Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State eds. by Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello

Abstract

Reviewed by: Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State eds. by Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello Corinne T. Field Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State. By Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello. Ithaca: Three Hills, Cornell University Press, 2017, 296 pages, $29.95, Cloth. Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello's Women Will Vote is an important book for anyone interested in the history of New York, gender, or social movements more broadly. In this meticulously researched and engagingly written monograph, Goodier and Pastorello set out to explain how women in New York worked from the 1840s to the 1910s to convince male voters and legislators to support woman suffrage, finally succeeding with a popular referendum in 1917. By adopting a statewide frame, the authors are able to trace out the loosely organized networks that connected New York City to rural towns and villages, while bringing elite women into conversation with factory workers and farmers. Indeed, a major contribution of this book is to demonstrate that a mass movement can be built from fluid and shifting coalitions and that a common goal can unite those who agree on little else. Goodier and Pastorello make a convincing case for the centrality of New York to the woman suffrage movement, and, conversely, the importance of women to the state's political development. Many of the most important national leaders—including Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Carrie Chapman Catt—lived and worked in New York. Key ideas, strategies, and rivalries that shaped the national movement emerged there. Most importantly, it was in New York that woman suffragists learned how to appeal to skeptical male voters and win the first popular referendum for woman suffrage east of the Mississippi. That victory—with its forty-three seats in the House of Representatives and forty-five electoral votes—decisively turned the tide in Congress, enabling the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. [End Page 143] The state level approach enables a careful study of how women built a complex, fluid, and decentralized mass movement. Goodier and Pastorello skillfully combine a broad survey of the existing literature on woman suffrage and New York history with revealing case studies drawn from archival records such as organizational reports, leaders' correspondence, newspaper articles, photographs, and suffrage propaganda. Throughout, they include rarely seen photographs of New York suffrage leaders and their public protests, thus offering a rich visual record of activism in the state. The result is one of the most diverse accounts to date of the various people who joined the suffrage movement, why they did so, and what they gained. Goodier and Pastorello organize their chapters around the distinct groups of people who joined over time: radical reformers in the antebellum period, rural residents in towns and villages, black club women, and immigrant workers in the late nineteenth century, male supporters and radical "new women" in the early 1900s, and finally, by 1917, the majority of New York's male voters. Throughout, they also pay careful attention to those who resisted woman suffrage, including indifferent voters, organized anti-suffragists, factory owners intent on discouraging trade unions, and both Democratic and Republican political leaders. The drama of the book is provided by women's relentless, innovative, and ultimately victorious effort to convince these opponents to support woman suffrage. The authors begin by tracing the emergence of the organized woman suffrage movement in upstate New York from the 1840s and lay out their argument that the New York State Woman Suffrage Association, founded in 1869, was a loose but highly effective coalition that enabled cooperation throughout the state. The second chapter, focusing on rural women, is one of the most significant, both for New York history and suffrage history. Keeping in mind that the majority of people in the state and nation remained on farms or in small towns during this period, the authors show how New York women helped to build a vibrant political culture that both entertained and enlightened farm families. Through the lyceum network, centered in Chautauqua, local Granges, founded first in Fredonia in 1868, and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, also organized in Fredonia in 1873, rural men and women...