster;   although  parliamentary suffrage was not forthcoming, qualified women did obtain  a local vote in 1869. The campaigns  in England  would continue  into the twentieth century, when they rose to a new peak, thanks to the combined efforts of the National Union of Woman Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) and the more militant activities of the Women’s Social and Political  Union (WSPU). The spectacular  and extensive campaigns of the WSPU  from  1906 through 1913, featuring  mass parades,  public demonstrations, occasional  incidents of  violence  against  state  property, and  the  imprisonment   and  force-feeding  of  suffrage  militants   by British authorities gained world media attention and set a benchmark by which all other  campaigns  were subsequently  judged.  The  cause  of  woman  suffrage became a decisive political issue for both England and Ireland,  and  Irish  suffrage  advocates  did  not  soon forgive their parliamentary deputies, who in 1912 sacrificed  the  cause  of  British  women’s  suffrage  in order   to  obtain   Irish   home-rule.   Ironically,   Irish women did receive the vote along with English women who met certain property or educational qualifications in 1918; ‘universal’ suffrage including all women did not  become  a  reality  in the  United  Kingdom  until 1928.

In  the  United  States,  democracy  without  women began to emerge in the 1820s, as various states slowly lifted  property  qualifications on  white  male  voters. The  demand  for  the  vote  was a  key feature  of the ‘Declaration of Sentiments’ issued by the first women’s rights convention,  held in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. Because US electoral laws were made at the state level, not at the federal level, suffrage advocates faced the challenge of organizing  suffrage campaigns  on a state-by-state basis, following their exclusion from the federal amendment that enfranchised  black men after the Civil War. The territory  of Wyoming enfranchised women in 1869, and Utah  territory  in 1870, but these proved  exceptions  until  new western  states  granted votes to  women  in the 1890s. Resistance  to  woman suffrage remained  strong  in the eastern,  central,  and southern   states.   In  the  United   States,   racial   and immigration   issues  complicated   the   problem   still further   and   from   the  passage   of  the  Fourteenth Amendment   to  the  Civil  Rights  Movement   of  the 1960s, even black  men’s vote in southern  states  was often qualified by literacy requirements, poll taxes, or threats   of  physical  violence.  Finally,   in  the  early twentieth century, suffrage leaders decided to attempt the federal  amendment approach again;  following  a huge prosuffrage  campaign, reminiscent of the British suffrage  movement,  Congress  passed  the  nineteenth amendment,  which  was  successfully  ratified   by  a majority of states and became law in 1920. Democracy, even  without   women,   was  not   an  unproblematic development, even in the US; indeed, few nation-states had  wholeheartedly  embraced   the  principle  of  full democratic  participation in government  by the end of the nineteenth  century, even for all men.

The first nation-states to enact full woman suffrage were New Zealand  (1893) and  two Australian states (1894, 1899). Originally British colonies, these South Pacific outposts  of the British Empire—like  the western  states  of  the  USA—proved more  favorable  to women’s citizenship than the older, more settled, and more authoritarian societies of Europe  and Asia.

In  some  twentieth-century continental European countries,  where the demographic balance  had  tilted and  adult  women  began  to  outnumber men  significantly,  the  prospect  of convincing  men in power  to enfranchise  women  became  even more  complicated. This   complication  was   compounded  by   concern among ruling elites over Marxist-socialist enthusiasm for  enfranchising   all  women  along  with  all  men, irrespective  of social class (endorsed  by the  Second International in  the  1890s); the  Socialist  Women’s International endorsed  unrestricted suffrage  for women in 1907. It was further compounded by longstanding concerns among  otherwise liberal, even progressive men that women would vote as the priests dictated,  to the detriment  of progressive (often  anticlerical)   secularizing   regimes   (especially  after   the Roman  Catholic  Church  muted its earlier opposition to  woman  suffrage  following  World  War  I). Meanwhile,  Finnish  women  obtained the  vote  alongside their menfolk in 1906, when Finland obtained a degree of independence  from  the Russian  Empire;  by 1913 Norwegian  women were also fully enfranchised,  followed by Danish  women in 1915. Suffrage campaign strategies  would differ markedly,  depending  on whether men had already been enfranchised in a particular setting, and to what degree.

3.    The International Woman Suffrage Alliance

The International Woman  Suffrage Alliance (IWSA), founded  in 1902, brought national  organizations of European and  North American  women  together  to support  each other’s campaigns  in a more politically astute,  systematic  fashion.  By 1913, the  IWSA  had affiliated societies from most European countries (including Bulgaria,  Hungary,  Romania, Russia,  and Serbia), and from the far-flung corners of the British Commonwealth—Australia, Canada, and South Africa. The  1920s would  see a remarkable extension  of IWSA’s network,  to  include  delegations  from  Latin America, Egypt, China, and other non-Western countries.  But  the  organization’s leadership  became increasingly torn between the need to focus on suffrage in countries  where women did not yet have the vote, and the need to advance progressive women’s agenda for change in the countries  where they could already vote. Issues of married women’s nationality, combating  state-regulated prostitution and  the  traffic  in women  and  children,  and  fostering  peace  were  the focus of considerable  activity  by IWSA’s board  and member  organizations. Controversy over  protective legislation for women workers vs. absolute equality in the  workplace  led to  schism  in the  organization  in 1926, and to a reorientation of focus.

