Women's Suffrage Research Articles

Spitting at Jim Crow

Spitting at Jim Crow

The Feminist View on Maud Watts’ Awakening in the Film Suffragette

Beginning in the 20th century, the philosophy of the British women’s suffrage movement evolved in a manner that encouraged the awakening of more women. From the middle-class women of the 19th century, the group of participants in the movement steadily shifted below, and the action for women’s suffrage grew in popularity. Suffragette uses the feminist awakening of the fictional protagonist, Maud Watts, to illustrate the immense fight and sacrifice women made for the right to vote at the time. The usual character of Maud Watts is quite valuable for research purposes. The great battle of women suffragists for the right to vote might be better comprehended by examining her transformation from apathy to spontaneous pursuit of women’s rights.

Women's Suffrage, Political Economy, and the Transatlantic Birth Strike Movement, 1911–1920

AbstractThe first two decades of the twentieth century saw the development of a meaningful transnational movement to employ birth strikes in the fight for women's rights. In an Anglo-American context, this movement was intimately tied to the women's suffrage campaign. It was led by a network of suffragists, Neo-Malthusians, and birth control campaigners who shared literary and personal ties which allowed their ideas to criss-cross the Atlantic between 1911 and 1920. Although the transatlantic birth strike was never implemented on a significant scale, explaining its almost total absence within existing historiography, this article uses a gendered intellectual history framework to piece together the ideas behind the movement which, the article argues, disrupt established understanding of Neo-Malthusianism and socialist-feminism within intellectual histories. Support for birth striking was predicated on faith in the power of working-class collective action, scrutiny of the economic exploitation of both productive and ‘reproductive’ workers, and a corresponding mistrust in the efficacy of state involvement with these issues. The birth strikers wove together strands from collectivist, individualist, socialist, and feminist thought, undermining traditional historiographical depictions of binaries between socialism and suffragism and collectivism and individualism in early twentieth-century political thought.

Frederick Douglass’s “New Departure” in the Reconstruction Era Woman Suffrage Movement

Frederick Douglass’s “New Departure” in the Reconstruction Era Woman Suffrage Movement

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.

Woman Suffrage in Bengal (1921–1925): The ‘Great Game’ Between the Imperialists and the Theosophists

In 1921, the Bengal Legislative Council defeated the Woman Suffrage Bill. It created quite a stir because Bengal showed strong opposition to the Bill, in spite of its reputation for being receptive to progressive thought. The bafflement was complete when the same Bill was passed in the Bengal Legislative Council in 1925. Longstanding social taboos and attitudes do not change within 4 years. Therefore, the explanation for the curious voting pattern has to be sought in Bengal politics. Very little research has hitherto been devoted to this episode of Indian history. Feminist historians of 1970s were satisfied when the Indian male’s purported social orthodoxy were repeatedly cited as a blanket explanation for all regressive obstructions. In 1978, Brian Harrison suggested that British Imperial resistance to woman suffrage was essentially a crusade against communism. Although Harrison’s work gave rise to a vigorous reinvestigation of anti-suffragist movement in England, no similar enquiry about anti-suffragist movement in India was carried out. The article investigates why and how the British Raj opposed woman suffrage in India, when principal supporters of woman suffrage was the Theosophical Society, considered to be a shady Russian-funded mischief-making organisation by British Intelligence.

Family, Slavery, and Love in the Early American Republic: The Essays of Jan Ellen Lewis ed. by Barry Bienstock, Annette Gordon-Reed, and Peter S. Onuf

