Suffrage In The United States Research Articles

The formation of women`s suffrage in the USA in the XIX-XX centuries

In the scientific article, the author analyzed the issue of the formation of women’s suffrage in the United States of America. The meaning of the “conference to discuss the social, civil and religious condition and rights of women” held in Seneca Falls in 1848 is revealed. The role of suffragettes, their complex international connections and strategies for the development of women’s rights are outlined. The achievements of Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Stuart, Francisca Anneke, Sarah Parker Remond, Stanton, Anthony, Ida Wells, Frances Harper, Churchy Terrell, Alice Paul and the social movement of abolitionists in the process of securing women’s rights, including women’s suffrage, are revealed. The importance of the founding of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, the International Women’s League, the World Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the International Council of Women, the National Association of Colored Women, the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, and the Inter-American Commission on Women is characterized. The emergence of the internationalism of women’s suffrage, the spread of feminism is analyzed. The events and consequences of the struggle for women’s suffrage in the USA are summarized. In particular, it notes that the transnational legacy of the suffrage movement is evident in the ongoing aspirations of US women for full citizenship today. Then, as now, the struggle for women’s rights is linked to global movements for human rights – for immigrant, racial, labor and feminist justice. The internationalism of the women’s suffrage movement shows us that activists and movements outside the USA, as well as a wide range of diverse international causes, were crucial to the organization of what was considered such a quintessentially American right to vote. The emergence of women’s suffrage reminds us how much we have to learn from feminist struggles around the world. We see the prospects for further scientific research in the study of women’s suffrage in the states of the EU and other countries of the world and in their comparison. A scientific article can be useful for experts, historians and students.

“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

Voters in a Foreign Land: Alien Suffrage in the United States, 1704–1926

AbstractAs early as 1704, noncitizen immigrants were legally allowed to vote in what would become the United States. By the end of the eighteenth century, noncitizens could legally vote in most states. State lawmakers offered the franchise as an incentive for white, male, Europeans of working age to migrate. However, rising immigration and nativism led states to reconsider alien suffrage, as noncitizen voting was known, and alien suffrage nearly disappeared by the 1840s. Revived by territorial expansion, demands for cheap labor, urbanization, racism, and sexism, alien suffrage expanded in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, peaking a century after the nation’s founding. However, resurgent nativism, wartime xenophobia, and corruption concerns pushed lawmakers to curtail noncitizen voting, and citizenship became a voting prerequisite in every state by 1926.

“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.

The Electoral Impact of Newly Enfranchised Groups: The Case of Women’s Suffrage in the United States

How do newly enfranchised groups achieve representation of shared interests? I theorize that while suffrage expansion has the potential to sway electoral tides in favor of the newly enfranchised, s...

“Make a Home Run for Suffrage”: Promoting Women’s Emancipation Through Baseball

At specific moments in history, women publicly entered the masculine realm of baseball to advance female suffrage in the United States. Girls and women took to the field in the nineteenth century, enjoying newfound bodily freedoms and disrupting Victorian constraints. While their performances may not have always translated into explicit suffrage activism, their athleticism demonstrated strength at a time when many people used women’s supposed weakness as an argument against their political enfranchisement. However, as the popularity of baseball increased at the turn of the century, the number of female ballplayers decreased. Activism in the sport therefore changed. In the mid-1910s, suffragists advertised at men’s baseball games. The women recognized the value of promoting suffrage through sport; yet, they also acknowledged that by entering ballparks, they entered a male space. Suffragists therefore exhibited conventional White gender norms to avoid aggrieving male voters. Women’s different engagements with baseball, as either players or spectators, had varying consequences for women’s political and sporting emancipation. Women’s physical activism in baseball demonstrated female prowess and strength in sport, but only abstractly advanced women’s political rights; suffragists’ promotional efforts through men’s baseball more directly influenced the eventual passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, but their actions supported women’s position on the sidelines.