4.    Women’s Suffrage From The 1920s To The 1950s

In some countries,  women sometimes gained the vote with far less of a struggle than in France,  England,  or the United  States.  After  World  War  I, for instance, new governments accorded woman suffrage as part of universal suffrage in a number of European countries, defeated during the war, that had acquired new, progressive regimes—Weimar Germany, the Austrian Republic,  Hungary,  etc. The Russian  Revolution in 1917 brought women the vote, but the subsequent rule of the Communist Party ensured that they would have no choice in whom to vote for. Western and Central European political parties began to develop an interest in women voters, at the same time attempting to keep them at arm’s length from party decision-making positions or candidacy for office. The various socialist parties elected the most women to office, but even then their leadership  was reluctant  to allow women representatives  much  leeway in deviating  from  the  party line, which continued to insist on noncooperation with ‘bourgeois’ feminists.   Catholic  political parties  were equally reticent when it came to incorporating women into  party  leadership.  In  a time when adult  women very often outnumbered men, all parties were understandably interested  in whether  or not women might vote  as a bloc.  Several initiatives  to  form  women’s political parties and coalitions (e.g., England, Sweden, Austria) did not succeed, and overall it seems to be the case  that   during   the  early  years,  women’s  voting patterns  resembled those of men, and often they were somewhat more conservative. This did not deter fascist governments from striking out against elections in general, and in particular, against the ostensible threat of women’s active participation in political life.

In Latin American countries, where voting, even for men, was often restricted  by birth,  property, literacy, marital status, or racial qualifications, suffrage became a priority  for  women  in some  countries  and  not  in others. Woman suffrage became an important issue in Cuba, Uruguay,  and Brazil, and in Mexico during the late 1920s and early 1930s, but seemed less urgent  in other Latin American states, where social justice issues were paramount concerns for political women. Miller (1991, p. 96) observes that ‘effective universal suffrage, male and  female, did not  exist anywhere  until  after World War II.’ But Lavrin (1995) emphasizes the breadth and importance of woman suffrage campaigns in Argentina,  Uruguay,  and  Chile,  accompanied by the emergence of women’s parties.

Only after 1945 did women’s suffrage find a place in the political  cultures  of most  Asian  countries.  Indonesia and  Japan  enfranchised  women in 1945, while Chinese women gained the vote in 1947. India enfranchised   women   in   1949,   following   independence (though  limited suffrage for some women had existed since 1919). Successful decolonization campaigns have led to women’s enfranchisement in many other countries.  (A comprehensive  chronology  of women’s suffrage can be found in Daley and Nolan  1994).

5.    Scholarship On The Women’s Suffrage Movement

Scholarship  on  the  history  of the  women’s  suffrage movement has expanded substantially since the 1960s, thanks in part to the development of social history and the inclusion of women’s movements  in the study of political movements  and collective action and also to the  dramatic  growth  of women’s studies  as an  academic field. Contextualization of the various national and local suffrage movements  has been an important objective of recent studies, along with comparative studies of the international women’s movement (Rupp 1997). Scholars  have  also  published  comprehensive biographical studies  of  some  of  the  internationally prominent suffrage movement leaders, including Elizabeth   Cady   Stanton,  Harriot  Stanton  Blatch, Carrie Chapman Catt,  Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Hubertine  Auclert,   and   Aletta   Jacobs,   and   have pressed for the recognition of women’s suffrage leaders in  national   and  international  biographical dictionaries.  Others   have  begun  to  examine  the  cultural history   (theatre,   literature,  arts,   campaign   propaganda,  public manifestations, even trials) of the most expansive woman  suffrage campaigns.  The literature on  the British  and  American  suffrage  movements  is voluminous;  only the most recent works will be listed below (bibliographies in these works will lead readers to the earlier  and  classic works;  see also the bibliographies  in Offen 2000 and  Daley  and  Nolan  1994). Documentary films have brought the British and American suffrage campaigns to the attention of English-speaking   television   audiences   (MacKenzie 1988, Ward et al. 1999), and commemorative museum exhibits organized  in London and  various  American states have attracted sizeable audiences. In other countries the movement for women’s suffrage has also begun to generate a growing historical  literature, in a variety of languages, even as political scientists debate the  results  that  woman  suffrage  has  had  in various political  contexts.  Comparative analyses of women’s suffrage  movements   are  still  in  their   early  stages (see Bolt  1993 and  Bader-Zaar 1994), and  a global assessment  of the  long-term  significance  and  consequences  of  women’s  suffrage  remains  to  be  undertaken.

Bibliography:

