Suffrage 2020

Pathways kicks off a year of suffrage-related content in its Winter 2019 issue. Learn about the role of Ohio women in the long fight for the right to vote. Portraits of little known Ohio suffragists and a reading list from the League of Women Voters round out this commemoration of the 100th anniversary of women's right to vote in America.

Chapter from Cleveland--a tradition of reform, edited by David D. Van Tassel and John J. Grabowski.

In 1914 John Reilly of Columbus, Ohio, wrote to Progressive Party candidate for the United States Senate Arthur Garford voicing his concern about the party's endorsement of women's suffrage. Although Reilly admitted to signing one of the suffragist's petitions to get the issue of women's suffrage on the November ballot, he declared that he had no intention of voting for the women's suffrage amendment. He wrote that he would "vote for the devil on the Progressive ticket" but that he did "not like the women's suffrage end of it at all." Reilly's rejection of women's suffrage reflects the difficulty Columbus suffragists faced in their 1914 campaign for an amendment to the Ohio constitution. The state and national Progressive Party endorsed women's suffrage, even prominently including it on their 1914 platform, but clearly not all Progressive voters supported the idea. As Reilly demonstrates, not all purported allies were actually supporters of women's suffrage. This was the case in Franklin County, Ohio, where, despite vigorous campaigning, suffragists faced defeat in 1914.

In May 1912 Rose Livingston, a self-described missionary working among the white female population of New York's Chinatown, suffered an attack at a tenement on Doyers Street in the Chinatown neighborhood when she tried to save a young white girl from the clutches of her cadet, or procurer. This essay explores the ways in which the suffrage movement mobilized Livingston's biography and antiprostitution work in New York City's Chinatown to illuminate the interconnections of class, racial, and sexual politics in the early-twentieth-century woman suffrage movement, including Ohio suffragists.

Describes the life of Mary Jane McCleery, and Oberlin alumna, who disagreed with the many prominent women at the college and defended the women's suffrage movement.

During the forty years before the Civil War, various agricultural journals sprang up and flourished throughout the Union. They carried advice on scientific farming, advertisements for farm implements, seed,
and stock, and a miscellany of queries from correspondents, reports of record-breaking harvests, folk nostrums, and so on. Most of them also published recipes and other items of interest to farm women. About the middle of the century, organized "Ladies' Departments" began to appear, often run by the editor's wife or one of the paper's more notable feminine contributors. This was especially true of the western journals. During the fifties, women's rights issues were freely discussed in these departments of the agricultural journals. The Ohio Cultivator was one of the few papers that heartily supported the women's movement.

In this autobiography Upton recounts her life as a suffragist, presidents of the United States she knew, her family history, her trip to Venezuela, and life in Washington, D.C. when her father was elected to Congress in November 1880.

Vivian M. May explores the theoretical and political contributions of Anna Julia Cooper, a renowned Black feminist scholar, educator and activist whose ideas deserve far more attention than they have received. Drawing on Africana and feminist theory, May places Cooper's theorizing in its historical contexts and offers new ways to interpret the evolution of Cooper's visionary politics, subversive methodology, and defiant philosophical outlook. Rejecting notions that Cooper was an elitist duped by dominant ideologies, May contends that Cooper's ambiguity, code-switching, and irony should be understood as strategies of a radical methodology of dissent.

With this first scholarly biography of Anna Howard Shaw (1847-1919), Trisha Franzen sheds new light on an important woman suffrage leader who has too often been overlooked and misunderstood.

When the Rev. Dr Anna Howard Shaw became president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), her status as a single, self-supporting woman forced changes in this organization, which had been dominated by economically dependent middle-class women. Yet Shaw did not fit into either acknowledged category of Progressive Era never-married women: the privileged and educated 'new woman' who chose to work and the working-class 'working woman' who labored out of necessity. This article argues that Shaw's liminal identity allowed her to bridge numerous constituencies and foster the needed changes in the NAWSA while also contributing to the redefinition of American womanhood. The problems of analyzing Shaw's life highlight the need for additional scholarship and theory on the category 'single' in women's history.

A pivotal leader in the fight for both abolition and gender equality, Stone's achievements marked the beginning of the women's rights movement and helped to lay the groundwork for the eventual winning of women's suffrage.

