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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 SUFFRAGE, POLITICAL RESPONSIVENESS, AND CHILD SURVIVAL IN AMERICAN HISTORY *

Associated data.

Women’s choices appear to emphasize child welfare more than those of men. This paper presents new evidence on how suffrage rights for American women helped children to benefit from the scientific breakthroughs of the bacteriological revolution. Consistent with standard models of electoral competition, suffrage laws were followed by immediate shifts in legislative behavior and large, sudden increases in local public health spending. This growth in public health spending fueled large-scale door-to-door hygiene campaigns, and child mortality declined by 8-15% (or 20,000 annual child deaths nationwide) as cause-specific reductions occurred exclusively among infectious childhood killers sensitive to hygienic conditions.

I. Introduction

Women’s choices appear to systematically differ from those of men ( Byrnes, Miller, and Schafer 1999 ; Niederle and Vesterlund 2007 ). The underlying causes of these differences remain unclear, but a growing body of evidence suggests that women place relatively greater weight on child welfare and the provision of public goods (Thomas 1990 , 1994 ; Duflo 2003 ). Such sex differences are now leading many to view the promotion of gender equality as a potent means of human development in poor countries (not simply an important end) ( United Nations 2005 ). In particular, ‘empowering’ women is believed to increase investments in children ( World Bank 2001 ).

Despite recent interest, this issue is not new; a long history links the status of women with child well-being. For example, the nineteenth century bacteriological discoveries of Ignaz Semmelweis, Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister, Robert Koch, and others revolutionized scientific knowledge about disease, but it was decades before the public at large (and children in particular) enjoyed their most immediate benefits. Principal among them were the basics of good household hygiene: hand and food washing, water and milk boiling, meat refrigeration, and breastfeeding ( Duffy 1990 ; Meckel 1990 ). In the United States, good household hygiene was promoted through large-scale door-to-door hygiene campaigns – and through charitable organizations and then government, women were their leading advocates ( Meckel 1990 ; Skocpol 1992 ; Tomes 1998 ). 1 Public health historians clearly link the success of hygiene campaigns to the rising influence of women ( Lemons 1973 ; Tomes 1998 ).

This paper investigates how a historical milestone in the advancement of American women – their enfranchisement – influenced child survival, drawing out new quantitative lessons where there is rich qualitative history. Specifically, it relates the sharp timing of state-level women’s suffrage laws enacted between 1869 and 1920 to state-level trend breaks in the voting behavior of legislators, state and local public spending, and age- and cause-specific mortality. This approach has a number of attractive features. First, America’s system of federalism created considerable variation across states and over time in laws governing women’s suffrage. Second, although many related studies have focused on lump-sum transfers to women, many policies and programs that ‘empower’ women have nuanced incentives with theoretically ambiguous consequences for children ( Becker 1981 ). 2 Women’s suffrage rights provide a salient example. Third, data from the early twentieth century United States is rich in comparison with developing country vital statistics, public finance records, and legislative roll call data.

In general, I find that the extension of suffrage rights to American women appears to have helped children benefit from the scientific breakthroughs of the bacteriological revolution. Consistent with standard models of electoral competition ( Duverger 1954 ; Downs 1957 ; Shepsle 1991 ), politicians responded immediately to shifts in electoral preferences as voting rights were extended to women. 3 Within a year of suffrage law enactment, patterns of legislative roll call voting shifted, and local public health spending rose by roughly 35%. These findings are consistent with historical accounts: describing the Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921 (a landmark federal public health appropriation immediately following the 19 th Amendment in 1920), Richard Meckel (1990) observes that “fear of being punished at the polls by American women, not conviction of the bill’s necessity, seems to have motivated Congress to vote for it. As one senator admitted to a reporter from the Ladies Home Journal , ‘if the members of Congress could have voted on the measure in their cloak rooms, it would have been killed as emphatically as it was finally passed out in the open’” ( Selden 1922 ). Growth in public health spending, in turn, was critical for scaling-up intensive door-to-door hygiene campaigns. Child mortality declined by 8-15% with the enactment of suffrage laws, and causes of death that responded were exclusively infectious killers of children sensitive to hygienic conditions (diarrheal diseases, diphtheria, and meningitis). Nationwide, these reductions translate into roughly 20,000 averted child deaths each year, explaining about 10% of the child mortality reduction between 1900 and 1930. 4

A variety of informal validity tests bolster this paper’s findings. Specifically, there is little evidence of: (1) relative increases or decreases in child mortality, public spending, or ‘Progressive’ legislative behavior just before suffrage laws were enacted, (2) meaningful relationships between the timing of suffrage laws and the timing of other major Progressive Era events, (3) suffrage estimates differing between states choosing to grant suffrage rights to women and states having it imposed on them by the 19 th Amendment; (4) changes in child survival, public spending, or ‘Progressive’ legislative behavior accompanying important women’s rights initiatives not ultimately leading to voting rights (i.e., ‘placebo’ experiments); (5) a systematic relationships between suffrage laws and internal migration; or (6) confounding changes in the composition of births or fertile age women. Taken together, this evidence suggests that the extension of suffrage rights to women may have itself been responsible for substantial improvements in child survival. Given the economic and epidemiological similarities between historical America and less-developed countries today, I conclude by briefly considering this paper’s implications for contemporary public health and development challenges.

II. Background

Ii.a. the historical advancement of american women and the women’s suffrage movement, “separate spheres” ideology and women’s voluntary organizations.

With the rise of industrialization during the nineteenth century, the social and economic “spheres” of American men and women became more distinct and segregated as men were disproportionately drawn into jobs away from the home. Women responded to this segregation by seizing the civic possibilities of their separate sphere and building voluntary organizations to promote ‘feminine virtues’ – both for their own benefit and for the good of society. Some were comprised of elite, urban women, but more often they were grounded in religion and joined middle class women across numerous localities. 5 Despite their heterogeneity, women’s voluntary organizations collectively capitalized on the perception of women’s moral superiority as homemakers and caregivers to promote broad public welfare agendas. A term popularized by women’s organizations – “municipal housekeeping” – provides a clear example of this strategy: “Woman’s place is in the home… But Home is not contained within the four walls of an individual home. Home is the community. The city full of people is the Family” ( Dorr 1910 ). 6 This “municipal housekeeping” ideology provided a philosophical foundation for the women’s suffrage movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and voluntary organizations supplied critical organizational infrastructure. They also provided a means of advancing a new child health and hygiene agenda during the Progressive Era ( Smith-Rosenberg 1985 ; Skocpol 1992 ).

The Women’s Suffrage Movement

The birth of the women’s suffrage movement went hand-in-hand with the birth of women’s voluntary organizations. Broad new ideals about women’s public and private roles were manifest both in emerging voluntary organizations and in the agenda articulated by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton at the famous women’s rights convention held in Seneca Falls, New York during the summer of 1848. The end of the Civil War invigorated the women’s suffrage movement as the emancipation of slaves and the (ostensible) extension of voting rights to black men in 1870 under the 15 th Amendment drew new public attention to the expansion of the electorate ( Flexner and Fitzpatrick 1959 ).

State-level suffrage efforts during the late 19 th century were poorly coordinated and generally proclaimed social justice as the basis for enfranchising women. There were several unanticipated early successes in the west (in the territories of Wyoming in 1869 and Utah in 1870 and later in Colorado and Idaho), surprising both proponents and opponents alike ( Flexner and Fitzpatrick 1959 ; DuBois 1998 ). However, these early victories were followed by a period of stagnation, leading to better coordinated local efforts and a more pragmatic appeal to municipal housekeeping as the rationale for enfranchising women ( McCammon and Campbell 2001 ; King, Cornwall, and Dahlin 2005 ). The result was a new string of new successes: prior to the ratification of the19 th Amendment in 1920, 29 of 48 states had extended suffrage rights to women. Figure I shows the timing of suffrage laws in American states, and Section III.A. and the data appendix discuss the nuances of these laws.

The Timing of Women’s Suffrage Rights in American States

Data obtained from Lott and Kenny (1999) and Cornwall (2003) . Years shown are for first suffrage laws, which extended full suffrage rights to women with the exception of presidential suffrage only laws in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Vermont, and Wisconsin and primary suffrage only laws in Arkansas and Texas.

Explaining the Spatial and Temporal Pattern of State-Level Women’s Suffrage Laws

Understanding the timing of state-level suffrage laws is important for evaluating the validity of this paper’s empirical strategy (as probed in greater detail in Section V). The most obvious pattern is geographic – all else equal, women in western states could vote before women elsewhere in America. Some historians suggest that frontier conditions were amenable to women’s suffrage because women supported restrictions on common western vices (drunkenness, gambling, and prostitution) or because the harsh realities of frontier life made it impossible to maintain traditional gender roles ( Brown 1958 ; Grimes 1967 ). 7 Many others argue that idiosyncratic circumstances in each state resulted in the vote for women ( Larson 1971 ; Beeton 1986 ), citing rich historical evidence in support of this view. 8 Quantitative studies yield strikingly inconclusive results ( Cornwall, Dahlin, King, and Schiffman 2004 ). The single robust correlate of suffrage law enactment emerging from these studies is the share of women working in non-agricultural occupations ( King, Cornwall, and Dahlin 2005 ). Although this presumably reflects changing social norms about the role of women, it evolved very gradually over time ( Smith and Ward 1985 ; Goldin 1990 ) and can be distinguished econometrically from abrupt year-to-year legislative changes governing women’s right to vote.

II.B. Women, Hygiene Campaigns, and the ‘New Public Health’ 9

Early public health efforts targeting infants and children generally emphasized the provision of pure milk to mothers through local milk stations ( Ferrie and Troesken forthcoming ; Lee 2007 ). In 1906, however, a critical assessment of milk station activities led the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor (and the New York Milk Committee) to conclude that providing clean milk to infants just scratched the surface of the potential health benefits of good hygiene – and that educating mothers about household hygiene more broadly was the most promising approach for improving infant and child survival ( Phillips 1909 ). This conclusion heralded the beginning of a ‘new public health’: milk stations and sanitary engineering had fulfilled much of their promise, and further health improvements depended critically on providing widespread information about the benefits of good personal and household hygiene. 10 This ideological shift was accompanied by demonstrated results; the widely publicized effectiveness of the New York Milk Committee’s household hygiene modification program quickly led to copycat programs around the country ( Meckel 1990 ).

However, hygienic home modification required regular home visits and individualized health education. Charitable organizations were already conducting these activities on a small scale, but in 1910, the newly formed American Association for Study and Prevention of Infant Mortality argued that only government had the authority, resources, and centralized administrative capacity to effectively coordinate large-scale hygiene campaigns ( AASPIM 1910 ). 11 What developed were public-private partnerships – local public funds supporting door-to-door hygiene campaigns that built upon the existing infrastructure of philanthropic organizations ( Neff 1910 ; Meckel 1990 ). The ability to channel new public sector appropriations into standing charitable programs made rapid health improvement possible.

