Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest, 1870–1920

Abstract

This thoughtful, direct, and efficient book fills a gap in suffrage scholarship. As a social history of politics, Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest also makes a case for the significance of place. Through close and careful attention to three rural counties (one each in Minnesota, Iowa, and South Dakota), Sara Egge has produced an exploration of suffrage from the bottom up. Between 1870 and 1916, women's suffrage activists largely struggled in the rural Midwest, where men—and many women—largely objected to extending suffrage. Ethnicity became one important dividing line. Some of the opposition to suffrage came from recently arrived European migrant communities, with foreign-born rural midwesterners and their kin often rejecting the moralistic arguments of native-born Americans for the extension of suffrage to white women—an effort often paired with crusades for temperance, domestic uplift, and Protestant norms. World War I changed everything. Wartime loyalty and “Americanism” provided a crucial turning point in rural conceptions of citizenship. In the context of community belonging, “citizenship became a performance of loyalty, and most women in the region readily starred in the principal roles” (p. 178). Compared to more reticent immigrant groups—especially the German enclaves across Minnesota, Iowa, and the Dakotas—suffragists and their allies threw themselves into home front efforts. They also highlighted the differences between themselves and neighbors less willing to engage in overtly patriotic activities. Many native-born opponents to suffrage began to support the movement, tipping the political scales.