Votes for Women: An Economic Perspective on Women’s Enfranchisement

The ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 officially granted voting rights to women across the United States. However, many states extended full or partial suffrage to women before the federal amendment. In this paper, we discuss the history of women's enfranchisement using an economic lens. We examine the demand side, discussing the rise of the women's movement and its alliances with other social movements, and describe how suffragists put pressure on legislators. On the supply side, we draw from theoretical models of suffrage extension to explain why men shared the right to vote with women. Finally, we review empirical studies that attempt to distinguish between competing explanations. We find that no single theory can explain women's suffrage in the United States and note that while the Nineteenth Amendment extended the franchise to women, state-level barriers to voting limited the ability of black women to exercise that right until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

It's Still about Relevance: The Founding of a Humanities Collaborative as a Confident Response to the Humanities Crisis

This article details the creation of a humanities collaborative in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Portland as an active response to counteract the so-called humanities crisis. Beginning as a low-budget endeavor in 2016, the Humanities Collaborative focused in its first two years on gathering interest and participation from faculty colleagues by hosting lunch discussions throughout the semester and a writing retreat in the spring. Collaborating across disciplines and departments resulted in a reinvigorated engagement with the humanities. In 2019–20 the CAS Humanities Collaborative hosted a campus-wide public humanities project focusing on the centennial of women’s suffrage in the United States that includes a student-faculty fellowship program, the Public Research Fellows. The success of the Humanities Collaborative allowed the founders to attract internal funding and to apply for external funding to support the Public Research Fellows programming.

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...

It’s Still about Relevance: The Founding of a Humanities Collaborative as a Confident Response to the Humanities Crisis

This article details the creation of a humanities collaborative in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Portland as an active response to counteract the so-called humanities crisis. Beginning as a low-budget endeavor in 2016, the Humanities Collaborative focused in its first two years on gathering interest and participation from faculty colleagues by hosting lunch discussions throughout the semester and a writing retreat in the spring. Collaborating across disciplines and departments resulted in a reinvigorated engagement with the humanities. In 2019–20 the CAS Humanities Collaborative hosted a campus-wide public humanities project focusing on the centennial of women’s suffrage in the United States that includes a student-faculty fellowship program, the Public Research Fellows. The success of the Humanities Collaborative allowed the founders to attract internal funding and to apply for external funding to support the Public Research Fellows programming.

Introduction

Introduction

The inferential opportunity of specificity: theory and empirical causality in American Political Development

The context-specificity of the research field of American Political Development (APD) can make it an especially fertile ground for empirical assessment of causal explanations of politics using observational data. Despite an ongoing—though diminishing—quantitative–qualitative divide in political science scholarship, notable agreement has emerged across that divide on the imperative for “rich theories” with multiple implications in the assessment of causal arguments when experimentation is impossible. Drawing on the underlying logic of that agreement, I consider how and why APD can both benefit from and add value to the use of design-based quantitative approaches developed within the potential-outcomes framework for causal inference. Among the central considerations are the possible limits on direct assessment of historical macro-level causal hypotheses and the imperative for multi-level and context-specific theorizing to enable empirical analyses. Also considered is the value of rigorous qualitative work to justify assumptions and measurement strategies in quantitative causal inference analyses. Illustrations of the advocated multiple-implication, multiple-method approach are drawn from my previous work on the development of woman suffrage in the United States. That integrative approach suggests the benefit of continued development of broader toolkits for explanation of complex, contingent, and endogenous political processes.

