How the West--and the Nation--was Won for Woman Suffrage

Abstract

Since World War II Americans have become accustomed to watching new political and social developments originate in the West and then eventually engulf the entire country. In her study of woman suffrage in the western states, Rebecca J. Mead shows that pattern of innovation occurring a century ago when every western state save one enfranchised women before a single state east of the Mississippi had done so. Historians routinely note the nineteenth-century victories for woman suffrage in Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and Idaho, but only a few have provided detailed studies of the movement in particular states, and Mead is the first to examine that development in the region as a whole.' Mead pays most attention to Colorado, Washington, Oregon, and California, the latter of which occupies two chapters. She begins with a description of the early white suffragists in the West, whom Mead calls organic intellectuals. Often self-supporting writers and lecturers, such as Abigail Scott Duniway, Laura DeForce Gordon, and Caroline Nichols Churchill, these women were highly individualistic freethinkers who helped spread suffrage ideas and form networks among sympathizers. Mead places the earliest debates over suffrage in the West in the frameworks of Reconstruction and the establishment of territorial and state governments: in these contexts, she examines how racial issues, particularly regarding the Chinese population, operated in suffrage debates as well as the usually overlooked enfranchisement of women by the Washington territorial legislature in 1883 and its nullification by the territory's Supreme Court in 1888. Mead then turns to Colorado, where the first popular referendum enfranchised women in 1893-after an initial defeat in 1877 and fifteen years of suffrage activism. Both the mobilization of middle-class women, under the society plan devised by eastern suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt, and the support of Populists and labor were crucial to the suffrage victory. In fact,