The Gender of Reform Politics: Theodore Roosevelt and the Culture of Masculinity

Abstract

The entrance of women into the political arena and the ensuing passage from an exclusively male political universe to one in which both men and women participated raise neglected questions of general historical significance. These changes still wait to be incorporated into a comprehensive analysis of the transformation of American democracy between the end of the nineteenth century and the 1920s. Women's acquisition of suffrage in 1920 cannot be considered as simply the extension of voting rights to individuals who were previously denied them. Such an approach would be inconceivable in any serious investigation of the advent of universal male suffrage in theJacksonian age or of subsequent extensions of citizenship rights to immigrants and former slaves and, in the 1960s, to disfranchised southern blacks. Historical common sense considers these events epochal turning points in the property, ethnic, and racial bases of politics that substantially changed local, regional, and national public life. Such changes had dramatic visible effects. They produced vivid images that are still with us: the storming of the White House by a democratic crowd at the 1829 presidential inauguration; the birth of popular political parties in the 1830s; the invention of ethnic and immigrant-based urban politics; the dramatic emergence of emancipated slaves as legislators during black Reconstruction; the breakup of the lily-white Democratic South and the emergence of a new Republican party after the civil rights revolution. Apparently nothing like that happened with women in the 1920s: no storming of symbolic locations by crowds of women, no building of new-style political organizations, no women-dominated machines, no sudden upsurge of women legislators, no partisan realignments. And yet it seems reasonable to suppose that the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution and the long journey to get it, by upsetting the gender base of politics, had important implications (invisible because unexplored as well as unexplored because invisible) for the whole political system.