American Woman Suffrage Association Research Articles

The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898, by Lisa Tetrault

The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women's Suffrage Movement, 1848-1898, by Lisa Tetrault. Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press, 2014. xiv, 279 pp. $34.95 US (cloth). Beginning with its arresting title, The Myth of Seneca offers a refreshing and much-needed new perspective on the early decades of the US women's suffrage movement. The book tells two intertwined stories: how antebellum activists' broadly conceived women's rights agenda became a more narrowly focused women's suffrage crusade in the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction eras, and how Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony created an for their branch of the movement by writing its history, the foundational History of Woman Suffrage. In the process, as Lisa Tetrault convincingly argues, a small, local, and undoubtedly significant 1848 convention held in Seneca Falls, New York, assumed titanic stature for later generations, and Anthony, who had attended neither it nor a second convention held in Rochester shortly afterward acquired historic monumentality as the mother of the suffrage movement. Simultaneously, the grassroots activism of Stanton and Anthony's rivals, particularly that of individuals such as Lucy Stone, who led the American Woman Suffrage Association, largely disappeared from historical just as their archival remains were heavily excised from the History of Woman Suffrage. Remembering and forgetting--the two sides of the coin--receive significant analysis in Tetrault's retelling of the Seneca convention's history. As she demonstrates, the convention and its concerns did not receive much attention in the decades immediately following 1848. Indeed, during those years, few women's rights activists made any effort to identify a single point of origin for their movement. Instead, they acknowledged a number of important forerunners, including abolitionist and anti-slavery meetings and conventions, the lecture tours that speakers such as Angelina Grimke and Lucy Stone had undertaken in the 1830s and 1840s, and the national women's rights conventions that began in 1850. Claims for the importance of the Seneca Convention arose only in the Reconstruction years, as internal conflicts among abolitionists over black male suffrage moved women's lack of the franchise to the top of the list of necessary woman's Then, and only then, as Tetrault clearly delineates, did advocates begin to construct a suffragist memory (p. 113), designating not only the Seneca Convention but also suffrage itself as central elements in an emerging story of women's rights. Gradually forgotten or eclipsed along the way were African American and radical white women's understandings of woman's rights, as well as the concerns of working class women in labour organizations who doubted that the ballot could have the transformative power that suffragists claimed for it. We have known some aspects of this story, especially the bruising battles among abolitionists over whether to support ratification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and their outcome in producing two competing woman suffrage groups. Tetrault's signal achievement is to trace the process whereby Stanton and Anthony constructed a suffrage-focused historical that grew more convincing and powerful over the decades. Through carefully delineating the development of commemorative practices, Tetrault shows how the two women elevated the Seneca event to mythic status. The meeting at Seneca [began to] become the myth of Seneca Falls (p. …

“The perfect library”Carrie Chapman Catt and the authoritative historiography

The very act of remembering was at the core of power dynamics in the suffrage movement, during the years of struggle and after the ratification of the 19th amendment in 1920. In the late 1930s, Carrie Chapman Catt, the former president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, decided to create her own “perfect library” on the woman suffrage movement, that she bequeathed to the Library of Congress in Washington. This paper explores the authoritative dimension of Catt’s endeavor and her effort to control the memory of the movement. Catt made it a personal affair: she obliterated historical accurateness to favor her vision, her agenda and her legacy. She saw herself as the sole custodian of suffragist remembrance.

Anna Howard Shaw: the work of woman suffrage

With this first scholarly biography of Anna Howard Shaw (1847-1919), Trisha Franzen sheds new light on an important woman suffrage leader who has too often been overlooked and misunderstood. An immigrant from a poor family, Shaw grew up in an economic reality that encouraged the adoption of non-traditional gender roles. Challenging traditional gender boundaries throughout her life, she put herself through college, worked as an ordained minister and a doctor, and built a tightly-knit family with her secretary and longtime companion Lucy E. Anthony. Drawing on unprecedented research, Franzen shows how these circumstances and choices both impacted Shaw's role in the woman suffrage movement and set her apart from her native-born, middle- and upper-class colleagues. Franzen also rehabilitates Shaw's years as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, arguing that Shaw's much-belittled tenure actually marked a renaissance of both NAWSA and the suffrage movement as a whole. Anna Howard Shaw: The Work of Woman Suffrage presents a clear and compelling portrait of a woman whose significance has too long been misinterpreted and misunderstood.