• Bader-Zaar B 1994 Vergleichende Aspekte  der Geschichte des Frauenstimmrechts in Grossbritannien, den Vereinigten Staaten von America, Osterreich, Deutschland und Belgien, 1860–1920. Ph.D.  University  of Vienna
• Bolt C 1993 The Women’s Movements in the United States and Britain  from  the  1790s to  the  University  of  Massachusetts Press, Amherst,  MA
• Bosch M, Kloosterman A (eds.) 1990 Politics and Friendship: Letters   from  the  International  Woman   Suffrage   Alliance, 1902–1942. Ohio State University  Press, Columbus, OH
• Capel R M 1992 El Sufragio femenino en la Segunda Republica. Comunidad de Madrid, Madrid
• Cohen Y, Thebaud F (eds.) 1998 Feminismes et identites nationales: Les Processus d’integration des femmes au politique. Centre Jacques Cartier,  Lyon, France
• Corbin A, Lalouette J, Riot-Sarcey  M (eds.) 1997 Les Femmes dans la cite. Creaphis,  Grane,  France
• Daley C, Nolan M (eds.) 1994 Suffrage and Beyond: International Feminist Perspectives. Auckland University  Press, Auckland; New York University Press, New York; Pluto Press, London
• DuBois E C 1997 Harriot  Stanton  Blatch and the Winning  of Woman Suffrage. Yale University  Press, New Haven, CT
• DuBois E C 1998 Woman Suffrage  and Women’s Rights.  New York University  Press, New York
• Fagoaga C 1985 La Voz y el voto de las mujeres: El sufragismo en Espana, 1877–1931. Icaria,  Barcelona,  Spain
• Faure C 1997 Encyclopedie politique et historique des femmes: Europe, Amerique de Nord. Presses Universitaires  de France, Paris
• Grimshaw P 1987 [orig. 1972] Women’s Suffrage in New Zealand. Auckland University   Press,  Auckland;   Oxford   University Press, Oxford,  UK
• Hardemeier S 1997 Fruhe Frauenstimmrechtsbewegung  in der Schweiz  (1890–1930): Argumente,  Strategien,  Netzwerk  und Gegenbewegung. Chronos, Zurich, Switzerland
• Hause S C,  Kenney  A R  1984 Women’s  Suffrage  and Social Politics  in the French Third    Princeton  University Press, Princeton,  NJ
• Holton S S 1986 Feminism and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage and Reform Politics in Britain, 1900–1918. Cambridge  University Press, Cambridge,  UK
• Holton S S  1996  Suffrage  Days:  Stories  from  the  Women’s Suffrage Movement. Routledge, London
• Joannou M,   Purvis   J  (eds.)  1999  The   Women’s   Suffrage Movement: New Feminist Perspectives. Manchester University Press, Manchester, UK
• Lavrin A  1995  Women,   Feminism,   and  Social   Change  in Argentina,   Chile,  and  Uruguay,  1890–1940.  University   of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NB
• MacKenzie M 1988 Shoulder to Shoulder: A Documentary. The Stirring History  of the Militant    Vintage Books, New York [Accompanies the documentary film]
• Miller F 1991 Latin American Women and the Search for Social Justice. University   Press  of  New  England,   Hanover   and London
• Murphy C  1989 The  Women’s  Suffrage  Movement  and Irish Society  in the Early  Twentieth    Temple  University Press, Philadelphia
• Offen K M 2000 European Feminisms, 1700–1950: A  Political History. Stanford University  Press, Stanford, CA
• Oldfield A  1992  Woman  Suffrage  in  Australia:  a  Gift  or  a Struggle. Cambridge  University  Press, Cambridge,  UK
• Prentice A,  Bourne  P,  Brandt  G C,  Light  B, Mitchinson W, Black N 1988 Canadian Women:  A History.  Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,  Toronto
• Rupp L J 1997 Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Princeton  University  Press,  Princeton, NJ
• Sepe C, Izzi Di Paolo P (eds.) 1997 Il voto alle donne cinquant’anni dopo. Ufficio Progretti Donna, Commune  di Roma
• Smith P  1996  Feminism  and  the  Third  Republic:  Women’s Political  and Civil Rights  in France, 1918–1945. Clarendon Press, Oxford,  UK
• Van Wingerden S A 1999 The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Britain, 1866–1928. Macmillan,  Houndmills, UK
• Ward G C, Saxton M, Gordon A D, Dubois E C, Burns K 1999 Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan  B. Anthony.  An  Illustrated  History.  Knopf,  New York

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Women’s suffrage research guide.

To mark International Women’s Day, we’re thrilled to share our latest research guide on women’s suffrage. In 1918, the Representation of the People Act gave the vote to all women in Britain who were over the age of 30 and met the minimum property qualification. Ten years later, the Equal Franchise Act gave women equal voting rights to men so that all women over the age of 21 could vote.   

  In this guide, we spotlight the personal papers of a range of individuals who contributed to heated debates about whether women should have the vote. From correspondence to diaries, ephemera to government papers, and everything in between.

This guide is also available in pdf format

Else Headlam-Morley (1865-1950)  

Else Headlam-Morley, HDLM 7

The pianist and composer Elisabeth ‘Else’ Headlam-Morley was an active suffrage campaigner. She belonged to several organisations including the Women’s Social and Political Union and the Women’s Tax Resistance League. Her papers, containing an array of ephemera, speeches, and writing, are catalogued in her husband James Headlam-Morley’s collection.  

HDLM 2/2/17 : The Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), 1911-15, including:  

• the menu card for a commemoration dinner for suffragette prisoners  
• flyers and leaflets  
• order of march for the women’s procession in London, June 1911  
• annual reports of the Union and also the Wimbledon branch
• letters from the Union  
• pamphlet of ‘suffrage speeches from the dock’ (taken from a conspiracy trial at the Old Bailey, May 1912)  
• official programme and instructions for the suffragette demonstration in Hyde Park, July 1912  
• copy of Else’s official address to Emmeline Pankhurst, Hon. Treasurer of the WSPU, appealing to her to disassociate the WSPU from acts of violence
• issues of ‘The Suffragette’, May 1913 and May 1914  
• Christabel Pankhurst’s speech on international militancy, delivered at Carnegie Hall, New York, Jan 1915, with a summary of her visit to the United States and Canada.  

HDLM 2/2/18 : Issues of Britannia, official newsletter of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), 1915-17.  