Although physicians and lay health workers were employed, community-based nurses were the backbone of household hygiene campaigns. Nurses were each assigned a district and made responsible for all families in that district with babies born between the end of May and the beginning of September (when infectious disease incidence and infant/child mortality rates peaked). Learning of a birth from either departmental records or door-to-door canvassing, nurses visited the new mother, examined the infant and other children in the household, encouraged breastfeeding, and provided intensive individualized education about hygienic practices. The nurse would continue visiting the household throughout the summer, monitoring hygienic conditions and the health of all household children. The growing ‘ideology of instructed motherhood’ also created fertile soil for hygiene campaigns to succeed – nurses overwhelmingly reported that when the benefits of improved hygiene were demonstrated, mothers eagerly embraced them ( Meckel 1990 ). 12

Historians are relatively silent about the relationship between state-level women’s suffrage laws and local hygiene campaigns, but they are outspoken about this relationship at the national level. A salient example is the case of the 1921 Sheppard-Towner Act, a landmark five-year public health appropriation and the single most dramatic expansion of the federal Children’s Bureau. Women’s organizations lobbied hard for passage of the act, and the long-standing perception of women’s superior morality made it difficult for legislators to ignore their demands ( Skocpol 1992 ). Not coincidentally, it was passed immediately after all American women were given the right to vote under the 19 th Amendment in 1920 – even before actual patterns of female voting had become clear. In the words of one historian, the “principal force moving Congress was fear of being punished at the polls. Politicians feared that women voters would cast a bloc vote or remain aloof from the regular parties” if their convictions about child welfare were not heeded ( Lemons 1973 ). 13

III. Data and Empirical Strategy

Iii.a. data 14.

I obtained dates that women gained the legal right to vote in each state from Lott and Kenny (1999) and have supplemented these dates with more detailed information collected from the legislative archives of forty-eight states by Marie Cornwall and colleagues ( Cornwall 2003 ). In this paper, I follow Lott and Kenny (1999) by not distinguishing partial and full suffrage rights, recognizing the flux of electoral rules during this period and uncertainty among politicians about the inevitability of full enfranchisement following partial suffrage laws. 15 Sensitivity analyses presented in Section V suggest that drawing this distinction does not substantively alter the conclusions drawn from this paper’s analyses.

To investigate how women’s suffrage was related to child survival, state-level mortality data by age/sex and by cause is needed. However, there was no national system of death records in the United States prior to 1933 ( Haines 2001 ). The Bureau of the Census first established an official ‘Death Registration Area’ in 1880 and began publishing its annual Mortality Statistics for death registration states (those deemed to have adequate death registration systems) with 1900 ( US Bureau of the Census 1906 through 1938 ; Haines 2001 ). The registration area grew from ten states in 1900 to include all forty-eight states in 1933. Using the published historical series, I have constructed an unbalanced panel of annual state-level deaths by age/sex and by cause for years 1900-1936. 16 Descriptive Statistics are shown in Panels A and B of Table I .

Descriptive Statistics

Decennial mortality data by age (in Panel A) and by cause (in Panel B) are from the U.S. Bureau of the Census’ decennial Census of Population and Housing (and are the same mortality statistics reported in the Bureau of the Census’ annual Mortality Statistics ). Municipal public finance data (Panel C) are from the U.S. Bureau of the Census’ Financial Statistics of Cities Having a Population of Over 30,000 , which are unavailable for 1900 and 1920. State public finance data (Panel D) is from Sylla, Legler, and Wallis ICPSR Study # 9728 (1900 and 1910) and the U.S. Bureau of the Census’ Financial Statistics of States (1930), which are unavailable for 1920.

To explore how women’s suffrage was related to the size and composition of public spending, I also matched local and state public finance data with the legislative records. For hygiene campaigns, local health department spending was most important. To examine how suffrage laws were related to changes in local public finance, I digitized annual nominal health-related spending data for all cities with populations exceeding 30,000 listed in the Statistics of Cities (1905-1908) and the Financial Statistics of Cities (1909-1913, 1915-1919, and 1921-1930) to the state level. 17 The specific health-related spending categories that can be harmonized across years include health conservation and sanitation spending; health conservation and sanitation infrastructure investment; charities, corrections, and hospital spending; and charities, corrections, and hospital infrastructure investment. Local funds supporting public-private hygiene campaigns (that built on existing charitable infrastructure) are primarily captured by spending for charities, corrections, and hospitals. Descriptive statistics for the city-level public finance data are shown in Panel C of Table I .

State spending was also important for bolstering local health department activities. Annual information about real state spending and revenue between 1900 and 1930 in broad sectoral categories was provided by Larry Kenny and John Lott ( Lott and Kenny 1999 ). State health board spending captured by the social service spending category was commonly directed toward establishing or strengthening city public health departments. Descriptive statistics for the state-level public finance data are shown in Panel D of Table I .

Finally, although many key public health appropriations during the Progressive Era were made at the local and state level, local and state legislative roll call data have not been systematically compiled to the best of my knowledge (and many important public health spending decisions are made at the committee and subcommittee level). Nevertheless, legislative responses to women’s suffrage laws should also be evident at the federal level. I obtained roll call data for all votes brought to the Senate and House floors between 1900 and 1930 (during the 56 th through 71 st Congressional sessions) from the Voteview database compiled by Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal ( www.voteview.com ). Because women’s voluntary organizations were leading promoters of the Progressive Era reform agenda, each Senate and House bill was coded according to whether or not it was broadly consistent with this agenda. Votes were then aggregated across legislators and bills to the state-year level for each chamber, yielding the share of possible votes cast by legislators that were ‘Progressive.’

III.B. Empirical Strategy

Exploiting rich spatial and temporal variation in the timing of state-level women’s suffrage laws after 1900, I use a simple difference-in-difference approach to estimate changes in public spending, ‘Progressive’ voting among legislators, and mortality by age/sex and cause associated with suffrage rights. Specifically, for states s and years y , I estimate equations of the following general form:

where d is an outcome of interest (public spending, ‘Progressive’ voting, or deaths by age/sex or cause) in state s and year y , v is a dummy variable indicating whether or not women could legally vote, δ s and δ y are state and year fixed effects, and δ s × t represents state-specific linear time trends. The parameter of interest in this simple specification is β .

In this econometric framework, only the timing of state suffrage laws is assumed to be exogenous. Fixed differences across states, common factors varying non-linearly over time (such as the establishment of the Children’s Bureau in 1912), and state-specific differences that vary linearly over time are all purged from the estimate of β . Only trend breaks in the outcomes of interest that coincide precisely with the timing of women’s suffrage laws are captured by this parameter. The validity of the identifying assumption is explored in detail in Section V.

A brief note on the use of deaths rather than death rates as dependent variables is also warranted. Because state-level population counts by age are not available annually between decennial population censuses, annual mortality rates cannot be constructed directly from annual deaths. Population projection techniques commonly used by demographers can be used estimate denominators for these rates, but they are essentially sophisticated methods of interpolation that employ no additional intercensal information. The inclusion of state fixed effects and state-specific time trends therefore accomplishes the same general objective.

IV. Results

Iv.a. political responsiveness to women’s suffrage.

Historical accounts suggest that women’s enfranchisement improved child survival through its impact on public spending and that local public health spending growth fueled the Progressive Era’s unprecedented door-to-door hygiene campaigns. This section provides direct evidence on how public spending and legislative behavior changed with suffrage laws, and Section IV.B. then traces these changes in political economy through to child health outcomes.

Public Spending

Assuming that the policy preferences of men and women differ, standard models of electoral competition predict that the extension of voting rights to women should cause politicians’ support-maximizing policy positions to shift immediately to better reflect women’s preferences. These immediate shifts should be based on politicians’ expectations of how women will vote – even before women’s voting patterns are actually observed. Following historical accounts, I first investigate changes in the size and composition of municipal public spending related to public health and hygiene. Using residual city public finance measures obtained by estimating equation 1 without the suffrage dummy (and with city rather than state fixed effects), Figure II plots residual means for the five years preceding and following suffrage law enactment (indexed to the year that women gained voting rights in each state – defined as year 0). It shows no relative increase or decrease in local spending prior to suffrage laws followed by sharp increases that coincide precisely with the laws. The immediacy of these increases is consistent with theoretical predictions. 18 Although hygiene campaign spending is not detailed in the historical public finance data, the primary category capturing hygiene spending is spending for charities, corrections, and hospitals. As noted earlier, this is because hygiene campaigns grew as public-private partnerships with public funds scaling-up pre-existing charitable efforts through charitable infrastructure and are therefore reflected in charity spending. 19

Municipal Public Spending and Women’s Suffrage Law Timing

Municipal public finance data from the U.S. Bureau of the Census’ Statistics of Cities Having a Population of Over 30,000 and Financial Statistics of Cities Having a Population of Over 30,000. Residual means shown relative to the year of women’s suffrage laws in each state (year 0) obtained by estimating equation 1 without the suffrage dummy variable and with city rather than state fixed effects.

To examine changes in the size and composition of municipal spending parametrically, variants of equation 1 (with city rather than state fixed effects) were estimated with local public finance measures as dependent variables. Because the dependent variables are in logarithmic form, the coefficient estimates can roughly be interpreted as percent changes. Panel A of Table II shows these results. Women’s suffrage is associated with an 8% increase in total municipal spending, a 6% increase in spending on health conservation and sanitation, and strikingly, a 36% increase in spending for charities, hospitals, and corrections. 20 Appendix Table A.1 also shows the dynamics of these increases over time. Panel B of Table II then reports estimates for state spending. The enfranchisement of women is associated with a 24% increase in state social service spending, but not with changes in any other state public finance measure. 21 Although state spending was not directly targeted toward hygiene campaigns, state health boards played important roles in developing the capacity of local public health departments.

Women’s Suffrage Laws and Municipal and State Public Finance

Municipal public finance data from the U.S. Bureau of the Census’ Statistics of Cities Having a Population of Over 30,000 and Financial Statistics of Cities Having a Population of Over 30,000 ; state public finance data from Sylla, Legler, and Wallis ICPSR Study # 9728 and the U.S. Bureau of the Census’ Financial Statistics of States . Estimates and standard errors (in parentheses, clustered by state) shown for the women’s suffrage law dummy variable obtained by estimating equation 1 (controlling for state and year fixed effects and state-specific linear time trends, with city fixed effects subsitituted for state fixed effects in the municipal public finance regressions). The municipal public finance sample contains city-year observations from years 1905-1909, 1909-1913, 1915-1919, and 1921-1930; the state public finance sample contains state-year observations from years 1900-1919 and 1921-1930. Spending (“cost payments”) are defined as “payments of cities and other municipalities for their expenses, interest, and outlays, less amounts which have been returned or are to be returned by reason of error or otherwise.” Infrastructure investment (“outlays”) are defined as “the costs of property, including land, buildings and equipment, and public improvements more or less permanent in character.”