Votes for Women: Selections from the National American Woman SuffrageAssociation Collection, 1848-1921 * By Popular Demand: "Votes for Women" Suffrage Pictures, 1850-1920

Votes for Women: Selections from the National American Woman SuffrageAssociation Collection, 1848-1921 * By Popular Demand: "Votes for Women" Suffrage Pictures, 1850-1920

Call Her a Citizen: Progressive-Era Activist and Educator Anna Pennybacker (review)

Reviewed by: Call Her a Citizen: Progressive-Era Activist and Educator Anna Pennybacker Rebecca Montgomery Call Her a Citizen: Progressive-Era Activist and Educator Anna Pennybacker. By Kelley M. King. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2010. Pp. 284. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9781603441858, $39.95 cloth.) This work provides a complex portrait of a remarkably accomplished woman who, if she had been born male, no doubt would have attained positions of even greater public authority and power. Anna Hardwicke Pennybacker (1861–1938) [End Page 97] was born in Virginia but spent most of her life in Texas. Trained as a teacher, she enjoyed a successful career in public schools and authored a popular textbook on Texas history in the 1880s. After her husband Percy’s death in 1899, she channeled her considerable writing, oratorical, and organizational skills into work with numerous women’s and political organizations. Pennybacker held prominent positions in, among other groups, the Texas Federation of Women’s Clubs, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, the Chautauqua Women’s Club, the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and the Democratic National Committee. All of these organizations highly prized her skillful use of persuasive speech and print media for educational, publicity, and fundraising purposes. Pennybacker’s value as a leader was enhanced by her sharp political acumen. She had an expert grasp of timing and strategy that made her particularly effective at handling controversial issues. For example, as president of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs she bridged the divide between conservative southern white women and women’s rights activists by muting her advocacy of woman suffrage enough to keep conservatives in the fold, while showing just enough support for the issue to appease suffragists. Although this alienated some members of the suffrage movement, she reconciled with both the Texas and national factions by assisting in their campaigns after stepping down from the presidency. She similarly negotiated the race question by accepting the legitimacy of white supremacy without resorting to the racist rhetoric employed by southern suffragists such as Kate Gordon of Louisiana. Once ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment appeared inevitable, she worked with the Democratic National Committee to educate women voters and secure their support for the party of the South. It was only after World War I that her diplomatic skills failed her. She participated in international relief work and publicly endorsed the League of Nations and World Court, but was unable to find an effective middle ground in women’s organizations between ultra-patriotic groups like the Daughters of the American Revolution and advocates of disarmament and peace. This is by far the most complete and critical account of Pennybacker’s public life published to date, although there are a few areas in which it is lacking. The introduction does not contain the sort of overarching thesis on the significance of her life needed to ground the reader in the narrative. Admittedly, the author discusses in her conclusion the difficulties of formulating such a thesis, but simply providing some initial generalizations as to Pennybacker’s place within Southern progressivism would have been helpful. The book also fails to explain the place of Mexican Americans in the racial politics of Texas progressivism. The author notes that Pennybacker’s history textbook referred to “lazy and insolent Mexicans” who challenged Anglo property rights (52), but there is no effort to explain how Hispanics figured into either public education or the suffrage issue. Despite these omissions, Call Her a Citizen makes important contributions to the history of education, Texas, and progressivism through its exhaustive examination of Pennybacker’s activism. Its account of the roles she and her husband played in pedagogical reform and the professionalization of teaching breaks new ground in Texas educational history. Moreover, by tracing Pennybacker’s journey from school teacher to political operative the author broadens the concept of education and reminds us of its connections to personal and political power. Although [End Page 98] Pennybacker’s life may defy easy generalization, this study should inspire other historians to give it the attention it deserves. Rebecca Montgomery Texas State University-San Marcos Copyright © 2011 The Texas State Historical Association

‘The New Suffrage History: Voting Rights in International Perspective’

AbstractScholars of the U.S. woman suffrage movement are paying increased attention to its international dimensions. International organizations like the International Council of Women (1888) and the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (1904) have begun to receive the kind of scrutiny that has traditionally been reserved for domestic suffrage organizations such as the American Woman Suffrage Association (1869), the National Woman Suffrage Association (1869), and the National American Woman Suffrage Association (1890). This attention to suffragists’ international organizing, cross‐border travel, and imperial commitments, including those of individual suffrage activists such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, has made visible the connections between struggles for women’s rights within U.S. borders and at the margins of U.S. territory including Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Philippines. In turn, suffrage historians are now contributing to broader disciplinary efforts to internationalize the field of U.S. history and to map the contours of American Empire.