HDLM 2/2/19 : Women’s Tax Resistance League, 1913-14: Mainly pamphlets and flyers issued by the League, a non-party association of constitutional and militant suffragists dedicated to resisting Imperial Taxation. Includes a draft of a paper by Else advocating the withholding of taxes.  

HDLM 1/4/10 : Correspondence, January 1913 – November 1914: Includes a statement by Else advocating the suffragette campaign of tax resistance, if amendments to the Franchise Bill were turned down.

Margaret ‘Maye’ Dilke (1857-1914)

Margaret Dilke, known as Maye, was a member of several women’s suffrage organisations. These included the National Society for Women’s Suffrage and later the Central National Society for Women’s Suffrage. She became heavily involved in the work of these organisations as an executive committee member and treasurer.

REND 7/1 , Letters to Maye Dilke, 1884-94: Correspondents include: Baker, Manchester National Society for Women’s Suffrage re municipal seats for women in Ireland; S C Burton, invitation to write on Women’s Suffrage with W Woodall; W Woodall re book on Women’s Suffrage and Infants Bill.

REND 7/2 , 1883: Manuscripts by Maye Dilke on women’s suffrage.

Virginia Mary Crawford (1862-1948)  

Virginia Crawford was educated partly in Lausanne, where she acquired an interest in literature and a talent for European languages. After her divorce in 1886, she converted to Catholicism and supported herself through prolific work as a journalist, including writing for the newspaper editor W. T. Stead; translating; historical research; and social work. During the interwar period she served as a Labour Party councillor on Marylebone Borough Council and campaigned for equal franchise rights for women through the Catholic Women’s Suffrage Society.  

  REND 12/11/1-4 : Articles by Virginia Crawford on religious, social, and cultural subjects, c. 1890s-1940s.  

William T Stead (1849-1912)

The newspaper editor William T. Stead frequently wrote about, and supported the work of suffrage campaigners. Stead’s collection includes his correspondence with several prominent activists, including:  

• STED  1/26 : S. Gertrude Ford (Nov 1911)  
• STED 1/40 : Annie E. Holdsworth (Jan 1892)  
• STED 1/50 : Annie Besant (Feb 1888). [See also STED 6/2 for Stead’s character sketch of Besant]  
• STED 1/59 : Christabel Pankhurst (Feb 1904)  

William Bull (1863-1931)  

William Bull, BULL 3/2

The solicitor, MP, and diarist William Bull is known for his support of women’s suffrage. Before the First World War, he was a vocal member of the Conservative and Unionist Women’s Franchise Association. He was also in regular correspondence with leading suffrage campaigners, including Sylvia Pankhurst and Christabel Pankhurst, who thanked him for paying a visit to the militant organiser Vera Wentworth in Holloway Prison in 1908.  

BULL 3/16 : Diary and correspondence, July – December 1907 : Correspondence mainly between Bull and his wife, some of which describe debates in the House of Commons; including two letters from Christabel Pankhurst about his support in the campaign for votes for women.  

BULL 3/17 : Diary and correspondence, January – June 1908 : Including letters from Sylvia and Christabel Pankhurst concerning the votes for women campaign.  

BULL 3/18 : Diary and correspondence, July – December 1908 : Letter from Christabel Pankhurst thanking Bull for visiting suffragette Vera Wentworth in Holloway Prison.  

BULL 4/7 : Diary and correspondence, January – May 1913 : Includes theatre programmes; menus; letter of thanks to Bull from the Conservative and Unionist Women’s Franchise Association for his ‘strenuous support’.  

BULL 5/11 : Diary and correspondence, January – June 1924 : Including correspondence with a suffragette on the gradual introduction of votes for women.  

Suffrage correspondence in other collections  

AMEL 2/5/8 : Private and personal letters to Conservative politician Leopold Amery, 1901: Katharine Oliver on women’s suffrage; letter from Leopold Amery to Mrs. Humphry Ward [Mary Ward] on women’s suffrage.  

  AMEL 6/1/80 : Press cuttings, 1906-11: Subjects include Leopold Amery’s part in the suffragette debate.  

  AMEL 6/3/31 : Personal letters, 1911-13: Leopold’s view of the suffragette movement.  

  AHKY 1/1/46 : Letters from Cabinet Secretary Sir Maurice Hankey to Henry Hankey, 1933: Subjects covered include opinions and observations on the danger of votes for women.  

  FISR 16/3 : Letters from Admiral 1st Lord Fisher to George Lambert, 1916: Subjects include universal suffrage as a way of getting rid of the Government.  

Winston Churchill (1874-1965)  

Winston Churchill’s views on suffrage changed throughout his career. Churchill, in his younger years, felt that women should not vote, writing that they were ‘well represented by their fathers, brothers, and husbands’. However in 1904, Churchill voted in favour of a female suffrage bill. Churchill’s collections are useful for not only illuminating his own changing views on suffrage, but also the range of campaigners who sent him correspondence on the subject.  