No study of women's history in the United States is complete without an account of Lucy Stone's role in the nineteenth-century drive for legal and political rights for women.This first fully documented biography of Stone describes her rapid rise to fame and power and her later attempt at an equitable mariage. Lucy Stone was a Massachusetts newspaper editor, abolitionist, and charismatic orator for the women's rights movement in the last half of the nineteenth century.

The story of an early champion of women's independence and of human wrights whose career spanned one of the most turbulent and vital periods in American history.

Explores Stone’s role not only as a founder of the movement that became the woman suffrage movement, but also as its primary organizer and
spokesperson.

Million examines the social forces of the 1830s and 1840s that led Stone to become a woman's reformer and her early agitation as a student at Oberlin College, including what may well be the nation's first "strike" for equal pay for women." "She worked tirelessly during the 1850s, not only as the movement's "silver-tongued" orator, but also as the organizer and manager of the National Woman's Rights Conventions, champion of coeducation, instigator of nationwide petitioning efforts, and first person to plead for women's equal legal rights before a body of lawmakers.

In this autobiography, originally published in 1940, Terrell describes the important events and people in her life. Terrell began her career as a teacher, first at Wilberforce College and then at a high school in Washington, D.C., where she met her future husband, Robert Heberton Terrell. After marriage, the women's suffrage movement attracted her interests and before long she became a prominent lecturer at both national and international forums on women's rights.

In her position as both teacher and administrator in the late nineteenth century, Mary Church Terrell navigated the racism and sexism of an increasingly bureaucratic educational landscape to emerge as a powerful, activist voice for children. Through a closer look at the strategies she and others used to advocate for social uplift via children and the home, we can continue to uncover the uneven rhetorical terrain black women navigated as they advocated for youth within an environment that constructed black children as outside of normative conceptions of childhood.

Covering 72 years of suffrage history, this film describes the struggle to get the 19th Amendment passed in Congress and ratified by states. Includes Tennessee’s special session on Aug. 9, 1920 where Suffrage supporters wore the yellow rose and "antis" countered with red roses. On August 18, 24-year-old Tennessee General Assembly member Harry Burn acted on the advice of his mother and cast the deciding vote granting all American women the right to vote.

Rosalyn Terborg-Penn draws from original documents to take a comprehensive look at the African American women who fought for the right to vote. She analyzes the women's own stories, and examines why they joined and how they participated in the U.S. women's suffrage movement.

Narrates the remarkable story of the first person to picket the White House, the first to attempt a national political boycott, the first to burn the president in effigy, and the first to lead a successful campaign of nonviolence.

Century of Struggle tells the story of one of the great social movements in American history. The struggle for women’s voting rights was one of the longest, most successful, and in some respects most radical challenges ever posed to the American system of electoral politics.

Covering 72 years of suffrage history, this film describes the struggle to get the 19th Amendment passed in Congress and ratified by states. Includes Tennessee’s special session on Aug. 9, 1920 where Suffrage supporters wore the yellow rose and "antis" countered with red roses. On August 18, 24-year-old Tennessee General Assembly member Harry Burn acted on the advice of his mother and cast the deciding vote granting all American women the right to vote.

In this book, Aileen S. Kraditor selects a group of suffragist leaders and investigates their thinking--the ideas, and tactics, with which they battled the ideas and institutions impeding what suffragists defined as progress toward the equality of the sexes. She also examines what the American public believed "suffragism" to mean and how the major events of the time affected the movement.

This brief but authoritative analysis of the woman suffrage movement by an historian and a political scientist should be of interest to students as well as specialists. Well-selected documents illustrate the interpretation in the text and enhance the value of the book as an effective teaching tool.

Companion book to the PBS American Experience documentary by the same name, this anthology is the most comprehensive collection of writings -- contemporary and historical -- on the woman suffrage movement in America. It includes essays by the most prominent contemporary historians, many who challenge widely accepted theories and illustrate the diversity and complexity of the fight for the 19th Amendment.

Margaret Finnegan's pathbreaking study of woman suffrage from the 1850s to the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 reveals how activists came to identify with consumer culture and employ its methods of publicity to win popular support through carefully crafted images of enfranchised women as "personable, likable, and modern."

Suffragists in Imperial Age demonstrates how seemingly disparate conversations about the physical boundaries of national territory and the gendered boundaries of political space overlapped and inflected each other during post-Civil War efforts to rebuild the nation in new terms. This book argues that US expansion was crucial to the development of the postbellum US woman suffrage movement and shows how federal discussions of citizenship and voting rights in the context of creating territorial governments in the continental West and, after the Spanish-American War, in the Caribbean and the Pacific, created space on the Congressional calendar for suffragists to instigate debate on the woman question.