Singular Leadership: Anna Howard Shaw, single women and the US woman suffrage movement

When the Rev. Dr Anna Howard Shaw became president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), her status as a single, self‐supporting woman forced changes in this organization, which had been dominated by economically dependent middle‐class women. Yet Shaw did not fit into either acknowledged category of Progressive Era never‐married women: the privileged and educated ‘new woman’ who chose to work and the working‐class ‘working woman’ who labored out of necessity. This article argues that Shaw's liminal identity allowed her to bridge numerous constituencies and foster the needed changes in the NAWSA while also contributing to the redefinition of American womanhood. The problems of analyzing Shaw's life highlight the need for additional scholarship and theory on the category ‘single’ in women's history.

Fair Connections: Women's Separatism and the Lewis and Clark Exposition of 1905

DEBORAH M. OLSEN Fair Connections Women sSeparatismand the Lewis andClark Exposition 0/1905 "THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE, MANY ofwhom stood inthehot sunfor hours," gathered at 2:00 p.m. on July6,1905, on Lakeview Terrace by the Columbia Court of the Lewis and Clark Centennial and American Pacific Exposition and Oriental Fair inPortland, Oregon. The crowds had arrived to witness the unveiling of a bronze statue of Sacajawea, the Shoshone woman recently popularizedbyEva EmeryDye inTheConquest:TheTrueStory of Lewis and Clark.1 Visitors who flocked to the celebration made attendance that day one of the largest since the fair's opening day. Speakers at the event? which followed by one day the official closing of the thirty-seventh annual convention of theNational American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in Portland ? included Abigail Scott Duniway, Oregon's own suffragist, and Susan B. Anthony, legendary leader of thewoman suffrage movement. Regional press coverage of both the NAWSA convention and the Sacajawea statue unveiling was extensive and positive, illustrating the success of Oregon clubwomen's leadership and networking. During the years and months preceding the opening of the Lewis and Clark Exposition, Oregon women sought tomodify theirpractice ofwomen's separatism, a long-standing tradition ofwomen's organizations in the nine teenth and early-twentieth centuries, and to use their experience and exper tisewithin the new model of integration ? that is, towork collaboratively with male organizers of the fair.Many Oregon women were experienced in organizing and financing world's fairs. EdythWeatherred had served as commissioner fromOregon for theworld's fairs inBuffalo and in St. Louis, for example, and Oregonian Mary Phelps Montgomery ? daughter of formerMissouri Governor John Phelps and member of the Board of Lady Managers for the 1904 St. Louis Louisiana Purchase Exposition ? had spent sixweeks in Washington, D.C., lobbying for a loan fromCongress for the St. 174 OHQ vol. 109, no. 2 ? 2008 Oregon Historical Society Suffragesupporters gather in front of the Oregon Building at theLewis and Clark Centennial Exposition. A receptionwas held inhonor ofSusan B. Anthony (center), following theJune30,1905,fairground session of the National American Woman Suffrage Association's thirty-seventh annual convention inPortland. Louis fair. She was well connected and would later secure an appropriation of $35,000 from the state ofMissouri for the Lewis and Clark Exposition.2 When women's efforts towork with the all-male organizers of the Portland world's fair foundered, Oregon women fellback on the skills theyknew best and developed an expanded, modernized version of female separatism. Since the 1876Centennial Exposition inPhiladelphia, American women had often sought to highlight women's work and women's issues atworld's fairs through a separate Board of Lady Managers and a separate women's building featuring women's exhibits.3 In 1904, one year prior to the Lewis and Clark Exposition, however, male and female organizers at the St. Louis Exposition embraced a new model that sought to highlight women's con tributions by integrating women's work throughout the fair.The women's building therewas used only for administrative and social functions and contained no women's exhibits, and the fair'sBoard of Lady Managers served only as an extension of themale organization.4 Although Oregon women were unable to secure support from the Lewis and Clark Exposition's male board of directors for either awomen's building Olsen,Women's Separatism and theLewis and Clark Exposition of 1905 175 or a Board of Lady Managers, they successfully focused fairgoers' attention on two separate but related women's projects: the national suffrage convention and the Sacajawea statue.5 Under the skillful leadership of Sarah A. Evans and other clubwomen, women organizers relied and expanded on theirwell established traditions of female separatism to overcome problems in trying towork with male directors of the Lewis and Clark Exposition Company, the corporation thatwas responsible forfinancing and planning the fair.To cover up their failure inworking with women, the corporation erroneously claimed that ithad adopted the integration model of St. Louis when, in fact, ithad been women's separatism that had won the day. NEARLYALL THE OREGON WOMEN involved inthetwoprojects were white and middle or upper class.6 They were also members of one ormore women's clubs and tended...

