History Of Suffrage Research Articles

An unfinished suffrage reform. Voting rights in Sweden after the ‘democratic breakthrough’

ABSTRACT This article examines the complex and non-linear process of democratization in Sweden after the introduction of so-called universal suffrage in 1921. The research questions address the excluded groups post-1921, the reasons for their exclusion, and the historical processes that led to further expansions of suffrage rights. The study shows that the expansion of suffrage rights in Sweden after 1921 was not guided primarily by a desire to broaden voter inclusion and/or rectify the limitations of the 1921 legislation. Instead, the motivations were embedded in a more intricate and multifaceted tapestry of political aims and alliances as well as situational factors that included various social, economic, and cultural shifts. The article concludes that the history of suffrage in Sweden after 1921 has been one of continuous negotiations, transformations, and adaptations, and that this provides valuable insights for addressing challenges of political inclusion and representation in the present and future.

“For the Advancement and Betterment of Humanity”: The Fight for Women's Suffrage at Utah's Constitutional Convention

“For the Advancement and Betterment of Humanity”: The Fight for Women's Suffrage at Utah's Constitutional Convention

Suffrage Statuary and Commemorative Accountability: An Intersectional Analysis of the 2020 Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument in Central Park, New York

ABSTRACT This essay explores the controversy surrounding the Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument (WRPM) that was unveiled in Central Park on 26 August 2020 to commemorate the centennial anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment. To read the WRPM’s commemorative process and product, I use an intersectional feminist analytic to consider how interlocking concerns of gender, race, and power inflected the debates and decisions that shaped the WRPM. This intersectional analysis explores how the WRPM became an opportunity for the public to wrestle with the ways this statue could (not) address a complicated suffrage history that would celebrate women’s collective activism and reckon with its racist past.

Cathleen D. Cahill. Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement.

The recent centennial of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment occasioned both public celebrations and scholarly interventions. Many historians welcomed the chance to engage a wider public audience interested in questions of gender, race, and citizenship in the midst of a highly contested election that made women’s voting timely and relevant. Of more lasting significance will be the new scholarship produced about the women’s suffrage movement. Cathleen Cahill’s Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement, an exploration of the contributions of women of color to that movement, takes its place as one of the most significant additions to that literature. In many ways, the history of women’s suffrage has gotten a bad rap: dismissed as a narrow story written and controlled by white women, it too often exists in its own silo, seemingly disengaged from broader US history. Cahill’s book, like the best recent suffrage historiography, conclusively shows that women’s suffrage did not exist in isolation but was always in dialogue with larger societal questions. This is US history, not women’s or suffrage history. Cahill’s book can be read as a manifesto for why suffrage matters.

The Untold History of Women's Suffrage: Voting Rights Pre-Ratification

The Untold History of Women's Suffrage: Voting Rights Pre-Ratification

Spillovers from gender equality onto economic equality: Evidence from 162 nations

AbstractThis paper studies the influence of different aspects of gender equality or female empowerment on income inequality. A key question addressed is: Are there positive spillovers from gender equality to income equality? Using data drawn from 162 nations over the years 1985–2019, results show that nations with a long history of women's suffrage, greater representation of women in the government, lower fertility rates and better overall gender equality experienced lower income inequality, ceteris paribus. These results are largely supported in several robustness checks, including different model estimation strategies to address potential reverse‐causality issues, considering alternative measures of income inequality, and considerations of persistence and nonlinearities in the gender inequality measures. The spillovers from some dimensions of gender equality are found to be sensitive to existing income inequality. Policymakers ignoring the payoffs from gender empowerment on income distribution might be underinvesting in initiatives to empower women.

Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote

Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote

Say her name: Madge Donohoe and the promise and problems of using Trove to write Australian suffrage histories

Like most middle-ranking suffragists, the Sydney schoolteacher Madge Donohoe is largely invisible in Australian historiography. Until widespread newspaper digitisation, the task of uncovering her name, let alone tracing her rise from Kogarah Girls’ School to the British National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies’ executive committee, would have been unimaginable. In this paper, I outline how Trove has enriched Australian feminist histories from the suffrage era (1890–1910). Yet, as indispensable as it has become, new histories relying on newspapers to vividly retell the suffragists’ stories also reveal the database’s distorting effects, not least the absence of the vibrant women’s advocacy press from its collections. Trove, I argue, affords vital new points of entry into lives like Donohoe’s but, without careful interrogation, risks privileging the pressman’s gaze above understanding the quotidian realities of feminist activism.

