Women's Suffrage Research Articles

“I Do Not Mean to Frown on Everything the Men Propose”

California’s first four assemblywomen began their historic tenure in 1919 in the state’s Forty-Third Session of the Legislature. They joined a growing number of women elected to state legislatures before ratification of the federal suffrage amendment. Entitled to run for office when enfranchised by the state in 1911, and elected in 1918, Esto Broughton (Stanislaus County), Grace Dorris (Kern County), Elizabeth Hughes (Butte County), and Anna Saylor (Alameda County) challenged the all-male exclusivity of the legislature by creating political space for women’s equal inclusion and bringing the value of their diversity as women into lawmaking. Intersectionality informs this history, because assemblywomen’s status as white, middle-class women enabled them to ally with men of similar status and to focus on progress for women of their race and class. Contributing to the history of early women in elective politics, and drawing on newspaper and state legislative records, this article explores how the assemblywomen downplayed their gender in self-presentation but focused on it in legislation. The first four women, moreover, voted on two amendments to the U.S. Constitution, beginning the legislative session with ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment and concluding the year with a vote for the Nineteenth Amendment. Their efforts as California’s first legislators solidified the value of women’s diversity in the legislature and, by voting to extend woman suffrage nationwide, they ensured women’s continued inclusion in elective politics.

Dutch students’ understanding of the interpretative nature of textbooks when comparing two texts about a significant event in the development of democracy

In history education, the deconstruction of narratives is an important skill for students. The skill teaches them to look critically at the offered texts. In this study, we investigated the extent to which students are able to critically analyse the narratives in their history textbooks. To answer this question, we asked 106 students in pre-university education (16–17 years of age) to read and compare two texts – from two different textbooks – about a turning point in the development of the Dutch state and democracy: the introduction of universal suffrage for men and women in 1917–19. One group of students (N=10) worked on the assignment while thinking aloud. We found that most students recognized the author’s voice in the selection of persons and dates and in the attention paid to a particular topic, but that they hardly mentioned recognizing the voice in aspects such as the choice of words or headings. The students who analysed and compared the texts while thinking aloud all indicated after the assignment that they understood that these texts are different interpretations of the same historical development.

The Philosophy of Black Lives Matter

The Philosophy of Black Lives Matter

Suffrage during the Pandemics of 1918 and 2020

In October 1918, a suffragist named Florence Huberwald declared to the New Orleans Times-Picayune: “Everything conspires against woman suffrage” (“Influenza,” 1918). That month, she and many other activists watched as the number of flu cases in the United States rose. When I encountered her quote in April 2020, I could relate to her experience in a way that I could not have imagined a few months before. Huberwald had plans, and she saw them collapsing. I, too, had plans, but fellow scholars, ...

A Right to Ourselves: Women's Suffrage and the Birth Control Movement—ERRATUM

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Interventions in Native American communities during an era of assimilation

ABSTRACT This “From the Archives” article provides the texts of two articles on Native Americans written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The first, Alice C. Fletcher’s speech on “The Legal Condition of Indian Women,” appeared on pp. 237-241 of the Report of the International Council of Women, March 25 to April 1, 1888 ,published by the National Woman Suffrage Association, Washington, D.C., in 1888. The second, Gertrude Bonnin’s report of “A Year’s Experience in Community Service Work Among the Ute Tribe of Indians,” appeared in the American Indian Magazine, vol. 4, no. 4 (October-December 1916), pp. 307-310.

Stunts and Sensationalism: The Pennsylvania Progressive Era Campaign for Women’s Suffrage

ABSTRACT Drawing on biographies of Pennsylvania women active in the National American Woman Suffrage Association, this article explores strategies used by suffragists during the Progressive Era. During Pennsylvania’s 1915 campaign for a state suffrage amendment, supporters participated in several stunts, including suffrage gardens and tour of a replica Liberty Bell. Despite the failure of the amendment to win the vote for women, the experiences of campaigning in 1915 and up to 1919 functioned as a training ground for the first generation of women to fully participate in the political life of Pennsylvania.