Reviewed by: Family, Slavery, and Love in the Early American Republic: The Essays of Jan Ellen Lewis ed. by Barry Bienstock, Annette Gordon-Reed, and Peter S. Onuf Cassandra Good Family, Slavery, and Love in the Early American Republic: The Essays of Jan Ellen Lewis. Edited by Barry Bienstock, Annette Gordon-Reed, and Peter S. Onuf. (Williamsburg, Va.: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture; and Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. [viii], 422. $39.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-6563-4.) Open the acknowledgments section of nearly any book on gender and sexuality (and plenty more on politics) in the early American republic published during the past several decades, and Jan Lewis's name will appear. Lewis had an outsize influence on these fields through both her mentorship and her published writings. This volume does a great service in compiling and contextualizing thirteen of her previously published articles, many of which were scattered across different edited volumes. Reading Lewis's articles together shows both the coherence of and the evolution in her thinking over the course of nearly forty years. Lewis's work was often ahead of its time, engaging early on with the gender and cultural turns as well as with new approaches to the study of emotional history. The book begins with a short introduction by Lewis's close friends and fellow Jefferson scholars Peter S. Onuf and Annette Gordon-Reed, followed by four thematic sections. It closes with an acknowledgments section by Lewis's husband, Barry Bienstock, that sheds light on his late wife's relationships with various scholars in the field. The volume came together as a tribute to Lewis and a legacy for her granddaughters after her death in 2018, at a time when Lewis was still actively producing important scholarship. The first section, "Gender in the Early American Republic," is introduced by Carolyn Eastman and demonstrates Lewis's interest in exploring the political roles women played during this period. While Lewis's article "The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic" is well known, her articles on women's pervasive political presence in early national Washington, D.C., and the brief period of women's suffrage in New Jersey between 1776 and 1807 are equally important. Her extended engagement with Jürgen Habermas is somewhat an artifact of its time, but all three articles are key parts of a conversation that more often features Linda K. Kerber, Catherine Allgor, and Rosemarie Zagarri. Nicole Eustace introduces the section on emotional history, rightly noting that Lewis's work anticipated a field that has flourished in recent years. The section's first article, "Domestic Tranquillity and the Management of Emotion among the Gentry of Pre-Revolutionary Virginia," largely echoes the first chapter of Lewis's book The Pursuit of Happiness: Family and Values in Jefferson's Virginia (New York, 1983). In a piece titled "Mother's Love: The Construction of an Emotion in Nineteenth-Century America," Lewis explores what she calls "emotionology of motherhood" in the antebellum era, fusing ideas about religion, gender, and emotion (p. 144). The final article, featuring Angelica Schuyler Church, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson, focuses on the intersection of politics and emotion. Lewis also brought her interest in the politics of the early republic to her work on the Constitution. As David Waldstreicher notes in the third section's introduction, Lewis convincingly demonstrated the central importance of [End Page 760] gender and slavery in Revolutionary and constitutional thought (p. 175). All three articles in this section demonstrate Lewis's rigorous attention to language and logic, clearly elucidating the ways women and enslaved people served as props in larger debates about representation, citizenship, and sectionalism. In the final section, introduced by Onuf and Gordon-Reed, Lewis applies her understanding of gender, family, politics, and slavery to Thomas Jefferson. All four of these articles come from edited volumes and may not be well known to readers, but the standout of the group, "White Jeffersons," deserves attention. First published in 1999, the essay offers an impressionistic, sometimes almost elegiac reflection on what Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemings (which was, at the time, newly proved) meant for Jefferson...

Davenport and Walters, eds., The Selected Works of Eugene V. Debs, Volume 3: The Path to a Socialist Party, 1897-1904