Voter Turn-out and Legislative Roll Call Behavior

The public finance changes shown in Figure II and Table II – which were instrumental in bringing the hygienic benefits of the bacteriological revolution to the American public – reflect changes in legislative behavior. This section provides direct evidence on changes in the political economy of states, building on evidence provided by Lott and Kenny (1999) that state-level voter participation among adults ages 21+ increased by 44% the year after women were enfranchised. This pattern of electoral participation is consistent with expectations among legislators that female voting would be an important strategic consideration in selecting support-maximizing policy positions.

Political responses should be directly evident in the voting behavior of legislators. To further test the prediction of immediate changes in political behavior, I use Congressional roll call data. My specific hypothesis is that as women gained the right to vote in individual states, Congressional representatives from those states should immediately alter their roll call voting to better reflect perceived women’s preferences. Because bills pertaining to local public health and hygiene are seldom introduced at the federal level, I instead assess the consistency of Congressional voting with the broad ‘Progressive’ Era reform agenda promoted by highly-visible women’s voluntary organizations.

Figure III (constructed the same way as Figure II ) shows ‘Progressive’ voting among legislators in the Senate and the House of Representatives as women gained the right to vote in legislators’ home states. 22 With the passage of these laws, roll call voting among senators immediately became more ‘Progressive;’ no such response is evident in the House. Although the reason for this difference in behavioral response by legislative body is unclear, the overall pattern is again generally consistent with theoretical predictions. 23 Parametric estimates of β in equation 1 for the entire period 1900-1930 (shown in Table III ) suggest that women’s suffrage was associated with a 23% increase in ‘Progressive’ voting in the Senate. Appendix Table A.1 also shows the dynamics of this shift in legislator Progressivity over time.

‘Progressive’ State Votes and Women’s Suffrage Law Timing

Legislative roll call data from the Voteview database; coding of Progressive voting done by author as described in the data appendix . Residual means shown relative to the year of women’s suffrage laws in each state (year 0) obtained by estimating equation 1 without the suffrage dummy variable.

Women’s Suffrage Laws and Legislative Behavior

Legislative roll call data from the Voteview database; coding of Progressive voting done by author as described in the data appendix . Estimates and standard errors (in parentheses, clustered by state) shown for the women’s suffrage law dummy variable obtained by estimating equation 1 (controlling for state and year fixed effects and state-specific linear time trends). The Voteview sample contains state-year observations from years 1900-1930.

IV.B. Mortality by Age/Sex and Cause

My ultimate interest is to trace changes in American political economy linked to women’s suffrage through to changes in child survival. Using residuals obtained by estimating equation 1 without the suffrage dummy, Figure IV plots residual means for age-specific mortality by gender for years relative to women’s enfranchisement. In general, it shows rapid mortality declines for both boys and girls when suffrage legislation was enacted. 24 The timing of these reductions is again consistent with the proposition that suffrage led to abrupt increases in local public health spending that fueled the Progressive Era’s unprecedented door-to-door hygiene campaigns.

Deaths by Age and Sex and the Timing of Suffrage Laws

Mortality data from the U.S. Bureau of the Census’ annual Mortality Statistics . Residual means shown relative to the year of women’s suffrage laws in each state (year 0) obtained by estimating equation 1 without the suffrage dummy variable.

Figure V shows parametric estimates of β obtained by estimating equation 1 for deaths by sex in each age interval reported consistently over time between 1900 and 1936 (0-1, 1-4, 4-9, 10-14, etc.). Women’s suffrage is generally associated with mortality reductions for children at all ages between age one and age nineteen, but not for infants (defined as those under age one) or for adults at any age. 25 In contrast with contemporary evidence on shifts in women’s bargaining power within the household in developing countries, there are no meaningful gender differences in the survival gains associated with women’s suffrage ( Duflo 2003 ; Qian forthcoming ). Appendix Table A.1 then shows the dynamics of age-specific reductions in death over time.

Women’s Suffrage Laws and Mortality Estimates by Age and Sex

Mortality data from the U.S. Bureau of the Census’ annual Mortality Statistics . Estimates and 95% confidence intervals (standard errors clustered by state) for β obtained by estimating equation 1 with state-year observations for deaths by sex in each age interval reported consistently over time between 1900 and 1936 (0-1, 1-4, 4-9, 10-14, etc.).

These child mortality reductions are large, with point estimates ranging from 8% to 15%. 26 Because child mortality is heavily concentrated at young ages, the great majority of absolute gains in child survival occurred at young ages. To place these estimates in context, mortality rates in death registration states fell by 72% for children ages 1 to 4 and 59% for children ages 5 to 9 between 1900 and 1930. The proportions of these declines explained by the estimates in Figure V are 5% and 10%, respectively. 27 In absolute terms, these reductions imply approximately 20,000 averted child deaths nationwide each year relative to mortality before suffrage laws were enacted. 28

I then investigate specific causes of death that declined as women gained the right to vote. State-level mortality data disaggregated both by age and by cause is reported erratically between 1900 and 1936, but changes in cause-specific mortality at all ages can reasonably be attributed to children given that I find little evidence of adult mortality change. Moreover, certain infectious diseases explicitly reported were notorious child-killers that did not strike adults. Table IV shows suffrage estimates obtained by re-estimating equation 1 with cause-specific deaths as dependent variables. The only causes of death that responded to suffrage laws were diarrheal diseases (under age two – a reporting anomaly), meningitis, and diphtheria, with reductions of 11%, 23%, and 24%, respectively. All three were leading infectious killers of children (but not adults) during the Progressive Era, and importantly, all three can be effectively combated through good household hygiene. 29

Women’s Suffrage Laws and Cause-Specific Mortality

Mortality data from the U.S. Bureau of the Census’ annual Mortality Statistics . Single cause estimates and standard errors (in parentheses, clustered by state) shown for the women’s suffrage law dummy variable obtained by estimating equation 1 (controlling for state and year fixed effects and state-specific linear time trends) for each individual cause of death using the unbalanced mortality sample with state-year observations, 1900-1936. Grouped cause estimates and standard errors (in parentheses, clustered by state) in the bottom two rows obtained by regressing ln(deaths ) on individual cause dummy variables, cause-specific linear time trends, state fixed effects, and year fixed effects separately for infectious childhood diseases (diphtheria, meningitis, diarrhea under age two, measles, scarlet fever, smallpox, and whooping cough) and other causes (typhoid fever, malaria, pneumonia, diabetes, circulatory disease, Bright’s disease/nephritis, cancer/tumors, accidents/violent deaths, and suicide) using the unbalanced sample of cause-state-year observations, 1900-1936.

Because cause-specific deaths are noisy, I also pool across causes to construct aggregate disease categories: childhood infectious diseases (the ones most sensitive to hygiene) and other diseases. 30 The bottom two rows of Table IV show estimates obtained by using cause-state-year observations to regress ln(deaths) on a women’s suffrage dummy, cause-specific dummies, cause-specific time trends, and state and year fixed effects. Women’s suffrage is associated with an 18% decline in childhood infectious diseases but not with the changes in other deaths.

V. Informal Validity Tests and Robustness 31

Natural concerns with this paper’s empirical strategy include the possibility of endogenous state-level suffrage legislation, ‘Progressive’ legislators enacting many ‘Progressive’ laws simultaneously, and confounding changes in the composition of state populations. This section presents a range of tests that investigate – but generally fail to corroborate – such concerns.

First, I assess whether or not there were relative decreases in child mortality, cause-specific mortality, state and local public spending, or ‘Progressive’ voting just before women’s suffrage laws were adopted (which might reflect differentially liberalizing state policy environments.) To test for trend breaks at various points prior to the passage of laws, dummy variables denoting intervals two, four, and six years before suffrage were included in variants of equation 1 . For all dependent variables found to be related to women’s suffrage, the resulting estimates are statistically indistinguishable from zero (as shown in Online Appendix Table 3 ).

Second, I investigate how suffrage law dates were related to social, economic, and demographic conditions in 1900 (literacy, employment, manufacturing wages, and workforce share in manufacturing), the dates of other major Progressive Era laws (governing divorce/alimony rights, mother’s pensions, minimum wage and maximum hours of work for women, prohibition, and workers’ compensation), and the dates that GFWC chapters were established in each state. Online Appendix Figure 1 suggests no discernable relationship between suffrage laws and other major Progressive Era events (suggesting that ‘Progressive’ reforms were not temporally clustered), and Online Appendix Table 4 also generally suggests no relationship with other state-level laws or characteristics in 1900.

Third, if changes in state social or political environments fostered both women’s suffrage and better child health – or if reformers enacted many ‘Progressive’ changes simultaneously – estimates of β in equation 1 should differ between states that voluntarily extended suffrage to women and those that had it imposed on them by the 19 th Amendment. Following Lott and Kenny (1999) , I define voluntary states as those that passed state-level suffrage laws or that voted to ratify the 19 th Amendment. Online Appendix Table 5 shows interaction terms between women’s suffrage and a dummy variable for voluntary suffrage. All are insignificant, suggesting statistically identical estimates in voluntary and mandatory states.

Fourth, if this paper’s major results were due to unobserved state-level social liberalization over time, there should also be detectable changes during other women’s rights efforts not ultimately resulting in suffrage laws. Online Appendix Table 6 shows results obtained by replacing suffrage dummy variables with dummies for failed (but in many cases promising) women’s rights campaigns (ballot referenda and campaigns lobbying state constitutional conventions). None are statistically meaningful. 32

Fifth, the enactment of suffrage laws could have induced internal migration, altering the composition of residents in states with suffrage rights relative to those without them. Using IPUMS 1% population census samples from 1900, 1910, and 1920, Online Appendix Table 7 reports estimates obtained by regressing the share of state residents who report being born in that state on cumulative years of women’s suffrage and other state-level socio-economic characteristics. 33 Little evidence of confounding patterns of internal migration emerges.

Sixth, I consider confounding fertility responses to suffrage laws. 34 Exploiting the fact that any fertility response should vary by women’s age when suffrage rights were introduced (and not be present at all among women first able to vote after menopause), I use the IPUMS 1% 1940 population census sample to make comparisons simultaneously among women the same age but born in different states and among different-aged women born in the same state. 35 Online Appendix Figure 2 shows the resulting estimates, suggesting little econometric evidence that women’s fertility responded to suffrage laws.

