Laura E. Free. Suffrage Reconstructed: Gender, Race, and Voting Rights in the Civil War Era.

Abstract

In Suffrage Reconstructed: Gender, Race, and Voting Rights in the Civil War Era, Laura E. Free seeks to answer two central questions: Why was the word “male” used in the Fourteenth Amendment, and why did some key woman suffrage activists embrace race, rather than gender, as a political tool? In addressing these questions, she examined six decades of debates on voting rights that took place in various public forums during the Civil War era, including in constitutional conventions, in state legislatures, in Congress, and in activists’ public conventions and meetings. The result is a comprehensive study of the political decision-making process. We like to think that our nation was founded on principles of democracy. And indeed, the U.S. Constitution, written in 1787, begins with a declaration of inclusiveness: “We, the people of the United States.” But, as Free notes, despite this inclusive language, virtually the only people who were eligible to vote were white male property owners over the age of twenty-one years. Poor men, women, African Americans, Native Americans, and other ethnic groups were excluded from the franchise and the governmental process.