In Votes For Women, Jean H. Baker has assembled an impressive collection of new scholarship on the struggle of American women for the suffrage. Each of the eleven essays illuminates some aspect of the long battle that lasted from the 1850s to the passage of the suffrage amendment in 1920.

An account of the 1920 ratification of the constitutional amendment that granted voting rights to women traces the culmination of seven decades of legal battles and cites the pivotal contributions of famous suffragists and political leaders.

In demanding equal rights and the vote for women, woman suffragists introduced liberal feminist dissent into an emerging national movement against absolute power in the forms of patriarchy, church administrations, slavery and false dogmas.

This book departs from familiar accounts of high-profile woman suffrage activists whose main concern was a federal constitutional amendment. It tells the story of woman suffrage as one involving the diverse politics of women across the country as well as the incentives of the men with the primary political authority to grant new voting rights - those in state legislatures. Through a mix of qualitative and quantitative evidence, the book explains the success and failures of efforts for woman suffrage provisions in five states and in the US Congress as the result of successful and failed coalitional politics between the suffrage movement and important constituencies of existing male voters, including farmers' organizations, labor unions, and the Populist and Progressive parties.

Witty rhyming valentines and other texts represent only a fraction of the extensive archive of literary works written in the service of the US suffrage campaign. From the early 1850s, when an organized national women's rights movement emerged, to 1920, when the Nineteenth Amendment enfranchising women was ratified, US women writers from a variety of racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds published hundreds of short stories, novels, poems, plays, essays and conversion narratives in support of woman suffrage.

American suffragists of the late-19th and early-20th centuries worked in a political climate that was hostile to the extension of democratic rights. This study investigates how the woman suffrage movement achieved its goal through a pressure group, the National American Woman Suffrage Association.

The Nineteenth Amendment should be interpreted broadly and cited as authority for incorporating equality of rights to women as a class. Both the historical context surrounding adoption of the Amendment and cases concerning the right to serve as a juror and the freedom of contract support interpreting the Amendment as a guarantee of gender parity. Future litigation against gender discrimination and for the protection of affirmative rights should be grounded in the Nineteenth Amendment.

Looking forward to the 100-year anniversary of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, this collection of original essays takes a long view of the past century of women's political engagement to gauge how much women have achieved in the political arena.

Written by leading scholars of African American and women's history, the essays in this volume seek to reconceptualize the political history of black women in the United States by placing them "at the center of our thinking."

This revisionist history traces how, despite male resistance to women's progress, the entrance of women and of their concerns into the public sphere transformed both the political system and women themselves.

In the two decades since Feminism and Suffrage was first published, the increased presence of women in politics and the gender gap in voting patterns have focused renewed attention on an issue generally perceived as nineteenth-century. For this new edition, Ellen Carol DuBois addresses the changing context for the history of woman suffrage at the millennium.

Grounded in the rich history of Chicago politics, For the Freedom of Her Race tells a wide-ranging story about black women's involvement in southern, midwestern, and national politics. Examining the oppressive decades between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932--a period that is often described as the nadir of black life in America--Lisa Materson shows that as African American women migrated beyond the reach of southern white supremacists, they became active voters, canvassers, suffragists, campaigners, and lobbyists, mobilizing to gain a voice in national party politics and elect representatives who would push for the enforcement of the Reconstruction Amendments in the South.

Votes without Leverage re-examines a long-standing puzzle in women's electoral politics - why the increasing importance of women's votes throughout the 1920s did not imply increasing success for the lobbying efforts of women's organizations during the same period. Applying recent theoretical developments in the political economy of institutions and electoral behavior, Professor Harvey argues that female disenfranchisement prior to 1920 created incentives for leaders of women's organizations to invest in the pursuit of suffrage as a first step to achieving other policy benefits for women.

Until recently, the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1920 was seen as a watershed in women's political history. The essayists in this collection argue that women's participation in political parties has been much more lengthy and varied than previously thought. Women's different political styles influenced party strategy, changed party structures, and coloured party ideology.

This volume gathers Ellen Carol DuBois' most influential articles on woman suffrage and includes two new essays. The collection traces the trajectory of the suffrage story against the backdrop of changing attitudes to politics, citizenship and gender, and the resultant tensions over such issues as slavery and abolitionism, sexuality and religion, and class and politics.