Reviewed by: The Selected Works of Eugene V. Debs, Vol. 3: The Path to a Socialist Party, 1897–1904 ed. by Tim Davenport and David Walters William E. Cain The Selected Works of Eugene V. Debs, Vol. 3: The Path to a Socialist Party, 1897–1904 Edited by Tim Davenport and David Walters (Chicago, Ill.: Haymarket Books, 2021. Pp. 733. Illustrations, index. Clothbound, $75.00; paperbound, $36.00.) Expertly organized and edited by Tim Davenport and David Walters, this is the third in a six-volume project from Haymarket Books. Covering the period from 1897 to 1904, it is essential reading for everyone interested in Eugene V. Debs, socialism in America, radical politics, and the bitter and often bloody struggle, here and abroad, between labor and capital. Debs supported the Democratic/Populist William Jennings Bryan in the presidential election of 1896. Bryan was decisively defeated by the Republican nominee William McKinley, and, on New Year's Day 1897, Debs announced, "I am a socialist." He took direct aim at capitalism, pledging "with all the emphasis of which my words are capable, my implacable hostility to this system, and my determination to battle with all my power for its overthrow" (p. 59). In 1900, Debs was the Social Democratic Party candidate for the presidency, but the outcome was a disappointment: he received only 0.6 percent of the popular vote. He was on the ballot again in 1904, this time as the candidate of the Socialist Party, and he did better with 3 percent. During these campaigns, indeed in everything he said and wrote, Debs called for the political education and organization of the working class. "The labor movement must be class conscious," he maintained (p. 432). Debs also highlighted the importance of the ballot—"a revolution can be brought about by this method," for "the ballot is the weapon"—and he was an advocate for women's suffrage (pp. 229, 409). For Debs, the labor movement was national and international; he condemned militarism and imperialism. He railed against business leaders and financiers (John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan), politicians (William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt), and their agents in the pro-corporate media. In contrast to these adversaries, Debs invoked a range of heroes, models, and precursors, including William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Edward Bellamy. At the center for Debs was the Socialist Party, "the only party that stands squarely upon the class struggle as the basis of its revolutionary character" (p. 559). He was fervently optimistic, convinced that the signs were pointing to the collapse of capitalism and the triumph of socialism: "The future is bright" and socialism "is coming just as certain as the rivers find their way to the sea" (pp. 252, 327). Debs's strengths were many, but this volume also dramatizes his limitations. He said hardly a word about the resources and connections of working-class cultures; his emphasis was [End Page 344] always on the worker's degradation, oppression, exploitation, ignorance, and victimization. Debs's position on race and racism was also problematic. He was a stalwart champion of equal rights, but it was the class-based war against capitalism that governed and propelled his views on race relations. "The class struggle is colorless," he asserted; socialism, for the Black worker, "will strike the economic fetters from his body, and he himself will do the rest" (pp. 516, 546). On nearly every page of this collection, Debs contends that workers are "slaves," and, furthermore, that wage slavery is worse than the chattel slavery that the Civil War had terminated. This feature of his rhetoric comes too often and too easily. The common identity of all workers as "slaves," in a nation permeated and disfigured by anti-Black racism and racist violence, is a graphic and attention-seizing claim, but a reductive one as well. There is much to learn, much to debate and argue with here. The 160 primary texts that Davenport and Walters have selected, the excellent introduction, incisive and illuminating notes, and cogent illustrations—this is an important book, superbly done. William E. Cain Wellesley College Copyright © 2022 Trustees of Indiana University

“A Great Many Needs”: Black Women Suffragists and Voters in Indiana

Little information exists about Indiana's Black suffragists and voters, making it difficult to draw a complete picture of their role in the suffrage movement and in state politics. Black women's suffrage groups sometimes organized with the help of their churches and worked with other civic groups such as the NAACP. Black suffragists and voters had in common a dedication to community service and improvement, approaching the vote as the means to achieving better schools and housing and greater access to employment and health care. The officers of Indiana's Black suffrage groups were middle-class and, in at least two cases, published authors. In Indianapolis, the three most visible Black suffrage leaders were teachers in the city's segregated public schools, making them very similar to prominent Black suffragists in other states. Unfortunately, these Hoosier suffragists left few statements about their suffrage work, and the groups they worked with left no minutes of their meetings. Their actions, if not their words, demonstrate that their efforts to win the vote were tied to community goals.

Representation of Women Characters in Preethi Shenoy’s ‘It’s All in the Planets’

'It’s all in the Planets' is a charismatic love story written by Preethi Shenoy. It was published in September 2016. The author of the novel, Preethi Shenoy is an Indian author, Speaker and famous blogger. In this paper, I am analysing this novel from the perspective of feminism, especially how the author presented her female characters. Feminism originated as an offshoot of the women's suffrage movement. The major feminist theorist is Toril Moi, Simone de Beauvoir, Elaine Showalter etc. It is a movement against men’s ideologies and society’s certain representations. Their main concern was the representations of women in literature. Traditionally females are represented in literature as passive characters. Though the feminists broke all such representations, our literary works do not completely get rid of such representations. Many of the authors still present women as passive in their works. In this novel too there are such representations. Superficially it is a love story between two persons who are living in two different worlds. They have their tastes, opinions and attitudes. Even they have two life partners (living relationships). But ultimately fate joins them.