To Lead and to Vote: Black Women Suffragists in the Naacp in the South

6 | BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 82, NO 2 82 No.2 TO LEAD AND TO VOTE: BLACK WOMEN SUFFRAGISTS IN THE NAACP IN THE SOUTH By: Jessica Brannon-Wranosky and Cecilia Gutierrez Venable There is increasing interest in woman suffrage history as the August 2020 centennial approaches for the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. This federal amendment removed sex as a qualifier for voting when it passed in August 1920. However, it did not immediately give all women in the US voting access. This article offers an overview of some of the history relevant to current debates on the subject, which of late have focused on the global majority’s role in the woman suffrage movement. Further, it also offers examples of Black women’s suffrage activism in the NAACP. These histories offer sketches of how some white suffrage leaders segregated affiliation within the national woman suffrage organizations and the ways in which Black women suffragists worked to circumvent those barriers. Here are some of their stories. History of Early Woman Suffrage Discussions of early woman suffrage in the United States arose between the interplay of abolitionists. Early supporters included Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Sojourner Truth, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan Brownell Anthony. Before the Civil War, early suffrage work was often abstract and aimed at groups of reformers gathering to discuss various aspects of the subject and/or spreading information to new audiences. Following the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, deliberations among early women’s rights advocates and former abolitionists led to the formation of the American Equal Rights Association (AERA) in 1866, with its express purpose “to secure equal rights to all American citizens, especially the right of suffrage, irrespective of race, color or sex.”2 By 1869, however, a rift developed within this organization concerning women’s right to vote, and it split in two, forming the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) and the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). The AWSA, led by Lucy Stone, supported the Fifteenth Amendment, which Congress had recently passed and sent to the states for ratification. The amendment defined the right to vote as an individual male’s right and not limited by race. The NWSA, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, was furious that the Fifteenth Amendment provided black men the right to vote, but did not guarantee suffrage for women. Among the patterns that developed between the split in 1869 and what suffrage historians call “reunification” in 1890, when the AWSA and NWSA recombined, is that Anthony and Stanton aligned themselves with supporters, money, and campaigning that increasingly incorporated nativist and racist language and fear-baiting at different points. Through these tactics, Anthony and Stanton’s support of voting regulations developed a nativist ideology. Therefore, it was not surprising that a larger number of Black women and men aligned their support with AWSA. In 1890, NWSA and AWSA joined to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). After Lucy Stone died in 1893 and Stanton reduced her role in this new group, Anthony assumed its leadership. Now the dominant national woman suffrage organization, NAWSA attracted other dynamicwomen,includingCarrieChapmanCatt,AnnaHoward Shaw, Laura Clay, and many others. These national suffragists focused their efforts on recruiting and organizing white social elite women into NAWSA affiliates, which left Black women on the sidelines. By the turn of the century, African American advocates for women’s suffrage were increasingly pushed out of NAWSA’s corridors, or prevented from addressing Black women’s voting concerns directly as part of the association’s work or proceedings. African Americans found themselves on the periphery of participating in NAWSA by 1910, so they identified new spaces to spotlight the importance of Black women’s suffrage. The NAACP was founded in 1909 by leaders from several earlier organizations, including the National Afro American League (AAL), the National Afro-American Council (AAC), the Constitution League, the Committee of Twelve, the National Negro Suffrage League, the Niagara Movement, and the National Negro American Political League (NNAPL). These various groups built their successes on the strategies, networks, and failures...

Signature Struggles

Book Review| February 01 2018 Signature Struggles: Democracy and Diversity in American History Many Voices, One Nation. Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, Washington, DC. Fath Davis Ruffins, Founding Project Director; Nancy Davis, Project Director; and the Many Voices, One Nation project team. June 28, 2017–Ongoing. http://americanhistory.si.edu/exhibitions/many-voices-one-nation.American Democracy: A Great Leap of Faith. Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, Washington, DC. Harry R. Rubenstein, Project Director and Curator; William L. Bird Jr., Lisa Kathleen Graddy, Barbara Clark Smith, and Grace Cohen Grossman, Curators. June 28, 2017–Ongoing. http://americanhistory.si.edu/exhibitions/american democracy-great-leap-faith. Robyn Muncy Robyn Muncy Robyn Muncy is professor of history at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is author of Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 (1991) and Relentless Reformer: Josephine Roche and Progressivism in Twentieth-Century America (2015). Her recent research on the career of the term “working class” in US political culture is forthcoming from Labor: Studies in Working-Class History, and she is co-curating an exhibit at the National Archives on the struggle for women's suffrage in the United States. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar The Public Historian (2018) 40 (1): 124–130. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2018.40.1.124 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Robyn Muncy; Signature Struggles: Democracy and Diversity in American History. The Public Historian 1 February 2018; 40 (1): 124–130. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2018.40.1.124 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentThe Public Historian Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2018 by The Regents of the University of California and the National Council on Public History2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

A Higher "Standard of Life" for the World: U.S. Labor Women's Reform Internationalism and the Legacies of 1919