« Kaiser Wilson » ou artisan de la liberté ?

In the 1910s, the suffragists campaigned for the passage of a federal Constitutional amendment that would grant women the right to vote. While the various lobbying activities exhibited great diversity in forms and styles, both the National American Woman Suffrage Association and the National Women’s Party used representations of President Woodrow Wilson, conferring upon him real or symbolic images of presidential power. In the context of World War I, the perception of these roles was influenced by the ongoing debate on democracy: while the NWP portrayed Wilson as a tyrant, the NAWSA depicted him as a champion of freedom. It is now acknowledged, however, that both organizations played essential roles in the passage of the 19th Amendment. After 1919, the absence of a common goal was a contributing factor to the subsequent divisions within the woman’s rights movement, as was, the article argues, the loss of a unique adversary.

The Passage of the Nineteenth Amendment

Seventy-two years separated the original call for women's suffrage at the Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, and ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, guaranteeing women the right to vote. Only two women who participated in the Seneca Falls convention were still alive when the Nineteenth Amendment went into effect. The extension of the vote to women was achieved only after prolonged struggle, which included 480 campaigns to persuade state legislatures to adopt suffrage amendments to state constitutions; 56 statewide referenda among male voters; and 47 campaigns to convince state constitutional conventions to adopt women's suffrage provisions. Only one of the original 13 states allowed any women to vote. Between 1776 and 1807 New Jersey granted single and widowed women with property the right to vote. In 1838, Kentucky authorized women to vote in school elections, and many other states followed suit. After the Civil War, women's rights supporters split over whether they should push to include women in the Fifteenth Amendment, which extended voting rights to African American men. In 1869, two competing organizations emerged, each with its own strategies and goals. The National Woman Suffrage Association, led by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, favored a constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote along with divorce reform, property rights for women, and dress reform. The American Woman Suffrage Association, led by former abolitionist Lucy Stone, favored a state-by-state approach and a single-minded focus on suffrage. The first breakthroughs for women's suffrage took place in the West. In 1869, Wyoming territory was the first government in the world to give women the vote on equal terms with men. It was followed by Utah, Colorado, and Idaho. In the West, support for suffrage was intermixed with a variety of seemingly unrelated issues. Some westerners favored women's suffrage as a way to attract settlers; others believed that it would attract women and help civilize the region. In Utah, suffrage was related to efforts to maintain a Mormon voting majority within the state. In 1890, the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Instead of arguing for suffrage in terms of equal rights, the new organization's leaders contended that the vote for women was necessary to clean up politics and fight social evil. Some suffrage supporters made the ugly argument that giving the vote to women would guarantee that white, native-born voters would outnumber immigrant and nonwhite voters. After 1900, the suffrage campaign developed a new, broader constituency, drawing support from many women who had received a college education or who held white-collar jobs. Beginning in 1910, seven additional western states adopted women's suffrage. In 1915, Carrie Chapman Catt, a former schoolteacher, became head of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and developed a new political strategy to win the vote. Named the Winning Plan, it called for state laws that would give women the vote and for ratification of an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Her strategy included the defeat of several key U.S. senators and the identification of supporters ready to lobby in every state legislative district in the country. The two broadsides on the following pages present the arguments used to persuade men to vote in favor of women's suffrage. While some arguments were based on the notion that women deserve equal treatment under the law, others reflect the notion that motherhood made women particularly sensitive to corruption and gave them a special concern for education and children's welfare. Meanwhile, a group of younger women, many of whom had received graduate education abroad and held professional jobs, adopted more confrontational tactics. Led by Alice Paul, a Philadelphia Quaker who formed the National Woman's Party, their strategies included picketing, marches, outdoor rallies, and hunger strikes in jail. The combination of Catf s careful organizing and Paul's militant tactics helped make suffrage an inescapable issue. By 1916, a million American women already had the vote in national elections and were an influential force. Still, opposition remained intense. Some opponents