Finally, I assess the robustness of the results using a variety of alternative specifications as shown in Appendix Table A.2 ( Online Appendix Tables 8 – 11 show results for a broader set of dependent variables). Because Figure I suggests a regional pattern of suffrage laws, column (2) reports suffrage estimates obtained by including census region×year fixed effects in equation 1 . The results are not generally consistent with unobserved regional shocks (not identified in the historical literature) explaining the paper’s basic findings. Column (3) reports estimates from equation 1 with standard errors calculated to allow spatial correlation according to geographic distance between states, following Conley (1999) , suggesting that doing so does not substantially alter the inferences drawn. 36 Column (4) assesses the results’ sensitivity to conditioning on time-varying state level covariates. They are generally robust to the inclusion of these covariates, although many state socio-economic characteristics are available only for decennial census years. 37 Column (5) reports estimates obtained by re-coding partial states as not enfranchising women until full-suffrage rights were extended (generally 1920); column (6) shows results obtained by excluding states enfranchising women in 1920; and column (7) shows estimates from samples restricted to states present in the mortality data at least five years before suffrage law enactment. With a handful of exceptions, the paper’s main findings are robust across these alternative specifications.

VI. Conclusion

This paper argues that the extension of suffrage rights to American women allowed children to benefit more fully (or rapidly) from the scientific breakthroughs of the bacteriological revolution. Simple hygienic practices – including hand and food washing, water and milk boiling, meat refrigeration, and renewed emphasis on breastfeeding – were among the most important innovations of this revolution in knowledge about disease. Communicating their importance to the American public required large-scale door-to-door hygiene campaigns, which women championed at first through voluntary organizations and then through government. Consistent with the predictions of standard models of electoral competition, support-maximizing politicians responded immediately to perceived changes in the distribution of electorate policy preferences as women gained the right to vote. The result was greater local public health spending that fueled hygiene campaigns, leading to fewer deaths from leading infectious childhood killers of the day. 38

Given the common failures of health education campaigns in developing countries today, further research is needed to reconcile contemporary difficulties with this historical success. A wide variety of candidate explanations are possible. First, relative to other types of health behaviors such as avoiding sexual contact, reducing diets high in saturated fats, and quitting smoking, hygienic behaviors may not be costly to change. Second, in an environment of competing risks, complementary sanitary reforms (like drinking water disinfection) occurring during this period raised the return to simple hygienic health behaviors. Third, the absence of curative measures a century ago strengthened incentives for prevention (i.e., less moral hazard). Fourth, effective health education campaigns are generally labor intensive, and labor inputs in this setting were particularly inexpensive. 39 Fifth, there was considerable latent demand for child health. As Meckel (1990) notes, the emphasis on maternal health education was strongly reinforced by the emerging ‘cult of motherhood’ ( Ladd-Taylor 1986 ).

This paper’s findings also suggest at least two broader conclusions relevant to contemporary development challenges. One is that strengthening the expression of women’s preferences can improve child health and welfare beyond the special case of lump-sum transfers targeted to women. Unlike such transfers, many policies and programs seeking to ‘empower’ women introduce nuanced incentives with theoretically ambiguous consequences for children ( Becker 1981 ). As a case in point, opponents of women’s suffrage in the United States often supported their position by invoking the potential neglect of children ( Flexner and Fitzpatrick 1959 ).

The other is that demand-oriented health improvement strategies may deserve more careful attention. In developing countries today, over 10 million children die each year from preventable causes ( World Health Organization 2002 ; Black, Morris, and Bryce 2003 ). Although international health efforts have traditionally emphasized shifting the supply of health technologies outward, demand for these technologies is also puzzlingly low in many contexts ( Bonair, Rosenfield, and Tengvald 1989 ; Scrimshaw 2001 ). Promoting gender equality may be an important means of increasing household demand for simple, highly beneficial health technologies.

Supplementary Material

Online appendix, data appendix 40, women’s suffrage dates – legislation, constitutional conventions, and referenda.

As shown in Figure I , twenty-nine states extended the right to vote to women before Nineteenth Amendment was approved in 1920. Among the other nineteen states, seven approved the amendment and twelve had suffrage imposed on them. Dates of state-level women’s suffrage laws were obtained from Lott and Kenny (1999) and supplemented with extensive archival project data provided by Marie Cornwall that was collected from the legislative archives of the forty-eight continental states (with support from the National Science Foundation through grants NSF 0095224 and NSF 9876519) ( Cornwall 2003 ). The Lott and Kenny (1999) data provides first suffrage law dates but does not distinguish between full and partial suffrage laws. However, the Cornwall data do make this distinction. Presidential-only suffrage laws were enacted in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Vermont, and Wisconsin (Michigan passed a Presidential-only law and then a full suffrage law the following year before the 19 th Amendment). Primary-only suffrage laws were enacted in Arkansas and Texas.

Several validity tests also examine unsuccessful state-level efforts to enfranchise women. These efforts generally took the form of lobbying leading up to state constitutional conventions and ballot initiatives/referenda. On constitutional conventions, Marie Cornwall and colleagues identified all constitutional conventions held in states between 1848 and 1919 and coded each according to whether or not a suffrage proposal was introduced at the convention. On referenda, the Cornwall data identify every year during this period that a state held a referendum on the question of woman suffrage. Votes for and against enfranchisement were recorded for each referendum as available.

Historical Mortality Statistics

No national system of death records existed in the United States prior to 1933 ( Haines 2001 ). However, the Bureau of the Census established an official ‘death registration area’ in 1880 and began publishing its annual Mortality Statistics for death registration states (those deemed to have adequate death registration systems) in 1900 ( US Bureau of the Census 1900 – 1936 , Haines 2001 ). As Online Appendix Figure 3 shows, the registration area grew from ten states in 1900 to include all forty-eight states in 1933. (Delaware technically entered the death registration area in 1890 but does not appear in the annual Mortality Statistics until 1919.)

I have digitized these published mortality statistics for all registration area states for all years 1900-1936 by age and sex and by cause. For males and females, specific age groups are under 1 (infant mortality), 1-4, 5-9, …, 90-94, and 95+. The causes of death followed consistently over time are: typhoid fever, malaria, smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, scarlet fever, whooping cough, meningitis, diarrhea (under age two), diphtheria, influenza, pneumonia, puerperal fever and childbirth-related complications, diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease, cancer, accidents, suicide, and all other causes. Because of changes over time in the Bureau of the Census’ cause of death reporting, some conservative assumptions were also necessary to harmonize this information across years 1900 – 1936.

In addition to quality control efforts in the data entry work (double entry and spot checking), I also verified that summations across age- and cause-specific deaths equaled provided totals. This process revealed a small number of inconsistencies in the printed historical mortality tables, which are summarized in the Online Data Appendix Supplement .

Historical Municipal Public Finance Data

Annual data on nominal municipal-level health-related spending were digitized for cities with populations exceeding 30,000 using the Statistics of Cities for years 1905-1908 and the Financial Statistics of Cities for years 1909-1913, 1915-1919, and 1921-1930 . The specific categories of health-related city spending harmonized across years include health conservation and sanitation cost payments; health conservation and sanitation outlays; charities, corrections, and hospital cost payments; and charities, corrections, and hospital outlays. Total cost payments and total outlays were collected and included as well. The US Bureau of the Census (1914) defined cost payments as “payments of cities and other municipalities for their expenses, interest, and outlays, less amounts which have been returned or are to be returned by reason of error or otherwise.” Outlays are defined as “the costs of property, including land, buildings and equipment, and public improvements more or less permanent in character.” Throughout the paper I refer to cost payments as “spending” and outlays as “infrastructure investment.” Although more disaggregated data is provided in some years (health conservation and sanitation separately rather than combined, for example), the categories constructed are the most disaggregated that can be harmonized across all years.

Missing data also cannot be distinguished from true zeros. For cities present in a given year, if all empty cells are assumed to reflect missing data rather than true zeros, variable-specific missing data rates do not exceed 10% – with the exception of outlays for charities, corrections, and hospitals, for which missing data rates can exceed 70% (analyses of this outlay category should therefore be interpreted with caution and do not make a substantive contribution to this paper’s findings). The Online Data Appendix Supplement summarizes the number of cities present in each year.

Historical State Public Finance Data

Historical information about annual state revenue and spending in real 1967 dollars per capita was provided by John Lott and Larry Kenny and is the same state public finance data used in Lott and Kenny (1999) . This data harmonizes state public finance information from a large archival project conducted by Richard Sylla, John Legler, and John Wallis with support from National Science Foundation (see Sylla, Legler, and Wallis ICPSR Study # 9728, “Sources and Uses of Funds in State and Local Governments, 1790-1915”) with data from the Financial Statistics of States for years 1915-1919 and 1921-1931 . It also includes pre-1915 data provided by John Wallis not available in ICPSR Study # 9728 from Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, and West Virginia.

The specific categories of per capita revenue and spending that are comparable over time include: total public spending, public revenue, property tax revenue, transportation spending (which combines current and capital expenditures on highways), education spending (which combines current and capital expenditures on elementary and secondary schools) and social service spending (which combines current expenditures on state health boards, charities, hospitals, and corrections).

Voteview Congressional Roll Call Data

Key public health appropriations during the Progressive Era were primarily made at the state and especially the local level. To the best of my knowledge, state and local legislative roll call data have not been systematically compiled (and critical appropriations decisions are made at the committee and subcommittee level anyway). Nevertheless, legislative responses to women’s suffrage laws should also be evident at the federal level in the Senate and the House of Representatives. I therefore obtained roll call data for all votes brought to the Senate and House floors roughly between 1900 and 1930 (for the 56 th through 71 st Congressional sessions) from the publicly available Voteview database ( www.voteview.com ) maintained by Keith Poole. This data includes the date that each bill was brought to a vote, how each representative voted on each bill, the home state of each representative, and a brief description of each bill’s substantive legislative proposal.

Because women’s voluntary organizations were outspoken advocates of the Progressive Era reform agenda, each Senate and House bill was coded according to whether or not it was broadly consistent with this agenda. In deciding whether or not a bill was ‘Progressive,’ I adopted the following definition of Progressivism taken from http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/modules/progressivism/index.cfm: “Progressivism is an umbrella label for a wide range of economic, political, social, and moral reforms. These included efforts to outlaw the sale of alcohol; regulate child labor and sweatshops; scientifically manage natural resources; ensure pure and wholesome water and milk; Americanize immigrants or restrict immigration altogether; and bust or regulate trusts. Drawing support from the urban, college-educated middle class, Progressive reformers sought to eliminate corruption in government, regulate business practices, address health hazards, improve working conditions, and give the public more direct control over government through direct primaries to nominate candidates for public office, direct election of Senators, the initiative, referendum, and recall, and women’s suffrage.” Using this definition, each bill was specifically coded as ‘Progressive,’ ‘Anti-Progressive,’ or neither. Agreement between the two individuals coding these bills in a 10% sample of all bills was approximately 75%.