In 1919, in the immediate aftermath of World War I, women labor reformers from nineteen nations and three continents gathered in Washington, D.C., to hammer out a set of international labor standards and worker rights. The ten-day International Congress of Working Women (icww), called by the National Women’s Trade Union League of America (nwtul), with the counsel and encouragement of British and French labor women, was timed to coincide with the inaugural meeting of the International Labor Organization (ilo), the body charged by the Treaty of Versailles with formulating international labor policies in the postwar world. The two hundred women who responded to the call demanded a voice for working women in shaping a new world order. Through international labor legislation and worker organization, they believed, “the standard of life of women workers throughout the world” could be raised. They met at a time of heady possibility. Women’s suffrage in the United States and in much of Europe was imminent. The Bolsheviks had seized power in Russia in 1917; socialist movements and labor parties were on the rise across Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. The 1919 icww adjourned on a high note with plans for a permanent organization, the International Federation of Working Women (ifww).1 In the last few decades, U.S. history has been transformed by research on international organizations and on the global movements of peoples, ideas, and commodities. Histori-

The State Giveth and the State Taketh Away? The Antislavery Movement and the Black Franchise in the United States, 1691–1842

Although the franchise is the centerpiece of U.S. democracy, serious scholarly study of the black franchise has been limited to the Reconstruction and Civil Rights eras. Consequently, the author examines black suffrage in the United States during 1691–1842 using event history methods and an original data set. Focusing on the neglected relationship between the antislavery movement and black suffrage, the author reports that disruptive and militant activism, warfare, and partisan politics influenced this phenomenon. There also is support for a generational model of movement success. The evidence clarifies two unsettled issues: (1) whether movements matter and (2) the impacts of conventional, disruptive, and militant protest on movement success. Moreover, as institutionalism predicts, voting rules spread across states through mimicry; and as group threat theory predicts, free black presence adversely affected black suffrage. The findings clarify why it took three and a half centuries for the American democracy to accept a race-blind franchise.

Militant Citizenship: Rhetorical Strategies of the National Woman's Party, 1913-1920 by Belinda A. Stillion Southard (review)

Reviewed by: Militant Citizenship: Rhetorical Strategies of the National Woman's Party, 1913-1920 by Belinda A. Stillion Southard Amy R. Slagell (bio) Militant Citizenship: Rhetorical Strategies of the National Woman's Party, 1913-1920. By Belinda A. Stillion Southard. (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2012. Pp. 303. $45.00 cloth; $24.95 paper) The battle for women's suffrage in the United States spanned more than seven decades and continues to provoke a well-deserved fascination. The focus of this well-documented study is the National Woman's Party (NWP), whose radical strategies of marches, picketing, and burning President Wilson's speeches and effigy in Washington, D.C., gave a new visibility to the movement during its final years. Their strategies were effective in accomplishing that goal and, argues Stillion Southard, in allowing women to constitute themselves as national citizens. The book brings a new dimension to our understanding [End Page 468] of the closing years of the suffrage movement. Grounded in the vocabulary of scholarship in rhetoric and public address, this study bears some marks of its dissertation origins as it sets forth its analysis of the strategies employed by the NWP. It explores their use of "militancy"—a strategy that "confronts" rather than "appeals to institutional power"—and "political mimesis"—a strategy whereby "disempowered rhetors mimic political rhetorics, rituals and practices to assert political agency, constitute political identities, and earn political legitimacy" (pp. 15, 18). The suffrage parade, the formal establishment of the NWP, the appeal for popular support through the Silent Sentinel pickets and the internationalized arguments surrounding the burning of Wilson's speeches, are framed as more than simple imitation or borrowing from the demonstrations and discourse of earlier political parties and of President Wilson; these strategic choices enabled NWP members to enact the very citizenship they desired to achieve as a result of the movement. The theoretical scaffolding of the opening chapters soon fades into the background, allowing the detailed and thoughtful analysis of the practices of the NWP to come forward. Primary sources—letters, publications, speeches, and images—combine with a broad set of secondary sources to support Stillion Southard's examination of the ways by which the NWP built a "collective, nationwide movement" uniting women "as politically empowered constituents" (p. 111). Even familiar stories of the suffrage movement are made new when told through the lens of the NWP. "I regret that we have not an ounce of energy nor a postage stamp to devote to Senator O'Gorman," wrote Harriot Stanton Blatch in her refusal to join in the NWP lobbying efforts (p. 89). Stillion Southard uses this kind of exchange to offer new insight into tensions between the NWP and other suffrage organizations. With its primary focus on the NWP as a whole rather than on the discourse and activities of individual members, Militant Citizenship is a good complement to Katherine Adams and Michael Keen's Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign (2008), a book Stillion Southard, whose notes and bibliography are otherwise quite extensive [End Page 469] and thorough, does not mention. The most powerful chapter of the book details the 1918 "Watch Fires of Freedom" protests staged in Lafayette Square at the statues of Lafayette and Rochambeau. Stillion Southard's analysis powerfully lays out the parallels between Wilson's rhetoric and the transnational vision and arguments of the NWP. The "NWP's Watch Fires" not only drew attention to the hypocrisy of Wilson's prodemocracy speeches that ignored the reality of women's disenfranchisement, they also fashioned "an international model of woman citizenship" (p. 171). One particularly impressive feature of the work is the author's consistent attention to issues of race and class; at every turn she points out the expedient rhetorical choices of the white, middle-class NWP leadership and analyzes the political and cultural implications of those choices. Upon reaching the closing pages of the book, readers may be reminded of Audre Lorde's classic warning in "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House." This tale of the NWP demonstrates the tremendous impact of inventive rhetorical strategies while reminding us that successes gained by adopting the strategies wielded...