Building Better Days by Commemorating Utah Suffrage History

Building Better Days by Commemorating Utah Suffrage History

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott: radical ‘co-adjutors’ in the American women’s rights movement

ABSTRACT Elizabeth Cady Stanton is widely considered to be the founder of the early women’s rights movement in America. She convened the first convention dedicated specifically to women’s rights in America, at Seneca Falls, New York, and she is credited with authoring the Declaration of Sentiments, arguably the founding document of the American women’s rights movement. Stanton’s unwavering insistence on women’s enfranchisement drove much of her efforts. The History of Woman Suffrage (1881–1922), which Stanton initiated and coedited, is considered the definitive account of the early movement. For many commentators, the radicalism of Stanton’s claims sets her apart from other reformers. However, I argue that another women’s rights advocate, Lucretia Mott, is as radical as Stanton and, in some respects, perhaps more so. Mott held a comprehensive view of women’s rights that included, but was not limited to, women’s suffrage. Whereas Stanton sought to establish an organized reform movement and craft the official account of its origins, Mott resisted these efforts, instead preferring informal networks of activism and a more inclusive historical understanding. Whereas Stanton has been criticized for her elitist and racist views, Mott’s lifelong commitment to abolitionism and human rights never wavered.

Digital Historical Practices

Digital Historical Practices Michelle Moravec (bio) Ten years into the twenty-first century, the historical profession is coming to terms with the ways in which the internet is irrevocably changing what we do and how we do it.1 With these remarks, Rachel Leow introduced the Journal of Women's History readership to a roundtable of historical bloggers. A decade later, we are still debating the implications of the "digital" for our profession. Rather than revisiting the various positions, I want to offer insights from my practice as a digital historian. I view digital history as a question-driven research process rather than the production of a particular end product. Becoming a digital historian, a mid-career shift, has not changed my core praxis. I rely, as I always have, on robust research questions anchored in archives. How I go about answering them is where the differences arise. Over the past decade, I have experimented with many approaches to answering historical questions using digital history approaches. In response to a suffrage historian's query, I evaluated gendered rhetoric in the sixvolume History of Woman Suffrage (1881–1922).2 A digital history approach allowed me to highlight how men and women adopted different rhetorical strategies to fight for women's rights. For example, male authors continually engaged in a rhetoric of separate spheres, while female authors instead emphasized aspects of women's nature that justified expanding their rights. In another case, my inquiry began with the quest for an original copy of a historical document, "Sex and Caste: A Kind of Memo" (1965), often credited with launching the second wave of feminism. I finally located one, via Google, when a finding aid for a recently processed collection went online. Software called Juxta pinpointed the changes between the published version that historians had relied on for decades, and the original, mailed to just thirty-two women. Juxta creates a side-by-side visualization that colors the text where differences occur between versions. That visualization appears in the essay to document changes made in the published version, which have led to an interpretation of "Sex and Caste" as an attack on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) by white women who wanted more power for themselves or who sought to organize women separately.3 The original Memo's list of recipients, omitted from the published version, indicates that the authors sent the document to a small group of SNCC insiders. [End Page 163] A closing section, also omitted from the published version, illuminates the authors' limited intent to promote discussion among women within the freedom movement. Finally, text added to the published document by an unknown individual creates the impression that the authors emphasized women's oppression in society and their subordination inside the movement to a greater extent than appeared in the original. I began theorizing about digital archives when I stumbled upon online copies of digitized audiotapes from a significant feminist conference, The Second Sex: Thirty Years Later (1979). Using my training as an oral historian, I transcribed the audiotapes of Audre Lorde's remarks that became her famed essay "The Master's Tools." I became curious about the grassroots Black feminists who participated in this event. This investigation led to a nonlinear web essay about using online search engines to research marginalized historical subjects.4 In turn, writing that piece led me to draft guidelines for ethical research practices in digital archives.5 I offer these examples of my work to emphasize that digital history is impossible to pin down to one particular approach or outcome. What my projects have in common is a reliance on a core research process. I begin with a historical question that seems to have a potential digital history answer. Each question requires careful consideration of the most suitable approach and the most appropriate archives.For instance, in my analysis of the correspondence of Carolee Schneemann, a feminist performance artist, I initially worked from an edited collection of her letters. I soon realized the volume contained insufficient evidence to provide insights into her connections to other feminist activists, which led me back to the archive to locate more female correspondents.6 What happened next is...