Next, the share of all possible votes cast by representatives from each state in each year that were coded as ‘Progressive’ was calculated. Using legislator by bill observations, each representative’s vote was first coded as “Yea,” “Nay,” “Not voting,” or “Other”. Yea includes “Yea,” “Paired Yea,” and “Announced Yea,” and Nay includes “Nay,” “Paired Nay,” and “Announced Nay.” A vote was considered ‘Progressive’ if it was a Yea vote for a ‘Progressive’ bill or as Nay vote for an ‘Anti-Progressive’ bill. Using each legislator’s home state, votes were then aggregated across legislators and bills to the state-year level, yielding the number of ‘Progressive’ votes cast by legislators from each state in each year. Dividing these numbers by the total possible number of votes yields the share of votes that were ‘Progressive’ for each state and year by legislative body. The total possible number of votes was calculated to account for legislator deaths and states gaining statehood between 1900 and 1930.

* I am grateful to Duane Alwin, Martha Bailey, Jay Bhattacharya, Louis Cain, Will Dow, Frederico Finan, Catherine Fitch, John Gerring, Michael Haines, Larry Katz, Ted Miguel, Mushfiq Mobarak, Pam Nickless, Ben Olken, Leah Platt Boustan, Eric Schickler, Ebonya Washington, Paul Wise, four anonymous referees, and numerous seminar participants for helpful comments and suggestions. Marie Cornwall, Larry Kenny, and John Lott generously provided data, and Jason Bautista, Laura Carwile, Liz Kreiner, Peter Richmond, and especially Nicole Smith provided outstanding research assistance. All historical statistics digitized for this project are available upon request. This project was supported by NICHD grant number R03-HD054682. I am responsible for all errors.

1 According to Richard Easterlin (1999) , “At first, the new knowledge was promoted especially by women reformers through voluntary organizations. But public health agencies assumed an increasing role…” Explaining this shift in responsibility is a central objective of this paper.

2 Opponents of women’s enfranchisement often supported their position with arguments about the potential neglect of children ( Flexner and Fitzpatrick 1959 ). Many empirical studies of women’s status and child welfare have grown from tests of unitary models of household behavior, focusing on lump-sum transfers targeted to women (Thomas 1990 , 1994 ; Rangel 2006 ). Notable exceptions include Luke and Munshi (2007) and Qian (forthcoming) .

3 There are important problems with the traditional Downsian framework ( Besley 2007 ), but these do not imply that politicians are unresponsive to large shifts in voter preferences in predicted directions.

4 In 1900, one in five children did not survive to age five ( US Bureau of the Census 1906 ). By the 1930s, the probability of dying by age five had declined by 65%, and life expectancy at birth had risen from 47 to 63 ( US Bureau of the Census 1938 ; Preston and Haines 1991 ; Haines 2001 ). Much of this mortality decline is explained by reductions in infectious disease deaths as America underwent its epidemiological transition.

5 Prominent voluntary organizations included the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, and the National Congress of Mothers (later to become the National Congress of Parents and Teachers, or the PTA).

6 When “men and women divide the work of governing and administering, each according to his special capacities and natural abilities,” the city “will be like a great, well-ordered, comfortable, sanitary household. Everything will be as clean as in a good home. Every one, as in a family, will have enough to eat, clothes to wear, and a good bed to sleep on. There will be no slums, no sweat shops, no sad women and children toiling in tenement rooms. There will be no babies dying because of an impure milk supply. There will be no ‘lung blocks’ poisoning human beings that landlords may pile up sordid profits. No painted girls, with hunger gnawing their empty stomachs, will walk in the shadows” ( Dorr 1910 ).

7 The earliest efforts in western territories also sought to attract female settlers to offset gender imbalances among frontier populations ( Marilley 1996 ).

8 Many historians invoke the remarkably poor correspondence between suffrage movement strength and the enactment of suffrage laws in support of this position, including: (1) The absence of an organized movement in Wyoming (where the first suffrage law was passed); (2) The absence of a suffrage law in Connecticut (where the first state women’s suffrage organization was established) prior to the 19 th Amendment; (3) Equivalent suffrage organization membership in the West and the South (where suffrage efforts were most and least successful, respectively); (4) Early suffrage mobilization in eastern states not followed by early suffrage law enactment; and (5) The correlation between movement strength and suffrage bill introduction not extending to bill passage ( Baumgartner and Leech 1998 ; McCammon and Campbell 2001 ).

9 This section draws heavily on Meckel (1990) .

10 According to the newly-formed federal Children’s Bureau, “It is useless to send pure milk into a dirty home to be handled by an ignorant, dirty mother or older child. It is necessary to reach the mothers, not only to teach them how to care for their baby’s milk, but also to convince them of the necessity of cleanliness” ( U.S. Children’s Bureau 1914 ). For additional information about the emphasis on household hygiene during the Progressive Era, see Ravenel (1921) , Kramer (1948) , and Tomes (1990) .

11 According to Richard Easterlin (1999) , “In the case of infectious disease control… The most important decision-making units have been households and governments… Of the two, governments have been more fundamental than households, because the adoption of new household methods required education programmes that were largely promoted by governmental agencies.”

12 A 1914 Children’s Bureau pamphlet on infant and child care became the best-selling publication ever issued by the Government Printing Office ( Preston and Haines 1991 ).

13 Although Progressive Era data on women’s actual voting behavior following enfranchisement is not available to the best of my knowledge, historians suggest that the widely anticipated ‘gender gap’ in voting did not emerge as expected ( expectations of systematic gender differences in voting are sufficient to produce the hypothesized changes). Politicians recognized this by the late 1920s, allowing the Sheppard-Towner Act to expire in 1929 (although new federal funds were again appropriated under the New Deal) ( Harvey 1998 ). One rare piece of early data – a 1932 study conducted by the National League of Women Voters in thirty-seven states – did find, however, that a larger share of women than men had voted for Norman Thomas (a socialist) in the 1932 presidential election ( Robinson 1933 ). Analyzing data beginning in 1964, Edlund and Pande (2002) find that a gender gap in voting emerged in the 1970s.

14 See the data appendix for a more detailed description of the data used in this paper’s analyses.

15 Although most laws passed before the 19 th Amendment extended full suffrage rights to women, some extended only partial rights (presidential- and primary-only voting rights). These partial suffrage laws were generally enacted in the Midwest shortly before the 19 th Amendment. Specifically, presidential-only suffrage laws were enacted in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Vermont, and Wisconsin. Primary-only suffrage laws were enacted in Arkansas and Texas. This paper’s results are not generally sensitive to how suffrage rights in these states are coded (see Appendix Table A.2 ). Given this and historical suggestion that local politicians commonly believed full suffrage to be imminent following partial suffrage laws, I use the dates of first suffrage laws of any type throughout the paper.

16 Conducting analyses with an unbalanced panel of state-level deaths raises the concern that entry into the death registration area was might be correlated with the timing of women’s suffrage laws (or their social, demographic, or economic determinants). To explore this possibility, regressions of registration area entry dates were run on state socio-economic characteristics in 1900 (literacy, employment, manufacturing sector wages, and workforce share in the manufacturing sector), the dates of major Progressive Era events (laws governing women’s suffrage, divorce/alimony rights, mother’s pensions, minimum wage and maximum hours of work for women, prohibition, workers’ compensation, child labor, and compulsory education), and the dates that GFWC chapters were founded in each state. The results suggest no statistically meaningful relationships (see Online Appendix Table 1 ). Online Appendix Table 2 shows states present in the unbalanced mortality sample by year relative to women’s suffrage law enactment. Finally, Section V and Appendix Table A.2 present sensitivity analyses restricted to a constant sample of states as suffrage laws were enacted.

17 I use samples with cities present in all years, but the results are insensitive to including cities that enter and exit during the 1905-1930 period as well.

18 Lee, Moretti, and Butler (2004) provide evidence that political selection was more salient than political competition in the U.S. House of Representatives between 1946 and 1995. Given that suffrage laws do not always occur in election years, this paper’s results are more consistent with political competition. These two mechanisms are not mutually exclusive, and they lead to the same eventual outcomes.

19 Hospitals made negligible contributions to population health until the development of sulfa drugs in the 1930s, and it is doubtful that corrections spending would influence only childhood infectious diseases sensitive to hygienic conditions (see the mortality results presented in Section IV.B.).

20 Table II also shows a large increase in infrastructure investment for charities, corrections, and hospitals, but many cities are missing data for this variable.

21 State social service spending includes appropriations for hospitals, charities, corrections, and state health boards. Given that social service spending is a small share of total spending, increases in total spending are presumably difficult to detect. Lott and Kenny (1999) report a significant increase in total state spending.

22 The direct election of Senators began in 1913 with the ratification of the 17 th Amendment.

23 Lott and Kenny (1999) report an increase in “liberal” voting in both the House and Senate with women’s suffrage. One possible explanation for Progressive voting results varying by chamber is that because members of the House represent smaller areas, they know their constituents better than do Senators – and better anticipated that a ‘gender gap’ in voting would not emerge as originally expected. For a historical analysis of this recognition in the late 1920s, see Harvey (1998) . I thank Pam Nickless for suggesting this explanation.

24 Deaths under age 1 appear somewhat lower the year before suffrage laws, but Online Appendix Table 3 shows that this drop is not statistically meaningful. More generally, there is no statistically meaningful association between suffrage laws and infant deaths reported in the main results (see Figure V ).

25 Because most infant deaths are birth-related and are concentrated in the neonatal period (the first 28 days following birth), the absence of statistically meaningful infant mortality estimates is not surprising given the rudimentary state of early twentieth century obstetrics (even relative to other specialties). Midwives delivered a large share of babies but were incapable of managing common complications of childbirth and managed hygiene poorly in birth settings ( Meckel 1990 ; Preston and Haines 1991 ). Despite the large shift of childbirth from home to hospital between 1900 and 1930, birth conditions did not improve during this period; maternal mortality rates did not decline in absolute terms until the mid-1930s ( Thomasson and Treber 2004 ). Public health campaigns emphasizing hygiene within homes did not address birth conditions.

26 Excluding states in which women were unable to vote until the 19 th Amendment was ratified in 1920 yields the same pattern of results.

27 To calculate these shares, the fraction of years women could vote in each state between 1900 and 1930 was used to weight the mortality reductions shown in Figure V . See Table I for levels and changes in mortality by age and cause during this period.

