Women's Suffrage Research Articles

Women & the Vote

There are four contexts in which women have won voting rights: as part of a universal reform for all citizens (15 percent of countries that granted women suffrage); imposed by a conqueror or colonial metropole (28 percent); gradually, after some men had been enfranchised (44 percent); or a hybrid category, often in the wake of re-democratization (14 percent). This essay outlines the global patterns of these reforms and argues that in a plurality of cases, where women's suffrage was gradual, enfranchisement depended on an electoral logic. Politicians subject to competition who believed women would, on average, support their party, supported reform. The suffrage movement provided information, and a potential mobilization apparatus, for politicians to draw on after the vote was extended. Together, both activism and electoral incentives were imperative for reform, providing important lessons for feminist mobilization today.

Interchange: Women's Suffrage, the Nineteenth Amendment, and the Right to Vote

Interchange: Women's Suffrage, the Nineteenth Amendment, and the Right to Vote

Interchange: Women's Suffrage, the Nineteenth Amendment, and the Right to Vote

Interchange: Women's Suffrage, the Nineteenth Amendment, and the Right to Vote

Why I March?

The tale is as old as time, women have been fighting for their rights for centuries. Their lives have always been restricted, and the rationale is unelucidated. They constantly face inequality in the society, be it in the western world or more conservative countries of the world. It never came easy for women; they not only had to raise voice for the basic rights which their counterparts are already endowed with.
 In 1913, first big rally was arranged by Woman Suffrage Procession, it was the first big public meeting in Washington D.C. for sanction voting for women in the entire country of United States of America. The March was attended by many women and sadly the March was attacked by police of Washington State, injuring around 300 women. The state police also mentioned “There would be nothing like this happen if you would have stayed at home”. Even though in some states of USA, women were permitted to vote since 1869 however, the entire country did not get the right to vote until 1919, which was a big achievement for the women globally. Women of USA and Europe have had many public gatherings to increase awareness about importance of being an equal citizen in the society.

Mapping Social Movements and Leveraging the U.S. West: The Rhetoric of the Woman Suffrage Map

This case study of the U.S. woman suffrage map in the early twentieth century reveals the political map as an advocacy tool for social movements. By analyzing the suffrage map and its reception, I argue that the suffrage map projected the movement’s national influence and constituted suffragists as powerful political activists through the rhetoricity of maps and place. Mapping woman suffrage legitimized women’s voting rights, exaggerated their political influence, and invoked the rhetoric of the U.S. West as a frontier, which held enormous cultural power at the turn of the century. The map reimagined the meanings of the West, the East, and the mobility of women’s voting rights to suggest that woman suffrage was destined to spread across the continent. This analysis illustrates the potential for political maps to empower and motivate members of a social movement and convince them of their political agency.

Why the Nineteenth Amendment Matters Today: A Citizen's Guide for the Centennial

The story of the Nineteenth Amendment includes a half-century of social movement contestation over whether permitting women to vote would destroy or democratize the American family and the American constitutional structure. This Essay revisits that story—an unfinished narrative of both disappointment and hope—in the service of identifying reasons why it relates to the lives of contemporary Americans. The overarching objective of the Essay is to suggest that the full story of the Nineteenth Amendment has always involved much more than a narrow debate over a determinate decision rule regarding women’s access to the franchise. To accomplish that objective, the Essay makes four points in four parts. It first considers which women were enfranchised when and why it matters, emphasizing the importance of an intersectional sensibility in examining that question. The Essay then considers some of the groups (men) and structures (federalism) that both impeded and facilitated woman suffrage. Next, the Essay explains the link between restrictions on woman suffrage and the social subordination of women to men, showing how the anti-subordination rationale of the Nineteenth Amendment bears on both its own interpretation and the interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause by the courts. Finally, the Essay turns to the contemporary implications of the story of the Nineteenth Amendment for American constitutional politics, including debates over the Equal Rights Amendment, unequal pay for equal work, paid family and self-care leave, and restrictions on access to contraception and abortion.

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.

Toward a Developmental Science of Politics.

Toward a Developmental Science of Politics.

All the rage: decolonizing the history of the British women's suffrage movement

ABSTRACT The intervention of British feminists in the South African War is a chapter of feminist history that is rarely included either in the memorialization of the suffrage movement or the genealogies of global counterinsurgency. The careers of pacifist Emily Hobhouse and suffragist Millicent Fawcett provide rich opportunities to examine the gendered and racialised politics of British imperial militarism. By exploring the confrontation between these two white women within the wider context of aggressive colonial expansion, this essay will draw out the implications of their differing stances towards the conduct and practice of war, particularly as it impacted on female civilians in the war zone. In doing so, it will contribute to our analysis of the interconnected histories of racism, imperialism, feminism and militarism that have undeniably shaped the politics of global security today.

Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest, 1870–1920. Iowa and the Midwest Experience. By Sara Egge

Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest, 1870–1920. Iowa and the Midwest Experience. By Sara Egge

Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest, 1870–1920

This thoughtful, direct, and efficient book fills a gap in suffrage scholarship. As a social history of politics, Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest also makes a case for the significance of place. Through close and careful attention to three rural counties (one each in Minnesota, Iowa, and South Dakota), Sara Egge has produced an exploration of suffrage from the bottom up. Between 1870 and 1916, women's suffrage activists largely struggled in the rural Midwest, where men—and many women—largely objected to extending suffrage. Ethnicity became one important dividing line. Some of the opposition to suffrage came from recently arrived European migrant communities, with foreign-born rural midwesterners and their kin often rejecting the moralistic arguments of native-born Americans for the extension of suffrage to white women—an effort often paired with crusades for temperance, domestic uplift, and Protestant norms. World War I changed everything. Wartime loyalty and “Americanism” provided a crucial turning point in rural conceptions of citizenship. In the context of community belonging, “citizenship became a performance of loyalty, and most women in the region readily starred in the principal roles” (p. 178). Compared to more reticent immigrant groups—especially the German enclaves across Minnesota, Iowa, and the Dakotas—suffragists and their allies threw themselves into home front efforts. They also highlighted the differences between themselves and neighbors less willing to engage in overtly patriotic activities. Many native-born opponents to suffrage began to support the movement, tipping the political scales.

Leaders of Their Race: Educating Black and White Women in the New South

At the 1895 Atlanta Exposition, the symbol of the New South, visitors encountered a Women's Building, which included a room dedicated to the Lucy Cobb Institute, a women's secondary school founded in Athens in 1859. Nearby, but on the outskirts of the park, visitors toured the Negro Building, which was largely organized by African American women associated with Spelman Seminary. In Leaders of Their Race, Sarah H. Case compares the history of both schools to assess the intersection of race, gender, and education in a changing South. While many of the differences in the aims and approaches of the schools between 1880 and 1925 stemmed from the region's rigid racial hierarchy, Case emphasizes the surprising similarities between Lucy Cobb and Spelman, as both schools framed the preparation of women leaders in the modern South around staunch efforts to regulate female sexuality and preserve women's respectability. Founded as largely a finishing school for southern elites, Lucy Cobb grew to include a more rigorous liberal arts curriculum that prepared southern white women for public roles as diverse as serving the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, teaching, and participating in journalism and, occasionally in later years, politics. Based mostly on institutional records, Case's portrait emphasizes the key role of female school administrators such as Mildred Rutherford who forged modern roles for southern women while, paradoxically, leading a school that defended the traditional “ideals of southern womanhood, white supremacy, and upper class hegemony” (p. 16). Lucy Cobb graduates embraced public and privileged roles that did not include support for women's suffrage.

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

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

Ben Pimlott Memorial Lecture 2018The Women's Suffrage Movement in the Balfour Family.

Given on the centenary of women's suffrage, this lecture explores the tensions and conflicts the claim for the vote raised among elite women already enmeshed in parliamentary and political circles. Drawing on the unbuttoned and sometimes angry correspondence among A.J. Balfour's suffragist sisters-in-law Lady Frances Balfour and Lady Betty Balfour, Frances' collaborator (and suffragist leader) Millicent Fawcett, Lady Betty's militant suffragette sister Lady Constance Lytton, and their old friend (and wife of the anti-suffragist Prime Minister) Margot Asquith, it explores the appeal but also the costs of this democratic claim for such "incorporated" women - and explains why some nevertheless supported it.

Getting Your Collection Ready for the Centennial Anniversaries of the 19th Amendment

The centennial anniversaries of the passage and ratification of the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution are coming up. The authors are recipients of the 2018 American Library Association Carnegie Whitney Grant to create a centennial anniversary bibliography of currently available materials on women's suffrage for the general reader. This article highlights some resources and solicits suggestions for the complete bibliography.

Affective Attachments: Women's Suffrage in Austria and the Social Democratic Struggle for Women's Votes in Die Unzufriedene.

“Human progress lies in discontent!” was the motto of the Austrian magazine Die Unzufriedene (The Discontented). It was first published in 1923 as an “independent weekly magazine” designed to reach “all women.” Yet, it was first and foremost a Social Democratic journal, established to socialize women politically and to obtain women's votes outside the Social Democratic purview in the 1923 National Council elections. Since women's suffrage had been established only a few years earlier, the struggle for women's votes was of utmost importance. This essay argues for understanding the journal as a mode and an instrument for the mobilization of affects for Social Democratic ends. Proposing the concept of affective attachments, it shows how the Austrian Social Democratic Workers' Party (SDAP) used the journal in an ambivalent way to affectively address women and to create political moods that would attract them to the party's political agenda.

Making Noise, Making News: Suffrage Print Culture and U.S. Modernism

Making Noise, Making News: Suffrage Print Culture and U.S. Modernism

Are role models the answer? [women in engineering

ONE HUNDRED YEARS ago this year, a small committee of influential women — designers, munitions factory managers and wives of eminent engineers — gathered together to found the Women's Engineering Society (WES). It was a time of hope. The First World War had ended and limited women's suffrage had been won. In the Society's first Woman Engineer Journal, the declared aim was to encourage and stimulate all women who are interested in and be a means towards removing the prejudices and artificial restrictions which now prevent women from taking up engineering as a trade or profession. (The Journal is now fully digitalised, indexed and freely available.) The women who'd gathered together on 23 June 1919 sensed a new dawn.

Massachusetts in the Woman Suffrage Movement: Revolutionary Reformers. By Barbara F. Berenson (Charleston, History Press, 2018) 187 pp. $21.99

Massachusetts in the Woman Suffrage Movement: Revolutionary Reformers. By Barbara F. Berenson (Charleston, History Press, 2018) 187 pp. $21.99

Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest, 1870-1920

Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest, 1870-1920