• CHAR 4/2 , 14 Jan 1904 – 22 Dec 1904 : Correspondence including the Women’s Social and Political Union.  
• CHAR 4/4 , 2 Jul 1905 – 23 Dec 1905 : Correspondents include William Royle, Chairman of the Manchester Liberal Association on demonstrations by suffragettes, including Annie Kenney and Christabel Pankhurst, against Sir Edward Grey.  
• CHAR 5/15 : 2 Jul 1905 – 23 Dec 1905: Correspondents include the Dundee Women’s Suffrage Society.  
• CHAR 2/29/52 , 3 Mar 1907: Letter from Walter McLaren to Winston Churchill. Urges him not to go back on his support for women’s suffrage.  
• CHAR 4/13 , Jan 1907 – Dec 1907: Dr J Dulberg about the Manchester Jewish community’s reaction to female suffrage.  
• CHAR 2/34/21 , 14 April 1908: Letter from Lady Dorothy Howard (en route for Castle Howard, York) to Winston Churchill apologising for her importunate behaviour but stressing her commitment to women’s rights and hoping for his support.  
• CHAR 2/34/65 , 14 Jun 1908: Letter from Lady Dorothy Howard (Pudsey) to Winston Churchill. Disassociates herself from the ‘rowdyism’ of the Women’s Freedom League and describing the gloomy prospects for the Liberals in the Pudsey by-election.  
• CHAR 12/3/62-64 , 1910: Transcript of a letter from Alex Ballantine, a member of the Men’s Political Union for Women’s Enfranchisement to Winston Churchill.   
• CHAR 2/52/22 , 16 May 1911: Letter from Constance Lytton to Winston Churchill urging him to support the Conciliation (Women’s Franchise) Bill as a measure on which all parties can agree.   
• CHAR 28/117/100 , 15 Oct 1912: Copy of a letter from Winston Churchill to Lord Northcliffe thanking him for the present of a stick to be used against the suffragettes.

Government papers  

CHAR 2/47 : Public and Political: General: Women’s Suffrage; Conciliation Bill: Correspondence and papers, 19 Oct 1909 – 16 Nov 1910.  

  CHAR 22/155/119 : ‘The Franchise Question: Memorandum by the Chancellor of the Exchequer’, 8 Mar 1927.  

  CHAR 22/156 : Official: Cabinet: papers 81 to 100, Feb-Mar 1927: Includes papers by various individuals on subjects including equal franchise and the effect of the enfranchisement of more women.  

  CHAR 22/183 : Official: Cabinet: Franchise, 24 Apr – 7 Nov 1927: Includes various papers on the subject of the franchise.  

Clementine Churchill (1885-1977)

Clementine Churchill, CSCT 5/2/14

Winston Churchill’s wife, Clementine was a long-term supporter of women’s suffrage and women’s education. In March 1912, Clementine was so appalled after reading a letter published in The Times by the anti-suffragist Almroth Wright that she penned a sarcastic reply, noting how what was at stake was not ‘should women have votes?’ but ‘ought women not to be abolished altogether?’. Ironically adopting Almroth’s language, she signed off her rebuttal ‘One of the Doomed’.  

  For more on this exchange, see MCHL 5/8/106 : Extracts from The Times and other sources relating to the Churchill family.  

See also MCHL 5/1/219 : ‘Clementine Churchill’: general correspondence, Jan 1975 – Jun 1977, Margaret Thatcher on Clementine Churchill’s early support for women’s suffrage, hoping that one day there would be a female Churchill in the House of Commons.  

• MCHL 5/8/101 , May-Jun 1908 : Extracts from The Times and other sources relating to the Churchill family including encounters with suffragettes in Dundee.  
• CHAR 12/3/49 , 9 Dec 1910 : Newspaper cutting from ‘Votes for Women’ of an article entitled ‘Why I struck at Mr Churchill’ by Hugh Franklin.   
• CHAR 8/301 , 1931: Research notes, proofs and cuttings relating to various articles in The Strand Magazine. Includes ‘Humours of electioneering’ on Winston Churchill’s experience of local elections and the suffragettes.  
• CHAR 21/12 , 4 Feb – July 1909: Press cuttings on speeches by Winston Churchill on female suffrage.  
• CHAR 2/183/46-47 , 12 Mar 1925: Pages from the ‘Patriot’ including marked letter from Nesta Webster complaining about political bias in the BBC on the issue of female suffrage.  
• BRDW I Press 4 Cartoons , Apr 1905 – Nov 1906: Cartoons on female suffrage.  
• BRDW I Press 15 Cartoons , Sept 1907 – May 1908 : Cartoons on female suffrage and Socialism.

Suffrage mentions in other collections  

• AVHL II 5/78 : Margaret Keynes Diary, 1907-8: Typescript with some annotations concerning family life, visits, social events references to Frances Darwin and Maynard Keynes and women’s suffrage.  
• WLMT 1/37 : Phyllis Willmott Diary, 25 Jan-24 May 1968 : mentions an exhibition at Congress House marking the 50th anniversary of votes for women.  
• WCHL 15/2/36 : Interview with Richard Pankhurst, 1991-92 [son of Emmeline Pankhurst] : The records include transcripts, video and audio tapes of interviews with people regarding their (or their relatives’) personal recollections of Sir Winston Churchill or their experiences of events related to Sir Winston’s career.  
• SOBA : Audio podcasts for Women’s Parliamentary Radio, conducted by Boni Sones with contributions by Jackie Ashley, Deborah McGurran, and Linda Fairbrother. The first set of 76 interviews covering a range of issues from the centenary of women’s suffrage to Brexit debates.  

For articles on the women’s suffrage movement in our collections, see:  

• HMTN 2/1 : Cutting of article ‘The Patient Suffragette’ by Sylvia Hayman, on Margery Corbett Ashby.  
• DRAX 1/30 : Article in ‘The Suffragette’ by Christabel Pankhurst.  
• CHWL/PE 41 (box 14) : Press cutting from the Western Daily Press, December 1909 on the court proceedings after the assault on Winston Churchill by Miss Theresa Garnett, Bristol suffragist.  
• HSBR 2/3 : The Vote, The Organ of the Women’s Freedom League, 25th March 1932.  