Approaching History through the Future: Some Thoughts from a Feminist Pragmatist

Approaching History through the Future: Some Thoughts from a Feminist Pragmatist

Čija Kriza?

In 1929, the central feminist organization in interwar Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes / Yugoslavia Alijansa ženskih pokreta (Women's Movements' Alliance) removed the demand for women's suffrage rights from their program. By analyzing and carefully contextualizing articles published in the central Yugoslav feminist magazine Ženski pokret (Belgrade, 1920-1938), the article addresses a specific gap in historiography about women's movements and feminisms in interwar Yugoslavia, and argues that the removal od this demand from the feminists' program was not only a direct consequence of the Royal dictatorship, but also a reflection of a broader disillusionment with the parliamentary and party politics in interwar Yugoslavia. More broadly, the article addresses the narrative of the „crisis of feminism“, suggesting that this is not a sufficently satisfactory explanation for the transformation of feminism in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Furthemore, the article contributes to the historiography of the political history of feminisms, and acknowledges the entangled history of the Yugoslav feminist movement with the parliamentary and party politics. Methodologically, it follows the recent approaches to the history of political thought in East Central Europe, and gives new insights into the political thought of the feminists from the AŽP, and particularly their leader Alojzija Štebi and her „political vocabulary“ and her understanding of political neutrality, moral crisis of political life, and small-scale work.

Petrażycki, prawa kobiet o udział kobiet we władzy

Leon Petra¿ycki (1867–1931), author of the original psychological concept of law, was preoccupied with the life of society and politics. As a member of the First State Duma of the Russian Empire, he called for the granting of rights to minority groups, including suffrage for women. He also anticipated a number of obstacles which, even after women were granted the right to vote, would hinder their achievement of equality. In the article, Petra¿ycki’s concepts are confronted with the results of contemporary research on women’s participation in politics.

Feminism and the Servant Problem: Class and Domestic Labour in the Women's Suffrage Movement

Feminism and the Servant Problem: Class and Domestic Labour in the Women's Suffrage Movement

Peace on Our Terms: The Global Battle for Women's Rights after the First World War

Peace on Our Terms: The Global Battle for Women's Rights after the First World War

Freedom As and Against Democracy

Freedom As and Against Democracy

The Ohio Women's Suffrage and Temperance Movements: Public Image, Cross-Group Contention, and Shared Enemies

The Ohio Women's Suffrage and Temperance Movements: Public Image, Cross-Group Contention, and Shared Enemies

Costa Rica (1821–2021): De la independencia a su bicentenario

Costa Rica (1821–2021): De la independencia a su bicentenario

Valdosta State University's Odum Library & Women's & Gender Studies Program Receive Grant for Women's Suffrage Book Discussion Project

Valdosta State University's Odum Library & Women's & Gender Studies Program Receive Grant for Women's Suffrage Book Discussion Project

Women’s Rebellion to Find Voices in Enola Holmes

Directed by Harry Bradbeer, Enola Holmes (2020) portrays a 16-year-old girl who searches for her mother who disappeared while fighting for women’s rights to vote. In this movie, Victorian women are bound by a law that forbids them from having the right to vote. This article aims to identify and describe women’s rebellion in their struggle for voices in the Victorian era. Employing Bartlett's rebellious feminism within a feminist perspective of John Stuart Mill, the article analyses how Eudoria Holmes, a female character, undergoes dangerous ways in attempt to fight for women's rights to vote. Using the script and cinematographical elements, the film analysis reveals that Eudoria Holmes rebels against the values of Victorian society on three levels: individual, familial, and societal. Becoming an independent and courageous mother, she plants the seeds of rebellion to her daughter, Enola Holmes. Moreover, Eudoria also establishes a secretive women’s circle to build solidarity with the purposes of social and political activism in the form of women's suffrage campaigns.