The Campaign for Woman Suffrage in Virginia by Brent Tarter, Marianne E. Julienne and Barbara C. Batson

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Campaign for Woman Suffrage in Virginia by Brent Tarter, Marianne E. Julienne and Barbara C. Batson Louise M. Newman The Campaign for Woman Suffrage in Virginia. By Brent Tarter, Marianne E. Julienne, and Barbara C. Batson. (Charleston, S.C: The History Press, 2020. Pp. 206. Paper, $23.99, ISBN 978-1-4671-4419-3.) This book accompanies an excellent exhibition at the Library of Virginia to commemorate the centennial of woman suffrage (https://edu.lva.virginia.gov/wedemand/), offering a detailed account of the campaigns conducted by the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia in the early twentieth century. These campaigns have generally been overlooked by historians because they failed to get the all-male General Assembly in Virginia to reform the state constitution. By the time the Equal Suffrage League did make some progress in March 1920, the process was no longer needed because the Nineteenth Amendment went into effect (without Virginia’s ratification) later that year. Nonetheless, this account is a welcome addition to the historiography on woman suffrage because, as Sandra Gioia Treadway argues in the foreword, it highlights the “divergent opinions of white Virginia suffragists as they debated whether their goal should be an amendment to the state or to the federal constitution, [End Page 142] whether their tactics should rely on persuasion or militancy and how to address the issue of race in a state that had substantially disfranchised its black male citizens” (p. 8). Apart from two early chapters, which cover Virginia women’s political activities from 1619 through 1920, and a final chapter that examines the period after 1920, the bulk of the book focuses on the campaigns of the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia, an exclusively white organization founded in 1909 by about twenty Richmond women and led by Lila Hardaway Meade Valentine through 1920. The authors also attempt to document the activities of African American women, whose engagement in the suffrage movement was carried out through local affiliates of the National Association of Colored Women and the Virginia State Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs. Due to difficulty locating records, the discussions of African American women’s activities are brief, taking up only a few pages in this 171-page narrative. However, there is an excellent section explaining the particular impediments that African American women faced when they sought to register to vote after the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, as well as a frank discussion of the complex and racist ways that white suffragists responded to antisuffragists’ claims that enfranchising women would endanger white supremacy. The book is well illustrated, with photographs of individuals, parades, broadsides, pamphlet covers, signed membership forms, letters, and other ephemera. Although the authors are familiar with a scholarly literature on southern suffragism, the narrative contains no historiographical analysis but instead presents detailed evidence to document the range and extent of Virginia women’s decades-long commitment to the suffrage cause. Scholars wanting to know more about the elite white women who made up the bulk of the leadership of this movement will find useful material here—but the book seems focused on increasing appreciation among a general audience for “those women [who] deserve recognition right alongside the heroes of the American Revolution and the civil rights movement for their work to expand democracy in the state” (p. 13). Louise M. Newman University of Florida Copyright © 2021 The Southern Historical Association