“Rung it Never can be Until All Women are Free”: Katharine Wentworth Ruschenberger and the Justice Bell

ABSTRACT This article traces the origin, creation, and use of the Justice Bell, a replica of the Liberty Bell that was cast for a statewide tour in support of the 1915 Pennsylvania referendum on woman’s suffrage. Suffragists used the image of the Liberty Bell well before 1915, connecting its symbolism of freedom to the suffrage cause. After the unsuccessful 1915 campaign, the bell was used for national suffrage events, patriotic fundraising, and get-out-the-vote campaigns. Katharine Wentworth Ruschenberger commissioned and paid for the bell and retained ownership of it until her death. The post-1915 use of the bell reflects the shift in her suffrage affiliation from the more traditional National American Woman Suffrage Association to the radical National Woman’s Party.

Women Physicians and the Suffrage Movement.

Women physicians have a long history of advocacy, dating to the 19th century women's suffrage movement. As history recounts the work of the suffragists, many women physicians bear mention. Some were leaders on the national scene, and others led suffrage efforts in their own state. In this article, we provide a snapshot of 7 prominent suffragists who were also physicians: Mary Edwards Walker, Mary Putnam Jacobi, Esther Pohl Lovejoy, Marie Equi, Mattie E. Coleman, Cora Smith Eaton, and Caroline E. Spencer. In sharing their stories, we hope to better understand some of the challenges and struggles of the suffrage movement and how their advocacy paved the way not only for women's voting rights but also the role of women physicians as advocates for change.

“The Right of Suffrage Has Been Thrust on Me”: The Reluctant Suffragists of the American West

AbstractFrom nearly the moment the woman's suffrage movement began at Seneca Falls in 1848, anti-suffragists actively campaigned against it, claiming that woman suffrage would only destroy both American politics and the American family. However, despite their best efforts, states in the American West passed equal suffrage laws. Interestingly, once it passed in their states, anti-suffragists in the American West—albeit begrudgingly—exercised their right to vote. As equal suffrage continued to expand, the Western anti-suffragist strategy became the strategy of anti-suffragists everywhere. This essay examines three states that represent pivotal moments in the development of the anti-suffrage movement: Colorado, California, and Oklahoma. Shortly after Colorado passed equal suffrage in 1893 and California passed equal suffrage in 1911, anti-suffragists organized state and national associations. By the time Oklahoma passed its equal suffrage law in 1918, anti-suffragists were not only voting—they were also willing to run for office. Anti-suffragist strategy and rhetoric relied on how suffrage worked in the West, or at least anti-suffrage perceptions of it. In other words, women's suffrage in the West served as a catalyst for the anti-suffragist movement.

The Politics of Commemorating the Woman Suffrage Movement in New York City: On the Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument

This article traces the commission, design, and public reception for New York City’s Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument as a case study for the contentious politics of monument-building. The Central Park statue—as of this writing, not yet realized—has followed a protracted, frequently contested path since its conception in 2015. It was originally designed to depict women’s rights activists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton for the centennial anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment. What began as an initially well-received initiative to correct the gender imbalance in the city’s public art became mired in controversy amid the politically charged atmosphere of the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency. I argue that, while the polarity of contemporary politics amplified the statue’s controversy, the tensions at play are the product of more than 170 years of conflicts inherent in the progressive activism of the American woman suffrage movement and commemorations of it.

Immigrant Declarants and Loyal American Women: How Suffragists Helped Redefine the Rights of Citizens

AbstractAs a result of the woman suffrage movement, citizenship and voting rights, though considered separate issues by the courts, became more intertwined in the mind of the average American. This interconnectedness was also a product of the concurrent movement to disfranchise immigrant declarant voters—immigrants who had filed their intention to become citizens but had not completed the naturalization process. This essay shows how suffragists pursued immigrant declarant disfranchisement as part of the woman suffrage movement, arguing that the same competitive political conditions that encouraged politicians to enfranchise primarily white, citizen women led them to disfranchise immigrant declarants. It analyzes suffragists’ arguments at both the state and national levels that voting was a right of citizens who had met their wartime obligations to the nation, and maintains that woman suffrage and the votes of white women who supported the measures disfranchising immigrant declarants and limiting immigrant rights should be included in historians’ understanding of the immigration restrictionist and nativist movements.

A Right to Ourselves: Women's Suffrage and the Birth Control Movement

AbstractThe suffrage and birth control movements are often treated separately in historical scholarship. This essay brings together new research to demonstrate their close connections. Many suffragists became active in the birth control movement just before and after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. The roots of suffrage arguments were deeply embedded in the same ideas that were foundational to the birth control movement: bodily freedom and notions of what constituted full and participatory citizenship. Beginning in the 1840s, women's rights reformers directly connected the vote to a broad range of economic and political issues, including the concept of self-ownership. Wide-ranging debates about individual autonomy remained present in women's rights rhetoric and were then repeated in the earliest arguments for legalizing birth control. The twentieth-century birth control movement, like the suffrage movement before it (which had largely focused only on achieving the vote for white women), would then grapple with competing goals of restrictive racist and eugenic arguments for contraception alongside the emphasis on achieving emancipation for all women.