Beneath the Suffrage Narrative

Abstract: Although the nineteenth-century woman’s movement was never exempt from internecine warfare, Susan B. Anthony, as editor and publisher of the History of Woman Suffrage, presented the movement as a grand narrative with a smooth surface. When the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) merged with the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), the twenty-year rupture between the organizations, the fierce opposition to the merger, and the stratagems involved in pushing it through go unmentioned in Anthony’s official account. The story of the woman who named the newly formed National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), against the opposition of Anthony, was Lillie Devereux Blake, who, during forty years of activism, would win many skirmishes on the battlefront of the woman’s movement but ultimately lose the battle for her rightful place in suffrage history. Her story is illustrative of the fate of other dissidents who were marginalized by a leadership that tolerated little independence. The contributions of Lucy Stone and the AWSA were minimized and its position on the Fifteenth Amendment was distorted, the radical Matilda Joslyn Gage was lost to its history, and the amendment to the constitution that Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote became known as the Susan B. Anthony amendment.

Beneath the Suffrage Narrative

Abstract: Although the nineteenth-century woman’s movement was never exempt from internecine warfare, Susan B. Anthony, as editor and publisher of the History of Woman Suffrage, presented the movement as a grand narrative with a smooth surface. When the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) merged with the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), the twenty-year rupture between the organizations, the fierce opposition to the merger, and the stratagems involved in pushing it through go unmentioned in Anthony’s official account. The story of the woman who named the newly formed National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), against the opposition of Anthony, was Lillie Devereux Blake, who, during forty years of activism, would win many skirmishes on the battlefront of the woman’s movement but ultimately lose the battle for her rightful place in suffrage history. Her story is illustrative of the fate of other dissidents who were marginalized by a leadership that tolerated little independence. The contributions of Lucy Stone and the AWSA were minimized and its position on the Fifteenth Amendment was distorted, the radical Matilda Joslyn Gage was lost to its history, and the amendment to the constitution that Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote became known as the Susan B. Anthony amendment.

The Dallas Equal Suffrage Association, Political Style, and Popular Culture: Grassroots Strategies of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1913-1919

LONG FAMILIAR AS A MEANS FOR EXPRESSING SOCIAL VALUES AND FOR resisting them, popular culture has served political purposes as well. From the symbolic log cabins of the 1840 presidential race to present-day televised advertisements, parties and candidates have employed cultural metaphors in United States politics. The drive to win the vote for women may be the best example of how political campaigns have been affected by mores and social conventions, and how those campaigns in turn have used the prevailing values and tastes to persuade the voters. The suffragists benefited from the experience of other organizations, particularly during the later years of their movement, 1913-1919. They drew upon the educational and advertising techniques of the contemporary national parties, the interest group tactics of the women's club movement, and the popular politics of both the English suffragettes and antebellum parties in the United States. (1) But because they faced gender assumptions and social restrictions that rarely troubled other political movements, American suffragists needed than examples of successful campaigning. The resources for meeting their challenges were, as it turned out, readily available. Scholarship in popular culture can help to clarify how the suffragists used cherished symbolism and honored ideals to adapt community festivals and social occasions to proven political strategies. The result was a sophisticated style unique in American political history for the degree to which it integrated a controversial issue into public life, both in specific communities and nationwide. (2) The suffragist accomplishment is most clearly visible at the local level. Indeed, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) derived much of its vitality from a network of grassroots societies. Despite the NAWSA's policy of centralizing the campaign, regional diversity required state and community suffrage organizations to develop a good measure of originality. Strategies that worked in California, for example, could fail in New York. Suffragists in a number of states--among them Iowa, Wisconsin, and Washington--only cautiously adopted tactics recommended from the NAWSA headquarters in New York City, while in Texas, local associations often rejected them altogether. (3) In a nation spread over a vast geographical area and composed of a population with varied cultural origins and economic interests, suffragists needed to tailor their campaigns to their specific communities. Everywhere, local sensibilities required some degree of adaptation and, at times, concessions to traditional expectations. In Dallas, Texas, the suffragists developed a campaign based on their understanding of the current social values and community standards. The public image of the city's Equal Suffrage Association (DESA) was initially so decorous as to appear apolitical. The Dallas Morning News described those involved with the first formal DESA meeting, held in a private home on March 15, 1913, as chiefly college young women and young matrons, who had been more prominent in social affairs, heretofore, than ... in women's club work or other civic matters. The reporter also recognized veteran club leaders aiding by their experience in the work of the organization but failed to mention the identities of a number of the younger suffragists. In addition to the mature clubwomen who had led efforts for local and state reforms during the past twenty years, the forty-one charter members included the niece of an officer of the first Texas suffrage association of 1893-96 and the daughters of several women still active in the city's club movement. With family traditions of female civic activism, younger women who wanted the vote as a matter of justice joined a number of experienced club leaders who were disgruntled with their own lack of any way to hold lawmakers and public officials accountable. (4) The challenges before the new organization's members were typical of those faced by suffragists everywhere. …