“Latter-Day Slavery”

My research highlights little-known aspects of African American participation in the mobilization on behalf of women’s suffrage in California, an issue of vital importance to African Americans. The history of suffrage in the United States is marked by varying degrees of denial of voting rights to African Americans. In California, African Americans were pivotal participants in three major suffrage campaigns. Based on black women’s support for the Fifteenth Amendment, which granted black men the right to vote, black men and women formed a critical political alliance, one in which black men almost universally supported black women’s suffrage. Black women began and continued their activism on behalf of male and female voting rights, not as an extension of white-led suffrage campaigns, but as an expression of African American political culture. African Americans—including black women suffragists—developed their own political culture, in part, to associate with those of similar culture and life experiences, but also because white-led suffrage organizations excluded black members. Black politics in California reflected African Americans’ confidence in black women as political actors and their faith in their own independent efforts to secure the franchise for both black men and women.

Gender, Sexuality, and Love between Women in California’s Suffrage Campaign

The traditional narrative of the women’s suffrage movement has presented a “respectable” version of suffrage history primarily focused on the prominent role of elite, cisgender, heterosexual white women in fighting for the vote. Scholars are currently challenging that narrative. The story of California suffragists Gail Laughlin and Dr. Mary Austin Sperry “queers” our understanding of suffrage history by revealing the ways that suffragists transgressed normative boundaries of gender and sexuality not only in their norm-defying gender expressions, but in their non-heteronormative domestic arrangements.

Women, Gender, and Rights: Past and Present

Women, Gender, and Rights: Past and Present

"Chinese Girl Wants Vote"

American suffrage history is dominated by white suffragettes; however, this essay aims to bring to light another vibrant dimension of the American women’s suffrage movement. Mabel Ping-Hua Lee turned tides when she marched horseback at a women’s suffrage parade at the age of sixteen, and further entrenched herself as a prominent Asian-American suffragette as she continued to fight for women’s suffrage throughout her lifetime, although the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred her and all Chinese people from voting or obtaining citizenship until the act was repealed in 1943. This article explores many dimensions of Mabel through several of her primary environmental and personal influences, from Guangzhou, China to New York City’s Chinatown, which all shaped her into an admirable, and selfless social justice advocate that claims an unforgettable chapter in American and Asian-American political history.

‘It wasn't like that at all’: memory, identity and legacy in Jessie Kenney's The Flame and The Flood

ABSTRACT This article uses Jessie Kenney's unpublished and fragmentary autobiography The Flame and the Flood to show how suffragettes reacted to, and tried to re-write, the emerging historical narratives on militant suffrage. As June Purvis and Sandra Stanley Holton have shown, Sylvia Pankhurst's The Suffragette Movement became the dominant frame through which the suffragette movement was understood. Yet Krista Cowman's revealing study of Mary Gawthorpe also demonstrates that many suffragettes were distressed at the way this narrative became cemented in popular and academic understandings of the movement. Developing this understanding by showing how suffragettes resisted Pankhurst's account to offer an alternative account of suffrage history, this article offers new insights into suffrage life-writing in the later twentieth century. It conceptualises The Flame and the Flood not as a monologue focused on Kenney's own experience, but as a dialogue with existing cultural narratives, and demonstrates the interaction between collective and individual identity in suffrage autobiography.