28 This number is obtained by multiplying mean age-specific deaths the year before suffrage laws were enacted at ages for which statistically significant estimates are shown in Figure V by the corresponding point estimates in Figure V , multiplying by 48 to obtain implied nationwide magnitudes at each age, and then summing across ages.

29 Meningitis is an inflammation of the membrane surrounded the brain and spinal column generally caused by any of roughly fifty types of bacteria. Good household hygiene was the best prevention at the time (it is transmitted by respiratory droplets and other bodily fluids), although there were some early therapeutic successes with intrathecal equine meningococcal antiserum before the advent of sulfa drugs and modern antibiotics. Diphtheria is an upper respiratory tract illness caused by airborne bacteria. A partially effective antitoxin became available in the 1890s, but its use was not widespread; sulfa drugs became the most effective modern therapy. Specific types of diarrheal disease are not reported in the historical mortality statistics (other than typhoid fever); the best preventive household measures were hand and food washing and water and milk boiling.

30 Childhood infectious diseases include diphtheria, meningitis, diarrhea under age two, measles, scarlet fever, smallpox, and whooping cough. All other causes include typhoid fever, malaria, pneumonia, diabetes, circulatory disease, Bright’s disease/nephritis, cancer/tumors, violent accidents, and suicide.

31 The results described in this section but not included in the paper are available online as supplementary appendix materials at: www.stanford.edu/~ngmiller .

32 The single exception is deaths among females ages 15-19 with constitutional conventions (and the point estimate for female deaths at ages 15-19 in Figure V is itself not statistically different from zero). The data used to analyze failed women’s rights initiatives was obtained from Marie Cornwall ( Cornwall 2003 ) and is described in the online data appendix .

33 These are: proportion of urban residents; proportion of home ownership; mean household size; mean number of own children per household; proportion of the population at ages 0-4, 5-14, 15-24, 25-44, and over 45; proportion of males; proportion of married residents; population shares white, black, native American; literacy rate among those ages 10+; labor force participation rate among those ages 16+; and mean Duncan socio-economic index score.

34 This concern is not relevant to mortality among older children, and the absence of changes in adult mortality suggests that the composition of potential mothers did not change.

35 Because the Bureau of the Census’ birth registration area was not established until 1915 and was incomplete until 1933, fertility responses to suffrage laws must be investigated using population census data. My approach is based on women’s state of birth rather than state of residence. Using individual ever-married sample-line women w born in states s and who were age a in the 1940 population census (and who were in a five-year age interval i =15-19, 20-24, …, 50-54 when a suffrage law was enacted in their state of birth), I estimate: b was = α + ∑ i β i ν ias + δ s + δ a + δ s × t + ε was , where b is the number of lifetime births reported by each woman, v is a dummy variable indicating whether or not a woman could first legally vote in a given age interval i , δ s and δ a represent state and age (or birth cohort) fixed effects, and δ s × t represents state-specific linear time (or age) trends. Because lifetime births can reasonably be modeled as count data and the distribution of lifetime births is left-censored at zero, I estimate this equation by maximum likelihood using a negative binomial model.

36 Specifically, I allow for spatial correlation among states within one standard deviation of each other in the distribution of distance between state centroids (using code posted at: http://faculty.chicagogsb.edu/timothy.conley/research/gmmcode/x_ols.ado ).

37 Interpolation is used to obtain data for intercensal years. These variables combine extensive data assembled by Michael Haines (made available as ICPSR Study # 2896 ) and Adriana Lleras-Muney (posted at http://www.princeton.edu/~alleras/papers/state2.dta ) and include: population over age 10 in gainful occupations, population over age 10 in clerical occupations, total population, urban population (in cities with 25,000 or more), total black population, total male population, fraction of girls ages 10-15 enrolled in school, fraction of boys ages 10-15 enrolled in school, total illiterate population over age 10, average value per acre of farmland and buildings, average acres per farm, population density, population share foreign born, rural surface road mileage per 1,000 population, value of all crops, and total number of farms.

38 Although this paper’s estimated mortality reductions are large, more powerful forces appear to have been at work during the early twentieth century. Cutler and Miller (2005) report larger mortality reductions in American cities linked to drinking water disinfection, for example.

39 Campaign organizers recruited school nurses to work during the summer, provided the desirable contemporary equivalent of residency training to otherwise unpaid doctors, and enlisted large cadres of volunteers.

40 Additional supplemental information about the data used in this paper’s analyses is available in online at www.stanford.edu/~ngmiller .

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• United States Children’s Bureau to the Secretary of Labor First Annual Report of the Chief, Children’s Bureau to the Secretary of Labor for the Year Ended Jun 30, 1913. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office; 1914.
• United States National Office of Vital Statistics Vital Statistics of the United States: 1950. Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office; 1954.
• The World Bank Engendering Development: Through Gender Equality in Rights, Resources, and Voice. World Bank Policy Research Report No. 21776. 2001.
• The World Health Organization (WHO) The World Health Report 2002: Reducing Risks, Promoting Healthy Life. Geneva: World Health Organization; 2002. [ PubMed ]

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Start your research on women's suffrage with this guide highlighting the Schlesinger Library's  archival collections as well as periodicals, photographs, posters, and memorabilia. Some materials may also be available in digital format and links are included where available.

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To learn more about suffrage at Radcliffe College, please see the Radcliffe College Suffrage research guide .

In the summer of 2020, supported by funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Schlesinger Library launched two new tools: the Long 19th Amendment Project Portal and the Suffrage School . The Portal is an open-access digital portal that facilitates interdisciplinary, transnational scholarship and innovative teaching around the history of gender and voting rights in the United States. The Suffrage School is a platform where a broad array of researchers, writers, and teachers have been invited to create a series of digital teaching modules. Each lesson in the Suffrage School connects in rich and unpredictable ways to the Library’s Long 19th Amendment Project , which tackles the tangled history of gender and American citizenship.

Please Take Note: Many of our collections are stored offsite and/or have access restrictions. Be sure to contact us in advance of your visit.

• Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906) Best known for her lifelong crusade for woman’s suffrage, Susan B. Anthony was first active in the temperance and anti-slavery movements. Discrimination within these movements, along with her friend Elizabeth Cady Stanton, helped to convinced Anthony that women could not fully participate in social action until equal rights were first secured. She helped to organize the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) in 1869 and served as the second president of the National American Women Suffrage Association (NAWSA) from 1891-1900. In 1872, Anthony cast a vote, for which she was arrested and tried. Anthony died in March 1906 at the age of 86, fourteen years before the Nineteenth Amendment gave American women the right to vote. Please visit the Susan B. Anthony research guide for more information and access to the digitized content.
• Blackwell family The most prominent members of the Blackwell family were Elizabeth (1821-1910) and Emily (1826-1910), among the earliest women doctors and founders of the New York Infirmary and College for Women; their brother Henry Browne Blackwell (1825-1909), his wife Lucy Stone (1818-1893), and their daughter Alice Stone Blackwell (1857-1950), known for their leading roles in the abolition, woman suffrage, and prohibition movements; and their sister-in-law Antoinette Louisa (Brown) Blackwell (1825-1921), wife of Samuel Charles Blackwell (1823-1901), the first woman ordained as a minister in the United States and an active speaker on behalf of abolition, women's rights, and prohibition. The Blackwell family collections document the family’s involvement in the suffrage movement and include materials relating to suffragists Alice Stone Blackwell and Lucy Stone, letters to Antoinette Louisa (Brown) Blackwell from Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, photographs of suffrage parades, and articles about suffrage. They also include materials relating to Emma Stone Lawrence Blackwell, who was a niece of Lucy Stone and active in the New Jersey and Massachusetts suffrage movements. Please visit the Blackwell Family research guide for more information about accessing the digitized materials.
• Alice Stone Blackwell (1857-1950) [in Woman’s Rights Collection] Alice Stone Blackwell, self-proclaimed radical socialist and daughter of suffrage leaders Lucy Stone and Henry Browne Blackwell, joined her parents at the Woman's Journal , the woman's rights newspaper they had founded and edited. Over the next 35 years, she played a leading role in writing and editing the Woman's Journal . Blackwell was instrumental in bringing about the reconciliation of the National and American Woman Suffrage associations in 1890, and for almost twenty years served as secretary of the new National American Woman Suffrage Association. Among her other positions were president of the New England and Massachusetts Woman Suffrage associations and honorary president of the Massachusetts League of Women Voters. Please visit the Blackwell Family research guide for related materials. [Digital content can be found in ProQuest's History Vault . This database requires a Harvard ID to access.]
• Olympia Brown (1835-1926) Olympia Brown became the first American woman to be ordained by full denominational authority when she was ordained by the St. Lawrence Association of Universalists in 1863. She was also active in the suffrage movement, primarily in Wisconsin and then on a national level. In 1868 Brown helped found the New England Woman’s Suffrage Association, the first suffrage organization in the United States. She also joined the Congressional Union (later the National Woman’s Party) and distributed suffrage material in front of President Wilson’s White House. After the passage of the School Suffrage Law in Wisconsin in 1885, Brown cast a vote in November of 1887, but her vote was rejected and her case went to court. Brown argued on her own behalf and won, but the decision was repealed by the Wisconsin Supreme Court. [Digital content can be accessed directly through the finding aid and in ProQuest's History Vault . The database requires a Harvard ID to access.]
• Carrie Chapman Catt (1859-1947) Carrie Chapman Catt, an active suffragist and peace leader, joined the Iowa Suffrage Association in 1887 and attended the first convention of the newly organized National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in 1890 as an Iowa delegate. She became chair of NAWSA's Organization Committee in 1895 and thereafter worked for suffrage both nationally and internationally. She joined Jane Addams in founding the Woman's Peace Party in 1915 and organized the Committee on the Cause and Cure of War (which met annually from 1925 to 1939), serving as its chair until 1932. Material can be found in the Woman's Rights Collection and the Mary Earhart Dillon Collection . [Digital content for both collections can be found in ProQuest's History Vault . This database requires a Harvard ID to access.]
• Mary Jane Whitely Coggeshall In 1870 Mary Jane Coggeshall was a founding member of the Polk County (Iowa) Woman Suffrage Society, and edited The Woman's Hour, which the Society produced between 1877 and 1880. She also held numerous positions in the Iowa Woman Suffrage Association (which became the Iowa Equal Suffrage Association in 1897), including three terms as president. Coggeshall was elected an auditor for the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in 1902 and 1904, attended several National American Woman Suffrage Association conventions, and was a speaker at those held in Washington, DC (1904), and Chicago (1907). She also served as editor of The Woman's Standard for its first two years of publication (1886-1888) and its last (1911). See also Additional Papers of Mary J. Coggeshall .
• Mary Ware Dennett (1872-1947) Suffragist, pacifist, artisan, and advocate of birth control and sex education, Mary Ware Dennett was a founder of the National Birth Control League, director of the Voluntary Parenthood League and editor of the Birth Control Herald. Attracted to organizations seeking a broader distribution of wealth and power, she worked for women’s suffrage, the single tax, proportional representation, and free trade. [Digital content can be found in ProQuest's History Vault . This database requires a Harvard ID to access.]
• Mary "Molly" Dewson (1874-1962) Mary “Molly” Dewson was particularly active in the Massachusetts woman’s suffrage movement and the campaign of the National Consumers’ League that worked to secure passage of minimum wage laws for women and children. In 1933, thanks to the influence of Eleanor Roosevelt, her political ally and personal friend, Dewson was appointed head of the Women's Division of the Democratic National Committee. She is credited with securing important positions for many women in the Democratic Party and the Roosevelt Administration. Material can be found in the Woman's Rights Collection and the Papers of Mary "Molly" Dewson . [Digital content can for the Woman’s Rights Collection can be found in ProQuest's History Vault . This database requires a Harvard ID to access.]
• Mary Earhart Dillon Mary Earhart Dillon assembled this collection in the early 1940s in the course of writing Frances Willard: From Prayers to Politics (published under the name Mary Earhart by University of Chicago Press in 1944). Due to the difficulty of finding primary source material, Dillon contacted various women in the Midwest (especially the Chicago lawyer and suffragist Catharine Waugh McCulloch) who had been active in temperance, woman's suffrage, and related movements and activities. These women gave Dillon books and papers they had created or accumulated during their work for these causes. [Digital content can be found in ProQuest's History Vault . This database requires a Harvard ID to access.]
• Mary Elisabeth Dreier (1875-1963) Mary Elisabeth Dreier (also known as Mimi, Mietze, and Tolochee) was a labor and social reformer as well as a suffragist. The negative attitudes of male trade unionists towards women workers helped turn Dreier into an ardent supporter of suffrage and women’s rights. Dreier chaired the Industrial Section of the New York State Woman Suffrage Party and was active in the New York Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) throughout its existence (1903-1950), serving as president from 1906 to 1914. She never married, but shared a home with fellow reformer Frances Kellor from 1905 until the latter’s death in 1952.
• Margaret Foley (1875-1957) Margaret Foley worked as a speaker and manager of organization work for the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association from 1906 to 1915. Foley, along with other young Massachusetts suffragists, was inspired by the militant tactics of suffragists in England and undertook open-air speaking tours in 1909. When she and others trailed Republican candidates through Western Massachusetts publicly questioning their suffrage views, newspapers labeled her a “heckler.” Foley never married and probably lived with her long-time friend and fellow suffragist, Helen Elizabeth Goodnow, for many years. Material can be found in the Woman's Rights Collection and the Papers of Margaret Foley . [Digital content can be found in ProQuest's History Vault . This database requires a Harvard ID to access.]
• Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826-1898) Matilda Joslyn Gage served as the president of the National Woman Suffrage and the New York State Woman Suffrage associations. She also edited the National Woman Suffrage Association periodical National Citizen and Ballot Box . Gage, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony together produced the first three volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage . See also Scrapbooks of Matilda Joslyn Gage . [Digital content can be found in ProQuest's History Vault . This database requires a Harvard ID to access.]
• Helen Hamilton Gardener (1853-1925) [in Woman's Rights Collection] Helen Hamilton Gardener settled in Washington, D.C., and took up the suffrage cause in 1907. In 1913 she was appointed to the Congressional Committee of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). She would go on to become the vice-chair as well as the vice president of NAWSA and served as its chief liaison with the Woodrow Wilson administration. In 1920, Wilson appointed her to the United States Civil Service Commission, making her the first woman to occupy so high a federal position. Gardener also published numerous lectures, articles, and books during the period between 1885 and 1900. [Digital content can be found in ProQuest's History Vault . This database requires a Harvard ID to access.]
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a socialist, deist, independent thinker, and author who was an intellectual leader of the women’s movement from the late 1890s to the 1920s. An advocate of economic independence for women, Gilman considered the ballot of secondary importance. Her interests ranged from sensible dress for women, physical fitness, more rational domestic architecture, and professionalized housework, to birth control, Freud, and immigrants. See also Papers of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (177) . The Schlesinger holds a wide breadth of material related to Gilman, much of which has been digitized. Please see the Charlotte Perkins Gilman research guide for more information about accessing the digitized materials.
• Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910) Julia Ward Howe, perhaps best known as the author of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” was also active in and widely respected for her leadership in a variety of fields, including women's suffrage. After the Civil War, she helped found the New England Woman Suffrage Association (1868). In 1869, along with Lucy Stone, Howe became a leader of the American Woman Suffrage Association. She served as the president of the Massachusetts (1870-1878, 1891-1893) and the New England (1868-1877, 1893-1910) suffrage associations. She was also one of the founders of the Woman's Journal . In addition to her work regarding suffrage, she was also extremely active in the women’s club movement. She was a founder (1868) and president of the New England Woman’s Club and of the Association for the Advancement of Women (1873). [Digital content can be found in ProQuest's History Vault . This database requires a Harvard ID to access.]
• Hazel Hunkins-Hallinan (1890-1982) Hazel Hunkins-Hallinan was born in Aspen, Colorado, in 1890. Denied the opportunity to teach chemistry and physics because she was a woman, she was inspired to join the National Woman’s Party. She became a prominent figure in the picket lines in front of the White House, which led to her arrest and imprisonment in the Occoquan Workhouse, where she and other suffragists participated in a hunger strike. In addition to being a journalist, she was also the author of a children’s book, The Story of America (1942) and the editor of In Her Own Right (1968), a collection of feminist essays.
• Grace A. Johnson (1871-1952) [in Woman's Rights Collection] Grace A. Johnson defined herself as an educator, lecturing and writing on a wide variety of topics, including suffrage, the status of women, prohibition, and aspects of democracy and government structure. During a 1907 trip to Europe with her family, Johnson became interested in woman suffrage and subsequently served as president to the Cambridge Political Equality Association from 1911 to 1915 – the first of a number of similar positions. She advocated for woman suffrage and for the United States’ participation in the League of Nations (and later the United Nations) and World Court. Johnson was one of three Massachusetts women delegates to the 1912 Progressive Party national convention in Chicago. [Digital content can be found in ProQuest's History Vault . This database requires a Harvard ID to access.]
• Florence Ledyard Cross Kitchelt (1874-1961) Florence Ledyard Cross Kitchelt worked as a social worker at a number of settlement houses between 1900 and 1907. By 1915, she had become a proponent of woman’s suffrage. She became the Citizenship Director of the Connecticut League of Women Voters in 1920 and was the director of the Connecticut League of Nations Association from 1924 to 1944. She was once an outspoken opponent of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) but eventually became the chairman of the Connecticut Committee for the ERA in 1943.
• Harriet Burton Laidlaw (1873-1949) Throughout her life, Harriet Burton Laidlaw was a suffragist, social and civic reformer, and internationalist. Her concern with women’s rights blossomed into her remarkably active involvement in a variety of causes and organizations. This life of public service is reflected in her participation with many suffrage organizations including the College Equal Suffrage League, National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), and the New York State Woman Suffrage Association/Party. See also Scrapbooks of Harriet Burton Laidlaw [Digital content can be found in ProQuest's History Vault . This database requires a Harvard ID to access.]
• Rosa Marie Finnochietti Levis (1878-1959) Levis was born on Hull Street in the North End of Boston. Her parents, Giovanni and Theresa Finnochietti, were recent immigrants from Genoa, Italy. Levis was proud of her early advocacy (1910) of woman suffrage, claiming to be the first Italian-American suffragist in Massachusetts. During World War I she participated, with other suffragists, in the sale of Liberty Bonds and in programs for food conservation and for Americanization of Italian immigrants.
• Florence Hope Luscomb (1887-1985) Florence Hope Luscomb, social and political activist, became an executive secretary for the Boston Equal Suffrage Association in 1917. She held positions in the Massachusetts Civic League and other organizations and agencies until 1933, when she became a full-time social and political activist. In the early 1920s, Luscomb began to serve on the boards of civil rights, civil liberties, and other organizations. Luscomb ran unsuccessfully for the Boston City Council, U.S. House of Representatives, and governor of Massachusetts. Material can be found in the Woman's Rights Collection and the Papers of Florence Luscomb .