Find out more  

• Crawford, Elizabeth. The women’s suffrage movement: A reference guide 1866-1928. Routledge, 2003.  
• The National Archives Suffrage Research Guide      
• Women’s Library digital collections  
• Churchill Archives Centre research guides  

  By Cherish Watton, Archives Assistant, March 2023

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• Women's Suffrage
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The following list features publications related to the suffrage movement. Please note that this list is not exhaustive and that many of the periodicals have been digitized and are available online in Women: Transnational Networks . This database requires a Harvard ID to access.

Tip: You can also use the HOLLIS catalog to search for periodicals relating to suffrage. This can be helpful as some titles may not yet be available online.

• Start in Harvard's HOLLIS catalog with an advanced search.
• Enter the term "suffrage" or another keyword in the keyword search field.
• Limit your search results to "Journals" in the "Resource Type" field.
• In the "Search Scope" field, select "Schlesinger" from the drop down menu.
• Click the "Search" button.

Sample search results:

• Periodicals/Journals
• The American Suffragette The official organ of the National Progressive Woman Suffrage Union. Published monthly in New York, New York. 1909-1911 [Digital content can be found in Women: Transnational Networks . This database requires a Harvard ID to access.]
• Anti-Suffrage Notes Published in Cambridge, Massachusetts by the Cambridge Anti-Suffrage Association. 1917-1918. [ Issues no.158 (1917:June 12)-no.175 (1918:Jan. 21), with gaps, of Anti-Suffrage Notes have been digitized and are accessible without a Harvard ID .]
• The Anti-Suffragist Published in Albany, New York by the New York State Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage. 1908-1912. [Digital content can be found in Women: Transnational Networks . This database requires a Harvard ID to access.]
• National Suffrage News Published in New York, New York by the National American Woman Suffrage Association. 1917. Digital content for this publication can be found under its parent publication, National American Woman Suffrage Association Headquarters Newsletter at the link below. [Digital content can be found in Women: Transnational Networks . This database requires a Harvard ID to access.]
• The New Voter Published in Baltimore, Maryland by the Equal Suffrage League. 1910-1911. [Digital content can be found in Women: Transnational Networks . This database requires a Harvard ID to access.]
• Progress Published in New York, New York by the National American Woman Suffrage Association. 1901-1910. [Digital content can be found in Women: Transnational Networks . This database requires a Harvard ID to access.]
• The Remonstrance Published in Boston, Massachusetts by the Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Further Extension of Suffrage to Women. 1890-1913. [Digital content can be found in Women: Transnational Networks . This database requires a Harvard ID to access.]
• Suffrage News Quarterly Published in Boston, Massachusetts by the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association. 1918-1919.
• The Suffragist The official organ of the Congressional Union for Women's Suffrage. Published in Washingtion D.C. 1913-1921. [ Issues v.4:no.21 (1916:May)-v.9:no.1(1921:Jan./Feb.) can be accessed online without a Harvard ID and also through Women: Transnational Networks . This database requires a Harvard ID to access.]
• Votes for Women Published in London, England by The Reformer's Press. 1907-1918. [Digital content can be found in Women: Transnational Networks . This database requires a Harvard ID to access.]
• The Woman Citizen: Official Organ of the National American Woman Suffrage Association Published in New York by Leslie Woman Suffrage Commission. 1917-1927. [Digital content can be found under the title The Woman's Journal (the parent publication) in Women: Transnational Networks . This database requires a Harvard ID to access.]
• The Woman Patriot Published in Washington D.C. by Woman Patriot Pub. Co. 1918-1932. [ Issues v.1:no.19(1918:Aug.)-v.11:no.2(1927:Jan. 15), with gaps can be accessed online without a Harvard ID and also in Women: Transnational Networks . This database requires a Harvard ID to access.]
• The Woman's Journal The official organ of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Edited by Julia Ward Howe, Lucy Stone, Thomas Wentworth Higgins, and others. Published in Boston, MA. 1870-1912. [ All issues of The Woman's Journal have been digitized and are accessible without a Harvard ID .]
• The Woman's Protest Published in New York, New York by the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage. 1912-1918. [Digital content can be found in Women: Transnational Networks . This database requires a Harvard ID to access.]
• Woman's Suffrage Journal Published in London, England by Trübner. 1871-1890. [Digital content can be found in Women: Transnational Networks . This database requires a Harvard ID to access.]
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• Last Updated: Feb 13, 2024 1:27 PM
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Recommended Primary and Secondary Source Databases