Excluded from Suffrage History: Matilda Joslyn Gage, Nineteenth-Century American Feminist

Excluded from Suffrage History: Matilda Joslyn Gage, Nineteenth-- Century American Feminist. By Leila R. Brammer. (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2000. Pp. xvii, 136. $58.00.) History has often been written by winners, but Leila R. Brammer's Excluded from Suffrage History: Matilda Joslyn Gage, Nineteenth-Century American Feminist reveals that not all victors find a place in historical record. Some are sidelined by historians in search of clear, uncomplicated narratives. Moreover, experience of Matilda Joslyn Gage demonstrates that suffragists themselves sometimes obscured contributions of their own colleagues. Gage herself frequently tackled problem of women's invisibility in historical record. She argued vehemently that male historians suppressed evidence of what women had accomplished in past times. Brammer sees a painful irony in fact that Gage appears to have suffered a similar fate, not just at hands of her contemporaries, but, until fairly recently, at those of feminist historians as well. Brammer asks why, given extent of Matilda Joslyn Gage's contributions to suffrage movement, do we not know more about her? She concludes that radicalism of Joslyn Gage's thought, especially her attacks on the patriarchate (81) of Christian church, led nineteenth-century female activists to distance themselves from her opinions. Brammer maintains that this suppression has continued through twentieth century because, until recently, historians have been unwilling to confront negative behavior on part of suffrage icons such as Stanton and Anthony. In principle, Brammer is right. She clearly documents marginalization that Gage experienced in 1890s. Leaders of newly united National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), fearing that Gage's radical views on organized religion would destabilize their fragile coalition, refused to endorse her view that Christian orthodoxy lay at heart of women's oppression. However, an unfortunate air of conspiracy permeates Brammer's discussion. Brammer's analysis seems to be predicated on assumption that every aspect of Gage's critique of organized religion was and remains beyond dispute. Therefore, Brammer indicates, fair-minded women's rights supporters ought to have championed Gage; instead, they turned their backs on her. Gage's views, however, were highly contentious. Even among those who might have shared them privately, her views posed a clear liability to a struggling movement. Suffrage leaders responded to reality that not all of their supporters were sympathetic to Gage's positions, while to general public, they were anathema. For no small number of suffrage supporters, especially those who came to suffrage by way of temperance movement, religious convictions underlay their activism. Gage's assertion that state functioned as willing minion of clerical tyrants may be palatable to some late twentieth-- century feminists, but it deeply offended many late nineteenth-century women and did nothing to encourage them to work for vote. Yet Brammer's analysis seems to suggest that suffrage leaders knew that Gage was right but that they ostracized her and excised her contributions from their history for sake of expediency. The difficulty Gage faced-and one that troubles Brammer's analysis as well-was/is conviction that woman suffrage organizations should have been all-encompassing movements for women's rights. …

Votes for Women: selections from the National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection, 1848-1921

Votes for Women: selections from the National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection, 1848-1921

“Conflicts of Interests”