A Crowdsourcing Approach to Revitalizing Scholarship on Black Women Suffragists

AbstractThis article draws on a collection of crowdsourced biographical sketches of Black women suffragists to explore the contributions of these activists to the expansion of voting rights that accompanied the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. It explores the motivations and strategies adopted by Black women suffragists and interracial alliances that emerged in the course of the suffrage struggle, comparing and contrasting the experiences of suffragists across racial lines.

One Hundred Years of Women's Suffrage: Health Care Advocacy, and Why We Vote.

In recognition of the 100 anniversary of women's suffrage, we reviewed the difficulties reformists overcame in passing the 19th Amendment and discuss the similarities to current challenges in providing evidence-based, affordable, accessible women's health care. Many current health care problems arise from systemic, not medical, issues, and we can better focus on them through the lenses of the social determinants of health and reproductive justice. Addressing systemic inadequacies and injustices requires policy implementation and legislative activism, like that pursued by the suffragists. We propose that, ultimately, voting is our professional, fundamental duty to make the desired changes. We then present advocacy avenues and opportunities available to all women's health care specialists.

Commemorating a whole story of woman suffrage

ABSTRACT To tell the whole story of the struggle for woman suffrage, we need to begin the story well before 1848 and continue it long after 1920. For those teaching about woman suffrage, this essay offers resources that enable you to situate the 19th Amendment within a richer narrative of woman suffrage.

The organic crisis of Internationalism and the challenge of remembering alternative futures: Woman suffrage, parliamentarism, and anti-colonial critique in the Communist International

ABSTRACT The function and meaning of voting can vary across political systems. Despite its diffusion as a norm alongside the global spread of political liberalism in the post-colonial period, women's franchise continues to expose key fault lines in the foundations of democratic theory. Recalling the Third Comintern's debates and activities in the aftermath of World War I, this paper explores how gender organized the left's critiques of bourgeois parliamentarism and its imperial tendencies in the early twentieth century. It draws particular attention to how, in the context of global anti-capitalist and anti-colonial struggles, the woman suffrage issue juxtaposed the promises and premises of bourgeois and proletarian internationalism, the democratic potential and limits of electoral systems and their political alternative, the soviet. From these experiences, this paper highlights the radical challenge that gender poses to the development of alternative democratic imaginations.

“Whores” and “Hottentots”: Protection of (white) women and white supremacy in anti-suffrage rhetoric

ABSTRACT Through an analysis of anti-suffrage arguments, I identify white supremacist tropes as an important strand in woman suffrage debates. I argue that sexualization and themes of home were signals to racial bias, and American womanhood was used as a rhetorical resource in struggles over race and national identity. As we celebrate the centennial of woman suffrage, it is vital to recognize how debates over women in national space participate in white supremacist logics.

The centennial of (white) woman suffrage: Gender and democratic engagement at the intersections

ABSTRACT The centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment offers an opportunity to write a new story about women’s democratic engagement. The goal of this issue is to honor women’s democratic labor while disturbing the generic features of the typical suffrage story, considering, in particular, how suffrage and citizenship have affected and been engaged by women with diverse identities situated at various intersections. In the pages that follow, leading experts and new voices trouble temporalities, extend the cast of protagonists, and reconsider objectives, creating an expansive, contradictory, and intentionally untidy narrative.

2019-2020: Celebrating the 100th Anniversary of the American Women’s Right to Vote

The article deals with one of the most significant achievements in the history of American women – the right to vote. The 19th amendment guarantees all American women the right to vote. Achieving this milestone required lengthy and difficult struggle; it took decades to achieve victory through agitation and protest. The article discusses how in the beginning in the mid-19th century several generations of woman suffrage supporters lectured, wrote, marched, lobbied and practiced civil disobedience to achieve what many Americans considered a radical change of the Constitution. Few early supporters lived to see the final victory in 1920.Keywords: Voting Rights, Women’s Suffrage Movement, 19th Amendment, 100th Anniversary