Suffrage History in the Northern Great Plains: Why It Matters

Suffrage History in the Northern Great Plains:Why It Matters Linda Van Ingen (bio) Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest, 1870–1920. By Sara Egge. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018. xi + 233 pp. Maps, photographs, notes, bibliography, index. $85.00 paper, $85.00 ebook. Votes for Women: The 19th Amendment in Nebraska. Edited by David L. Bristow. Lincoln: History Nebraska, 2019. 96 pp. Photographs, notes, references. $15.95 paper. Equality at the Ballot Box: Votes for Women on the Northern Great Plains. Edited by Lori Ann Lahlum and Molly P. Rozum. Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2019. xiii + 410 pp. Maps, illustrations, photographs, notes, index. $34.95 cloth. A quick glance at suffrage history will highlight one significant connection to the northern Great Plains: Wyoming. In 1869 Wyoming's first territorial legislature extended the vote to women, and when Wyoming joined the union in 1890 it became the first state to likewise enfranchise women. The northern Great Plains states of Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska, in contrast, introduced or otherwise campaigned for the vote at least fifty times from their territorial days well into the first decades of the twentieth century when they began to see some success and, finally, ratification of the federal amendment in 1920. Most of these suffrage efforts ended in defeat, prompting historians to question the significance of this expansive state history. Is it worth the effort to sort through the many times a suffrage bill came before territorial or state legislatures? Or to research how women organized, time and time again, to no avail? As one historian asks of her own work, "Why study the failed woman suffrage campaigns?"1 Does this state suffrage history matter? Three recent publications provide a new opportunity to explore this question in the Great Plains. In 2019 the South Dakota Historical Society Press published a collection of twelve original articles and seven shorter "snapshot" essays that explore state suffrage in Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota. Edited by Lori Ann Lahlum and Molly Rozum, Equality at the Ballot Box: Votes for Women on the Northern Great Plains is organized into three parts, the first offering a political context [End Page 229] for suffrage in each state, the second consisting of case studies on various suffrage topics, and the third providing analysis on particular suffrage women. The brief snapshots focus narrowly on certain aspects of a state campaign. History Nebraska of the Nebraska State Historical Society also published a collection of articles and essays in the same year. Votes for Women: The 19th Amendment in Nebraska, edited by David Bristow, is an illustrated special edition of previously published articles from Nebraska History Magazine as well as new essays highlighting Nebraska's connections to national suffrage. Sara Egge's 2018 monograph, Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest, 1870– 1920, provides a comparative analysis of three counties in Iowa, Minnesota, and South Dakota to explore how suffrage intersected with ideas of citizenship, community, and civic activism to create a regional identity. Egge looks for "an upside" to failed suffrage campaigns, arguing that after decades of defeat, suffragists in the Midwest "eventually adopted civic responsibility as their winning argument for the vote."2 Taken together, this rich body of scholarship not only reveals the breadth and depth of Great Plains state suffrage history but also creates an opportunity for a thematic approach to better understand this history. This essay explores a number of these themes, highlighting what historians have found significant about suffrage history even with, or perhaps because of, the many losses the region endured. These themes show why state suffrage history matters. Historians often look for stories of achievement in their analyses of the past. The notion that history is written by the victor places significance on the winners or those who came first. There is no doubting the significance of Great Plains suffrage history with Wyoming's uncontested status as the first in the nation—if not globally—to enfranchise women. Montana also secured a significant "first" by electing Jeannette Rankin the first woman to Congress in 1916 after enfranchising women through a state amendment two years earlier.3 For states marginalized...

Editorial Note: Suffrage and Beyond: Celebrating Women's History

Editorial NoteSuffrage and Beyond: Celebrating Women's History Elisa Camiscioli and Jean H. Quataert 2020 is the centennial year of the granting of women's suffrage in the United States through state ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. Many diverse celebrations are planned to commemorate the anniversary, from museum exhibits and symposia to workshops and concerts. Indeed, as we write, local singers in Binghamton, New York already performed a concert called "Women of Note," featuring music composed by women and highlighting suffragist songs. The anniversary is a milestone of sorts. Suffrage was a cardinal aim of feminist mobilizations across the globe over the past two centuries, and the topic has spurred a vibrant yet increasingly critical historiography. With this issue, the JWH brings the insights of women's historians to the celebration. We open with a Special Forum that asks, provocatively, "What Difference Did the Nineteenth Amendment Make?" The Forum is guest edited by Liette Gidlow who proposed, organized, and edited it. She brings together six leading women's historians who write about the topic from different regional, class, and race perspectives. As Gidlow writes in her introduction, the authors extend the moment of 1920 "both backward and forward in time," inserting the suffrage question into the history of US imperial expansion and exploring the meanings of inclusion in—and exclusion from—the nation as the ranks of the voting public expanded. Each contribution to the Forum offers valuable documentary and historiographical details in a length easily adaptable for teaching purposes. Lori D. Ginzberg writes from the perspective of the women advocates themselves. She shows that over the decades, the consistent call for the women's vote reflected different rationales. She explores a "radical reimagining of political, religious, and marital hierarchies" inherent in suffrage claims in the antebellum era. She then examines the compromises suffrage advocates accepted around the turn of the century, a "tactical shift" that required concessions to white supremacy and to notions of women's purity. These political accommodations, Ginzberg writes, made suffrage "mainstream, respectable, and safe," setting the stage for 1920 itself—although the vote "left many things unsorted." Rosalyn Terborg-Penn looks at the outcome for African American women. Terborg-Penn, recently deceased, was a pioneer in the field of African American women's suffrage history, and Gidlow's introduction includes a fitting tribute to her pathfinding scholarship and their collaboration in this Special Forum. In her essay, Terborg-Penn examines the fraught history of suffrage for Black women and men who, soon after [End Page 7] ratification, lost the right to vote in the South. Her main story deals with Black women's formative role in the women's suffrage movement prior to 1920 and their subsequent mobilization strategies for the ballot through the Civil Rights era of the 1960s. Looking outside the formal borders of the United States, Rumi Yasutake takes us to Hawai'i, at the time a US territory. She focuses on Native Hawaiian women suffragists who seized the vote as a "means to recover their political and economic rights lost in the modern American system," including the right to hold office. In the next contribution by Cathleen D. Cahill, the vote is examined in the longer context of Native American history. Cahill explores the topic through the writings of two Native feminist intellectuals who creatively intertwined citizenship with sovereignty for Native Nations. Gidlow's own essay rounds out the Special Forum. She provides trenchant historical reassessment of the many sides to the "rise of the 'Women's Vote.'" In her telling, suffrage helped revive the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s; it transformed a piecemeal strategy known as the "white primary" into a uniform policy that effectively barred "Black voters from local Democratic Party organizations"; turned the Republican Party after 1965 into a white party when southern white conservative Democrats defected to it; and shaped the "racial politics of the feminist movements." Since 1976, the women's vote, Gidlow observes, elevated Black women into a key constituency of the Democratic Party—on full display in the 2018 midterm elections in the Trump era. This issue also includes three article-length pieces. As in the Special Forum on women's suffrage...