The early twentieth century in the United States was a period of social and political unrest during which two reform movements-- woman suffrage and prohibition-- adhered to the belief that the press could serve as a powerful ally in molding public opinion.1 However, their opponents-an informal coalition that included anti-suffragists, anti-- prohibitionists, the brewing and liquor industries, the Roman Catholic Church, and German-Americans-held the same belief.2 The battle raged on both the national and the local front. It was particularly heated in Wisconsin, where a combination of social, political, and economic forces made it pertinent to a large part of the population. Thus, the general circulation press became a major battlefield for these reformers and their opponents. By the early 1900s, all sides in the conflict were well organized. Representing suffrage on the national front was the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), while in Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Woman Suffrage Association (WWSA) coordinated the movement.3 The prohibition movement was best represented by two national organizations, the Anti-Saloon League (ASL) and the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), both of which had branches in Wisconsin. As for opponents to the reforms, the oldest anti-suffrage organization was the Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Further Extension of Woman Suffrage (MAOFEWS), founded in 1887; the best organized was the National Association Opposed to the Further Extension of Woman Suffrage (NAOFEWS), established in 1911. Both these organizations sent representatives to Wisconsin during suffrage campaigns and the state had its own anti-suffrage association from 1911 to 1915.4 Anti-prohibitionists were represented mostly by industry and industry-backed groups such as the National Wholesale Liquor Dealers Association (NWLDA), the National Retail Liquor Dealers Association (NRLDA), and the United States Brewers Association (USBA), each of which had active state chapters.5 Although all these organizations had their own organs through which they reached their membership, both the reformers and their opponents attempted to win positive coverage and editorial support of their views in the general circulation press and devised specific strategies to accomplish this.6 They bombarded the press with press releases and requests to run regular columns on their position, staged events to attract media coverage, and attempted to enlist the support of publishers, editors, and reporters.7 In addition to using these tactics, the financially solvent liquor and brewing industries invested large sums in advertising in the hope that their advertising dollars would make editors more positive toward them and, in the case of last resort, bought space for their own news stories and editorials.8 When they were dissatisfied with press coverage, the reform groups and their opponents also employed a variety of strategies. They denounced the press in public meetings and in their own publications, organized letter writing campaigns to set erring editors straight, threatened readers' boycotts, and, in the case of the liquor and brewing industries, hinted at the withdrawal of advertising dollars.9 But the reform movements and their opponents faced a greater challenge than simply convincing the press that their side was right. For the general circulation press was far from a blank slate passively waiting to absorb and reproduce any information presented, even the most compelling. It was, instead, a highly evolved information processing system influenced by a multitude of economic, social, political, and historic factors. Nor was it a monolithic institution, but was made up of a wide variety of organizations, each one representing an individual publication or group of publications driven by individual factors. Suffrage and prohibition, as well as anti-suffrage and anti-prohibition, represented a mere fraction of the issues faced by publishers, editors, and reporters of this period. …

Raising Voices, Lifting Shadows: Competing Voice-Paradigms in Frances E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy

One of the most interesting and frequently overlooked features of Frances E.W. Harper's 1892 novel Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted is its dual climaxes. The first climax is the rural church meeting in Chapter XX that brings together Iola, Robert, and their mother/grandmother Harriet in a culmination of the family reunification plot that drives the novel. The second climax, Chapter XXX's conversazione, marks the apex of Iola's rise from abject slave to race leader and announces the establishment of a vital African-American bourgeois intellectualism. These climaxes offer significant contrasts. The church meeting takes place in a Southern rural setting; the conversazione is a Northern, urban event. The church meeting features primarily dark-skinned exslaves; the conversazione is dominated by light-skinned, educated blacks. The church meeting's tones are of profound sadness and joyful exuberance; the conversazione's atmosphere is marked by deep seriousness and the rhetoric of self-improvement. For all their diff erences, however, the two scenes share an essential and persistent orality. They consist almost wholly of verbal performances and exchanges, thus functioning as fitting climactic moments for a novel dominated by dialogue, discussion, and debate. The various voices and rhetorical strategies that circulate through these climactic moments--and through Iola Leroy as a whole--reveal much about the often conflicting and conflicted purposes of an African-American author who attempted, like many of her contemporaries, to portray post-war black society and construct a fin-de-siecle blueprint for the future of the race. Specifically, it is Harper's portrayal of an internal speech difference, a divide between African-American dialect and English spoken by African Americans, that reveals most about the conflicts she faced. The dual climaxes highlight this difference: The first climax includes dialect speakers; the second doesn't. The particular importance of this division between dialect and standard speech stems, as I argue in this essay, from its reflection of class and cultural divisions within the black community. While Harper, like many other nineteenth-century authors, represented dialect- and standard-speaking black characters for a variety of rhetorical reasons, the majority of these representations reflect and in turn contribute to a cultural conception--held by both whites and blacks--that the broad dialectical differences within black speech signal broad social differences. Speech types mark clusters or networks of educational, behavioral, economic, and racial attributes; in other words, voice marks class affiliation. The dialect voice generally locates a speaker in folk culture and measures a distance from the essentially middle-class qualities that whites promoted as the badges of full humanity: refined deportment, economic independence, education, and white skin. The voices of standard-English-speaking black characters, on the other hand, implicitly claim a range of attributes approximating bourgeois ideals. [2] In Iola, then, as in many black- and white-authored texts before and since, black speech differences are synecdochic means of representing an educated, standard-English-speaking bourgeois class and a dialect-speaking subaltern class. As dialect and speakers talk to one another, as the voices and the classes they represent are given and are denied space and authority in a text whose purpose is to reconfigure Reconstruction, competing visions of a race future come into focus. On the one hand, Harper envisions a future that offers an important role for the subaltern, whose culture and courage she admired; and on the other hand, she expresses some concern that the largely rural, uneducated, dialect-speaking subaltern blacks might drag down the race in the new century. [3] Harper's own experiences underlay these contradictory visions. A Northern bourgeois woman herself, she was active in such middle-class, progressive organizations as the American Association of Education of Colored Youth, the Women's Christian Temperance Union, the American Woman's Suffrage Association, and the National Council of Women (Foster, Introduction, Harper xxvii). …