• Nineteenth/Twentieth Century
• Women and Social Movements in the U.S. 1600-2000 This link opens in a new window Books, letters, images, scholarly essays, commentaries, and bibliographies, all of which document the multiplicity of American womens reform activities from the colonial period into the 20th century. Primary document projects cover a broad range of topics; books, pamphlets, and related materials provide scholars with in-depth access to the published histories and records of womens reform organizations throughout the United States during the 19th and early 20th centuries; there is also a extensive Dictionary of Social Movements, and a Chronology of Women's History.
• Women in The National Archives Original documents on the Suffrage Question in Britain, the Empire and Colonial Territories combined with a Finding Aid to Women's Studies Resources in The National Archives, Kew, Britain.
• Women's Studies International Index to over 871,000 records drawn from a variety of essential women's studies databases, including Women Studies Abstracts, Women's Studies Database, Women Studies Librarian, Popline Subset on Women, Women of Color and Southern Women, and Women's Health and Development.
• HeinOnline Academic This link opens in a new window Government, Politics & Law on the HeinOnline platform is a fully searchable, image-based government document and legal research database. It contains comprehensive coverage from inception of both U.S. statutory materials, U.S. Congressional Documents and more than 2,400 scholarly journals, all of the world's constitutions, all U.S. treaties, collections of classic treatises and presidential documents, and access to the full text of state and federal case law powered by Fastcase. HeinOnline’s Government, Politics and Law also includes special topical collections on topics like Religion and the Law, Women and the Law, History of International Law, and Criminal Justice.
• Defining Gender, 1450-1910 This link opens in a new window Provides access to a vast body of original British source material that will enrich the teaching and research experience of those studying history, literature, sociology and education from a gendered perspective. A wide range of original primary sources representing five key topics: Conduct and Politeness, Domesticity & the Family, Consumption & Leisure, Education & Sensibility, and The Body.
• Gale OneFile: Gender Studies This link opens in a new window This database offers access to scholarly journals and magazines covering topics including gender studies, family and marital issues, and more.
• Queer Pasts This link opens in a new window Collection of primary source exhibits for students and scholars of queer history and culture covering topics that are gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender and including work on sexual and gender formations that are queer but not necessarily LGBT.
• LGBTQ+ Source This link opens in a new window LGBTQ+ Source contains all of the content available in LGBT Life as well as full text for more than 140 of the most important and historically significant LGBTQ+ journals, magazines and regional newspapers, plus full text for 150 monographs/books. The database includes comprehensive indexing and abstract coverage as well as a specialized LGBTQ+ Thesaurus containing over 10,000 terms.
• Perdita Manuscripts This link opens in a new window Manuscripts written or compiled by women in the British Isles during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Produced in association with the Perdita Project based at the University of Warwick and Nottingham Trent University.
• Medieval Family Life This link opens in a new window Full-color images of the original medieval manuscripts that make up family letter collections and full-text-searchable transcripts from the printed editions, where they are available. Covers trade, warfare, arranged marriages, arguments between parents and children, matters of inheritance, births and deaths, estate management, legal disputes, domestic finances, women and their role in the family, and everyday social and domestic life.
• Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment This link opens in a new window Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, previously known as Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, includes over five hundred peer-reviewed scholarly volumes published since 1955 as part of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford. This series covers wide-ranging aspects of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, from gender studies to political theory, and from economics to visual arts and music, and are published in English or French.
• Archives Unbound Archives Unbound presents topically-focused digital collections of historical documents that support the research and study needs of scholars and students at the university level. Collections included: American Indian Movement and Native American Radicalism Black Economic Empowerment: The National Negro Business League Chinese Civil War and U.S.-China Relations: Records of the U.S. State Department’s Office of Chinese Affairs, 1945-1955 Civil Rights and Social Activism in the South - James A. Dombrowski and the Southern Conference Educational Fund Conditions and Politics in Occupied Western Europe, 1940-1945 Country Intelligence Reports on China Country Intelligence Reports on Japan Country Intelligence Reports on Korea County and Regional Histories and Atlases: Indiana Economy and War in the Third Reich, 1933-1944 Electing the President: Proceedings of the Democratic National Conventions, 1832-1988 Electing the President: Proceedings of the Republican National Conventions, 1856-1988 International Women's Periodicals, 1786-1933: Social and Political Issues Middle East Online: Iraq, 1914-1974 Overland Journeys: Travels in the West, 1800-1880 Post-War Europe: Refugees, Exile and Resettlement, 1945-1950 Ralph J. Bunche Oral Histories Collection on the Civil Rights Movement SUR, 1931-1992 U.S. Military Activities and Civil Rights: The Military Response to the March on Washington, 1963 We Were Prepared for the Possibility of Death: Freedom Riders in the South, 1961 Women’s Issues and Their Advocacy Within the White House, 1974-1977 Women, War and Society, 1914-1918

