Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest, 1870–1920 by Sara Egge

Abstract

Reviewed by: Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest, 1870–1920 by Sara Egge Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz Sara Egge, Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest, 1870–1920. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018. 242 pp. $85 (cloth). In this fascinating and important work, Sara Egge recaptures the story of the upper midwestern fight over suffrage in the five decades prior to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Drawing on newspapers, archival sources, voluntary association records, and other materials, Egge takes readers on a deep dive into three counties that, over the period between 1870 and 1920, weighed the question of whether women should vote. She uses the histories of the suffrage debate in Clay County, Iowa; Lyon County, Minnesota; and Yankton County, South Dakota, to analyze midwestern political discourse surrounding not just suffrage but citizenship. In five succinct and well-argued chapters, Egge traces the five-decade trajectory of conversation surrounding suffrage. Her first chapter lays out the early histories of White settlement (at the expense of the Indigenous populations, she notes) and the meanings of community to settlers in the upper Midwest. Egge then describes, essentially, how women started behaving as citizens and participating in these communities in the decades prior to 1920. On the surface, Clay, Lyon, and Yankton women adhered to gender conventions while quietly defying them as they planned bazaars, worked in Ladies Aid Societies, and joined the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). Egge argues that through such work as planning a bazaar, women were "recognized as loyal citizens intent on making their communities better" (52). That the women understood their work as actively subversive is not always clear, though Egge makes it very apparent that they knew better than to use such terms as "feminism." Even with this cautious approach, the story she tells is not one of linear progression towards the vote, but rather one of stops and starts, as voters defeated suffrage multiple times in the 1890s. In South Dakota, woman suffrage was defeated three times alone, leading the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) to [End Page 79] denigrate the Midwest and leading Carrie Chapman Catt (herself Iowaborn) to blacklist the South Dakota Equal Suffrage Association. In part, Egge's book intends to rescue the region's reputation and restore the Midwest, especially its rural parts, to its proper place in the history of suffrage activism. Her third chapter in particular offers great comparisons of the counties, where enfranchisement efforts failed for varied reasons, as well as discussion of the lessons suffragists in each place learned from the losses. Two important takeaways were realizations that local leadership needed to disentangle discussion and debate over temperance and suffrage and that they needed to shed their more radical language of individual liberty in favor of a language of civic responsibility. Suffrage advocates worked on both, combining Progressive Era ideals of civic participation with their own desire to vote. World War I was a watershed, as women's wartime efforts and the rampant "anti-German hysteria" convinced Iowa, Minnesota, and South Dakota voters to reverse course and confirm suffrage for White, native-born women (151). Egge argues that success came, in perhaps large part, because of a narrowing of the definition of citizen to one focused on loyalty to community rather than on individual rights. This, coupled with nativist sentiment and the historical context of WWI (which "shattered the tolerance of ethnic diversity in the Midwest"), allowed White native-born women to secure the franchise (155). The idea that racism and nativism shaped both suffrage activism and passage is of course not new, but Egge adds nuance to discussion of nativist and anti-German sentiment as well as to the divisions between NAWSA and upper midwestern groups. In particular, she reminds readers that in the early days of German, Norwegian, and Swedish immigration to the upper Midwest, Yankee settlers were "grateful" as well as "wary"—and dependent upon the immigrants in their community. Importantly, Egge interrogates citizenship as much as suffrage, looking closely at "the complex political identities women built," their evolution over five decades, and the broader interaction between geographical and regional identity (2). Throughout her work, she reminds us that...