W.E.B. Du Bois on Woman Suffrage

Scholars have analyzed W.E.B. Du Bois's role as a chief advocate for Black civil rights during the 20th century, yet his advocacy for women's rights-including woman suffrage-has largely been overlooked. Du Bois lamented the burden of Black women in essays in The Horizon, Voice of the Negro, The Independent, and in his first autobiographical book, Darkwater (Du Bois, 1920/1969). During his tenure as editor of Crisis, Du Bois wrote more than 20 essays on woman suffrage, published a special, Suffrage Number, of the periodical in September 1912 (Du Bois, 1912d), and sponsored a Votes for Women symposium in the August 1915 issue (Du Bois, 1915b). He delivered a speech on suffrage at an annual convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, which the association later published as a book. Du Bois also corresponded with several influential suffragists, including Mary Church Terrell, Ida B. Wells, and Jane Addams. Several scholars have identified Du Bois as a supporter of woman suffrage,' yet none has engaged in a sustained critical reading of his writings on the issue. This essay is a step toward filling this gap in the existing literature on Du Bois; it focuses on Du Bois's writings on woman suf-

"The Sex Side of Life": Mary Ware Dennett's Pioneering Battle for Birth Control and Sex Education.

This is a biography of Mary Ware Dennett, who was an educator in sex education and the author of the widely distributed pamphlet, The Sex Side of Life. Dennett was a pioneer in sex education, who battled with Congress in her fight against the censorship law that banned the dissemination of any information about human sexuality. So threatening was Dennett's message to those who would limit a woman's knowledge of contraception, that the Post Office used exaggerated obscenity charges to frame Dennett in a trial that became a landmark case in obscenity law. Dennett was also executive secretary of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and founding organizer of the National Birth Control League, and she held key positions in the American Union Against Militarism.

Transforming Women, Transforming Politics: The U.S. Woman Suffrage Movement

Until recently historians have not treated the U.S. woman suffrage movement very kindly. After Eleanor Flexner published her groundbreaking, comprehensive study in 1959, scholars either heaped criticism on the movement or else they deemed it unworthy of historical scrutiny. Historians lamented that women failed to use the vote for feminist purposes; they argued that women exercised as much-or more-influence through voluntarism and a separate political culture before the Nineteenth Amendment as they did after its passage; and they decried the racism, nativism, and elitism displayed by leaders and members of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) as they struggled to obtain the vote.1 There were exceptions to this tendency. Ellen DuBois's Feminism and Suffrage (1978), while not uncritical of suffrage leaders, asserted the monumental significance of the emergence of the independent women's rights movement in the 1860s. A handful of scholars began to examine suffrage on the state level, and several activists, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Alice Paul, found their-mostly celebratory-biographers. These works too, along with Nancy Cott's The Grounding of Modern Feminism (1987), claimed the importance of suffrage in women's and U.S. history. Yet, what is most striking about suffrage historiography is the scant amount of