Men, Women, and the Ballot - Woman Suffrage in the United States

Woman suffrage led to the greatest enfranchisement in the history of the United States. Before World War I, however, suffrage states remained almost exclusively confined to the American West. The reasons for this pioneering role of the West are still unclear. Studying the timing of woman suffrage adoption at state level, we find that states in which women were scarce (the West) enfranchised their women much earlier than states in which the sex ratio was more balanced (the rest of the country). High sex ratios in the West, that is high ratios of granters to grantees, reduced the political costs and risks to male electorates and legislators of extending the franchise. They are also likely to have enhanced female bargaining power and may have made woman suffrage more attractive in the eyes of western legislators that sought to attract more women to their states. Our finding of a reduced-form inverse relationship between the relative size of a group and its success in securing the ballot may be of use also for the study of other franchise extensions and for inquieries into the dynamics of political power sharing more generally.

The rise and fall (and rise?) of non-citizen voting: Immigration and the shifting scales of citizenship and suffrage in the United States

Using non-citizen voting (or ‘alien suffrage’) as a case study, this article traces the long role which immigration has played in reshaping the boundaries around the citizenry and the population of eligible voters in the US. The paper discusses the gradual ‘territorialisation’ of citizenship and suffrage from the late 1700s to the mid 1960s and then addresses the current ‘deterritorialisation’ of these institutions vis-à-vis the growing population of non-citizens. It concludes with a discussion of contemporary attempts to reinstate non-citizen voting at the local scale, as a means of addressing the widening gap between popular and territorial sovereignty.

Public Attitudes Toward Felon Disenfranchisement in the United States

Since passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, debates about suffrage in the United States have largely shifted from questions about formal individual rights to participation to questions of fairness in the policy implementation of those rights. Prior to the Voting Rights Act, the disenfranchisement of African American voters provided a vivid example of persistent suffrage inequities in the American political system, and its passage was a landmark development in the struggles to extend the franchise to all citizens (Keyssar 2000). After the passage of the Voting Rights Act, however, concern over voting rights faded rapidly. As one authoritative treatment puts it, “at least since the voting rights reforms of the 1960s, political rights have been universalized in the United States. With relatively insignificant exceptions, all adult citizens have the full complement of political rights” (Verba, Scholzman, and Brady 1995, p. 11). The apparently settled character of the right to vote and its disappearance from the scholarly and popular literatures on American democracy, however, is challenged by the rapid growth in incarceration and conviction rates within the criminal justice system over the past three decades (U.S. Department of Justice 2003). Election laws in most states bar felons and some ex-felons from voting, and it has been estimated that between 4.1 and 4.7 million Americans are currently disenfranchised due to a past or current felony conviction