Laura Curtis Bullard and Women’s Rights Literature

Laura Curtis Bullard and Women’s Rights Literature Denise Kohn Laura Curtis Bullard’s 1856 novel Christine: or Woman’s Trials and Triumphs is both a work of fiction and a metanarrative about the cultural work of women’s writing in the women’s rights movement. Like Curtis Bullard herself, the novel’s protagonist, Christine, first uses fiction and later employs the essay as vehicles to advocate for women’s sexual, legal, marital, and political self-determination. Christine proposes the novel as “a form that will bring my words to all”; “I will write! I can write—I am sure of it—words that will reach the hearts of men, and find an echo there!” (139, 138). When she later becomes a famous women’s rights speaker, Christine uses the essay form to achieve similar ends, just as Curtis Bullard would do after succeeding Elizabeth Cady Stanton as editor of The Revolution in 1870. In entering her story to assert the power of her own writing and the cultural influence of fiction, Curtis Bullard offers a reminder to suffrage scholars: in this centennial year, as we assess the history of woman suffrage, we need to include its literary history. Fiction, essays, poetry, and other writing by women have always been as central to the movement as petitions and parades. Curtis Bullard is one of the many writers and editors in the suffrage movement who deserve further study. Her literary and other advocacy work, which spans the antebellum and postbellum periods, illustrates the matrix of causes that suffrage engaged, including marriage and divorce reforms. Christine, for example, foregrounds the franchise with its heroine, a public speaker (drawn sympathetically in opposition to typical representations by the popular press) who uses her platform to argue for “universal suffrage” (280). This term denoted voting rights for women and men regardless of race, ethnicity, or class; like so many other white women writers, however, Curtis Bullard focuses on the stories of white northern women, failing to address the lives of African Americans and ignoring the racial politics of suffrage and equality in antebellum America. The novel’s subplots gesture outward from its suffrage argument, dramatizing the four types of marriage identified by Margaret Fuller as prevailing in the nineteenth century, along with women’s need for legal rights relating to custody, property, and divorce. As editor of The Revolution, Curtis Bullard continued this broad approach to women’s rights; believing suffrage was not [End Page 307] imminent, she emphasized marriage reform along with the ballot. She contextualized this effort broadly when she changed the paper’s motto to “What therefore God hath joined together let not man put asunder,” arguing that God created men and women as equals, but women have been denied equal opportunities for education and careers (“The Motto” 168). She later asserted that women wanted the freedom to divorce as much as the freedom to vote (“A Change” 300), an argument that was blamed for the failure of an attempt to reunite the National and American Woman Suffrage Associations (Higginson). Her editorials likely made her more vulnerable to false accusations in the New York press that she had eloped to Europe with Theodore Tilton, even though her letters show she was in love with the suffrage leader Anna Dickinson. Debates over women’s suffrage were inextricably tied to fears of female agency and desire. Attending to the work of Curtis Bullard and others who advocated for suffrage in print—that is, considering the literary history of women’s suffrage—illuminates these dimensions of suffrage history and clarifies how such issues still shape our political discourse today. Denise Kohn Baldwin Wallace University works cited Bullard, Laura Curtis. “A Change in the Aspect of the Woman Question.” The Revolution, 29 Sept. 1870, p. 300. Google Scholar ———. Christine: or Woman’s Trials and Triumphs. 1856. Edited by Denise M. Kohn, U of Nebraska P, 2010. Google Scholar ———. “The Motto of this Journal.” The Revolution, 15 Sept. 1870, p. 168. Google Scholar Fuller, Margaret. “The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men. Woman versus Women.” 1843. Norton Anthology of American Literature: Beginnings to 1865. Shorter Ninth Edition, edited by Robert S. Levine, Norton, 2017, pp. 803– 14...

Introduction

Introduction