• Women's Magazine Archive This link opens in a new window Full back-files of leading women’s interest consumer magazines. Titles are scanned from cover to cover in high-resolution color and feature detailed article-level indexing. Coverage: late-19th century through to 2005
• Women and Social Movements: Development and the Global South, 1919 - 2019 This link opens in a new window This database examines efforts to foster gender equity through expanded economic and social participation of women on a global scale. Covering a century, the database highlights and evaluates activism through individual efforts, organizational initiatives, and socio-cultural projects led by or for women in the Global South. It shows how women have negotiated power and status regarding private or public programs centered on their rights and social inclusion. Stressing the historical problem of the “feminization of poverty,” coupled with women’s invisibility within most foreign aid regimes and approaches to technical assistance, the project documents how women and their allies worked to balance economic growth and social improvement while navigating equity and the fairer allocation of resources. Accompanying essays by leading scholars in the field outline and critique significant shifts in approaches to development, including that of a gendered “post-development” perspective.
• Women and Social Movements in Modern Empires since 1820 This link opens in a new window Explores prominent themes in world history since 1820 as told through women’s voices: conquest, colonization, settlement, resistance, and post-coloniality.
• Women's Studies Archive This link opens in a new window Focuses on the social, political, and professional achievements of women throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century., including: the History of Feminist Theory and Activism; domestic culture; lay and ordained church women; women in industry; women's sexuality and gender expression; women’s education; women’s movement; women’s health and mental health; women and law; women and the control of their bodies; and women’s roles and interactions within society. Includes the following collections: Issues and Identities Voice and Vision Rare Titles from the American Antiquarian Society, 1820-1922 Female Forerunners Worldwide
• History Vault This link opens in a new window Includes a wide variety of archival materials (digitized letters, papers, photographs, scrapbooks, financial records, diaries, and other primary source materials) taken from the University Publications of America (UPA) Collections. These materials are organized into four main collections: Civil Rights and the Black Freedom Struggle; Southern Life, Slavery, and the Civil War; Women's Studies; and American Politics and Society. Purdue’s holdings include federal government records, organizational records, and personal papers from the Black Freedom Struggle; papers from the NAACP; records from the African American Police League; information on slavery in the United States; plantation records; records from the Union and Confederate military forces; information on reconstruction; manuscript collections on voting rights, national politics, and reproductive rights from the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College; information on women at work during World War II, including correspondence of the director of the Women’s Army Corps; the papers of Margaret Sanger; and records of the War Relocation Authority during World War II.
• Gender Identity and Social Change This link opens in a new window Essential primary sources documenting the changing representations and lived experiences of gender roles and relations from the nineteenth century to the present. This expansive collection offers sources for the study of women's suffrage, the feminist movement, the men’s movement, employment, education, the body, the family, and government and politics.
• Archives of Sexuality and Gender This link opens in a new window More than 5,000 rare and unique books covering sex, sexuality, and gender issues across the sciences and humanities and throughout history. Topics include patterns of fertility and sexual practice; prostitution; religion and sexuality; the medical and legal construction of sexualities; and the rise of sexology. Includes five archives: L'Enfer de la Bibliothèque nationale de France International Perspectives on LGBTQ Activism and Culture LGBTQ History and Culture Since 1940, Part I LGBTQ History and Culture Since 1940, Part II Sex and Sexuality, Sixteenth to Twentieth Century
• Sex and Sexuality This link opens in a new window Explores changing attitudes towards human sexuality, gender identities and sexual behaviors from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Investigating the breadth and complexity of human sexual understanding through the work of leading sexologists, sex researchers, organizations, and personal accounts. Includes unpublished papers of prominent sexologists, sex researchers, societies, advocacy groups, and campaigners working across America and beyond during the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, as well as a significant proportion of correspondence between professional and private individuals, autobiographical accounts, official records, and literary works.

• LGBTQ History & Culture This link opens in a new window Provides the essential primary sources necessary for researchers, students, and educators to delve deeper into gay rights movements, and to explore the social, political, health, and legal issues impacting LGBTQ communities around the world. Coverage 1946-2000s

Selected Open Source Databases

• Internet Archive Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.
• Women's Studies/Women's Issues Resource Sites Women's Studies / Women's Issues Resource Sites is a selective, annotated, highly acclaimed listing of web sites containing resources and information about women's studies / women's issues, with an emphasis on sites of particular use to an academic women's studies program.
• Library of Congress: Women's and Gender Studies Web Archive The Women's and Gender Studies Web Archive collects and preserves online content on topics of importance to the interdisciplinary field of Women's and Gender Studies. Collection priorities include primary sources, first hand accounts, and records of social, cultural, and political movements for gender equality. This archive provides enduring access to resources which illuminate underrepresented perspectives and identities, many of which are not typically found in traditional print resources or in institutions of cultural memory. Sites which document topics relevant to the history, current field, and future directions of Women's and Gender Studies as an academic discipline are likewise collected.
• Civil War: Women and the Homefront Guide to Duke University's physical and digitized holdings regarding women and the Civil War.
• Lesbian Herstory Archives The Lesbian Herstory Archives exists to gather, preserve and provide access to records of Lesbian lives and activities. Doing this also serves to uncover and document our herstory previously denied to us by patriarchal historians in the interests of the culture that they served. The existence of the Archives will thus enable current and future generations to analyze and reevaluate the Lesbian experience.
• ONE Institute Founded in 1952, One Institute (formerly ONE Archives Foundation) is the oldest active LGBTQ+ organization in the country, dedicated to telling LGBTQ+ history and stories through education, arts, and social justice programs. Our one-of-a-kind exhibitions and public programs connect LGBTQ+ history and contemporary culture to effect social change. Through unique K-12 teacher trainings, lesson plans, and youth mentorship programs, we empower the next generation of teachers and students to bring queer history into classrooms and communities. As the independent community partner of ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, we promote the largest collection of LGBTQ+ materials in the world.
• GLBT Historical Society Founded in 1985, the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender (GLBT) Historical Society is recognized internationally as a leader in the field of LGBTQ public history. Our operations are centered around two sites: our GLBT Historical Society Museum, located since 2011 in the heart of San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood; and our Dr. John P. De Cecco Archives and Research Center, open to researchers in the Mid-Market district.
• OutHistory OutHistory is a public history website that aims to generate, present, and promote high-quality LGBTQ historical research for LGBTQ and general audiences. We also work to foster the development and growth of broad and diverse communities of people interested in learning about and producing LGBTQ histories. We are especially interested in under-represented histories and historical research that contributes to positive social change. Most but not all of the current content focuses on the United States and Canada.
• << Previous: Global/World
• Last Edited: Apr 22, 2024 3:23 PM
• URL: https://guides.lib.purdue.edu/history