• Catharine Gouger Waugh McCulloch (1862-1945) Both a suffragist and a lawyer, McCulloch served as the legislative superintendent of the Illinois Equal Suffrage Association (1890-1912). She was also active in the movement for women’s rights, seeking state legislation permitting woman suffrage in presidential and local elections not constitutionally limited to male voters, a bill that passed in 1913. She served as legal adviser (1904-ca.1911) and as first vice president (1910-1911) of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. She was also instrumental in the passage of Illinois legislation granting women equal rights in the guardianship of their children (1901) and raising the legal age of consent for women from fourteen to sixteen (1905). Material can be found in the Mary Earhart Dillon Collection and the Papers of Catharine Gouger Waugh McCulloch . [Digital content for the Mary Earhart Dillon Collection can be found in ProQuest's History Vault . This database requires a Harvard ID to access.]
• Helen Brewster Owens (1881-1968) Helen Brewster Owens was both a mathematician and a suffragist. Her mother, Clara (Linton) Brewster, a teacher, was president of the Linn County Women’s Suffrage Association in Kansas, and as a young girl, Owens would help her mother distribute suffrage literature at the county fair. Owens went on to serve as chair of the Resolution Committee for the New York State Woman Suffrage Association (1910). She also organized the College Equal Suffrage League at Cornell (1911) and was a paid organizer and chair of the Sixth Judicial District for the Empire State Campaign Committee (1913-1916). See also Additional Papers of Helen Brewster Owens . [Digital content can be found in ProQuest's History Vault . This database requires a Harvard ID to access.]
• Mary H. Page (1860-1940) Mary Hutcheson lived in Europe with her family as a child; when her parents both died, she moved to Boston to attend classes in biology and chemistry as a special student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In addition to founding a discussion club that became the Brookline Equal Suffrage Association, being president of the Brookline Association, and serving as chairman of the Executive Board of the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association, Page played a major role in founding the Boston Equal Suffrage Association for Good Government. Chair of BESAGG's Executive Board and later its president, she was known for her fund-raising skills and ability to convince individual women to join the suffrage cause. Her interest in suffrage extended to the campaigns in Europe; in addition to making several trips there, she corresponded with several English suffragists and entertained Emmeline Pankhurst during her 1909 visit to Massachusetts. In 1912, Page and Gertude Halladay Leonard helped organize the suffrage campaign in Ohio. This collection contains organizational records of the Brookline Equal Suffrage Association and the Committee for Work, which was based in Boston and raised money to support the suffrage movement in Oklahoma and elsewhere. Also included are several of Page's suffrage-related writings and speeches, both handwritten and published; and material pertaining to the British suffrage campaign, including letters to Page from Emmeline Pankhurst and photographs of Pankhurst from her 1909 visit to Boston.
• Alice Park (1861-1961) A socialist, vegetarian, pacifist, founder of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and campaigner for women's rights, Alice Park wrote the California law, passed in 1913, granting women equal rights of guardianship over their children. She was a delegate and speaker at the Congress of the International Women's Suffrage Alliance in Budapest, Hungary, in June 1913, and a delegate to the Tenth Congress of the International Women's Suffrage Alliance, held in Paris in May 1926. Through her connections with many women's rights organizations, Park acquired a library of feminist books, as well as buttons, leaflets, and posters. This collection includes 55 different posters of the women's suffrage movement collected by Alice Park. Most are British, two are from the international congresses she attended, and eleven are American. [All posters in this collection have been digitized and are accessible without a Harvard ID through HOLLIS Images .]
• Maud Wood Park (1871-1955) [in Woman's Rights Collection] Maud Wood Park graduated from Radcliffe College in 1898 and was active in suffrage and civic work in Boston for more than fifteen years. With Inez Haynes Gilmore, she organized the first chapter of the College Equal Suffrage League in 1900 and during the next eight years worked to establish local chapters in Massachusetts, New York, and the Midwest. Following the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, Park served as the first president of the National League of Women Voters (1920-1924). She prepared and donated a large body of material on the suffrage movement and on women after 1920 to Radcliffe College in 1943. This collection, called the Woman’s Rights Collection, formed the nucleus of the Women’s Archives, later the Schlesinger Library. [Digital content can be found in ProQuest's History Vault . This database requires a Harvard ID to access.]
• Alice Paul (1885-1977) Alice Paul was a Quaker, lawyer, and lifelong activist for women’s rights. She was active in the Women’s Social and Political Union in England, where she was arrested and jailed repeatedly as a participant in the campaign for women’s rights led by Emmeline Pankhurst. After returning to the United States in 1910, Paul was appointed chair of the Congressional Committee of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1912. In June 1916, Paul founded the National Woman’s Party (NWP), its sole plank a resolution calling for immediate passage of the federal amendment guaranteeing the enfranchisement of women. After the ratification of the suffrage amendment in 1920, the NWP began a long battle to end all legal discrimination against women in the United States and to raise the legal, social, and economic status of women around the world. The Equal Rights Amendment, as written by Paul in 1923, was first introduced in Congress in December of that year. In 1938, Paul founded the World Woman’s Party in Geneva, Switzerland. This collection is digitized and is accessible through the finding aid for the Alice Paul collection (Call#: MC 399). See also Videotape collection of Alice Paul .
• Wenona Osborne Pinkham (1882-1930) Pinkham was a suffragist, reformer, and lobbyist. She taught in the Denver, Colorado, public schools and was a founder and president of the North Side Neighborhood House in Denver. As state chair for the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association (1913-1915), Pinkham spoke to audiences as an example of a woman voter, since Colorado had granted women suffrage years before. In 1917, she became executive secretary of the Boston Equal Suffrage Association for Good Government and remained in this position when the organization became the Boston League of Women Voters. In late 1922 she left the league and became associate executive secretary of the Massachusetts Civic League, which promoted social welfare legislation and such issues as paying prisoners for their work. From 1923 until her sudden death in 1930, Pinkham served as the Massachusetts Civic League's executive secretary.
• Jeannette Rankin (1880-1973) Jeannette Rankin, after briefly working as a social worker in Seattle, campaigned for women’s suffrage in Washington, California, Montana, and other states from 1910 to 1915. The first woman elected to Congress (1916), she voted against United States entry into World War I and worked for women’s rights as well as peace legislation. From 1919 to 1940, Rankin lobbied Congress and lectured for various peace and other humanitarian causes. In the 1920s, she was employed by the National Consumers’ League and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and founded the Georgia Peace Society. [Digital content can be found in ProQuest's History Vault . This database requires a Harvard ID to access.]
• Rebecca Hourwich Reyher (1897-1987) Reyher was an author, lecturer, suffragist, and traveler. In March 1913, she began her life's work for women's rights by participating in the first national suffrage parade in the United States. She carried her newfound passion to New York City and beyond, organizing street meetings and opening offices for the National Woman's Party. In 1924, Reyher took her first trip to South Africa as a journalist; it opened her eyes to the plight of women in other countries and inspired at least four more trips to the African continent. She wrote many books and articles (some unpublished) regarding women's rights throughout Africa, India, and Sri Lanka. Back in the United States, Reyher continued her work with the National Woman's Party, maintaining close friendships with many of the women and men who fought for equal rights for women.
• Anna Howard Shaw (1847-1919) A minister, physician, lecturer, and suffragist, Anna Howard Shaw became increasingly convinced that the problems she encountered in her ministry and as a physician could not be solved without major political and social reforms, and that obtaining the vote for women was a necessary first step. Shaw’s oratorical skills surrounding the suffrage and temperance movements were legendary. In 1913, the National Anti-Suffrage Association forbade its members to engage in any further debate with her. She served as the vice president (1892-1904) and the president (1904-1915) of the National American Woman Suffrage Association as well as acting as the chair of the Woman’s Committee of the U.S. Council of National Defense (1917-1919). For her extraordinary work and success in the coordination women’s contributions to the war effort, she was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal by the United States government in May 1919. Material can be found in the Woman's Rights Collection and the Mary Earhart Dillon Collection . [Digital content for both collections can be found in ProQuest's History Vault . This database requires a Harvard ID to access.]
• Nellie Nugent Somerville (1863-1952) Nellie Nugent Somerville became active in suffrage and temperance work in the early 1890s, becoming Corresponding Secretary of the Mississippi Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in 1894 and organizing the Mississippi Woman Suffrage Association in 1897. By 1915 she was vice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. In 1923, she became the first woman elected to the Mississippi legislature, serving until 1927. She is viewed as a pioneer in Mississippi’s work for women’s rights and was the first woman to be elected to the state House of Representatives. See also Additional Papers of Nellie Nugent Somerville . [Digital content can be found in ProQuest's History Vault . This database requires a Harvard ID to access.]
• Edna Lamprey Stantial (1897-1985) Edna Lamprey Stantial was secretary of the Boston Equal Suffrage Association for Good Government from 1916 to 1920 and was reportedly its youngest member. After the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment guaranteeing woman suffrage, she became executive secretary of the Boston League of Women Voters until 1924, when her daughter was born. Stantial continued to work for women’s rights as a volunteer while raising her child. She became close to Maud Wood Park and Alice Stone Blackwell through her political activity. Stantial was extremely organized as well as dedicated to the cause of women’s history. She helped Park gather the papers she gave to Radcliffe College in 1943 that formed the Woman’s Rights Collection, and she was named archivist of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1950. Stantial continued throughout her life to assemble and disseminate suffrage-related information and historical documents to a variety of repositories. Materials can be found in the Papers of Edna Lamprey Stantial and the Mary Earhart Dillon Collection . [Digital content can be found in ProQuest's History Vault . This database requires a Harvard ID to access.]
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) In 1840 Elizabeth Cady Stanton was appointed a delegate to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. There she met Lucretia Mott, with whom she signed the first call for a women’s rights convention. She was the chief agent in calling the Seneca Falls Convention (1848), and following the Convention she remained one of the leaders of women in America until her death. From 1855 to 1865 she served as the president of the National Committee of the Suffrage Party. She was president of the National Woman Suffrage Association until 1890. She was also the joint author, along with Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Ida Husted Harper, of The History of Woman Suffrage .
• Doris Stevens (1888-1963) Doris Stevens became active in the suffrage movement in 1913, when the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, which became the National Woman’s Party, hired her as an organizer. Stevens held this position through 1920, at which time she published her book, Jailed for Freedom , which described the imprisonment of women activists in 1917 during the National Woman’s Party’s radical campaign for suffrage. Stevens was an active member of the National Woman’s Party for thirty years and served the party in various capacities: as vice president, as chair of the Committee on International Action, and as a member of the National Council.
• Lucy Stone (1818-1893) [in Woman's Rights Collection] Lucy Stone, a suffragist and abolitionist, gave her first public address on women’s rights in 1847. In 1850 she called for the first national women’s rights convention and had much to do with arranging later conventions. When the 14th Amendment was pending both she and her husband, Henry Brown Blackwell, tried in vain to strike the word "male" from it and thereby win suffrage for women. When the American Equal Rights Association was organized (1866), she became a member of the executive committee. In 1868, Stone and Blackwell helped organize the New England Woman Suffrage Association. She was a leading figure in the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association, which she helped found in 1870, and in the American and New England Associations. She likewise spent a great deal of time lecturing, drafting bills, and attending legislative hearings in the interest of women's rights. Materials can be found in the Woman’s Rights Collection and the Blackwell family papers. [Digital content for the Woman’s Rights Collection can be found in ProQuest's History Vault . This database requires a Harvard ID to access. Please visit the Blackwell Family research guide for related materials.]
• Betty Gram Swing (1893-1969) Suffragist Betty Gram Swing was born Myrtle Eveline Gram. With her sister Alice, she joined the women's rights movement in 1917 and was part of a group arrested for protesting the treatment of Alice Paul in prison. After her release, she joined the National Woman's Party as a national organizer and worked for the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Correspondence, speeches, clippings, and printed material show Swing's work with the National Woman's Party, first as a "suffrage picket" who served jail time in 1917, and later as an advocate for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. Material documenting Gram Swing's work with international women's groups, such as the Six Point Group, the Inter-American Commission of Women, the World Woman's Party, and the League of Nations Consultative Committee on Nationality, shows the tight social circles of international women's rights activists, as well as the connections between national and international campaigns.
• Woman's Rights Collection Donated by Maud Wood Park in 1943, this collection of papers concerning women and men involved in the woman's rights movement formed the nucleus of the Women's Archives, which is now the Schlesinger Library. The collection contains correspondence, journals, notebooks, speeches, financial documents, reports, minutes, membership lists, agendas, bulletins, pamphlets, manuals, articles, clippings, maps, scrapbooks, photos, posters, memorabilia, plays, books, etc. Highlighting the work done in Massachusetts, the collection primarily documents the suffrage movement and also the gains for women in government participation, protective legislation, and employment opportunities after 1920. It includes papers of and about little-known women, suffrage leaders, and professional women; records of suffrage groups; and information on international peace activities. [Digital content can be found in ProQuest's History Vault . This database requires a Harvard ID to access.]
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🏆 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?
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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IvyPanda . "92 Women’s Suffrage Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." March 2, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/womens-suffrage-essay-topics/.

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