100 Years of Womens Suffrage
100 Years of
Womens Suffrage
A University of Illinois Press Anthology
Compiled by
DAWN DURANTE
Introduction by Nancy A. Hewitt
2019 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved
This anthology was compiled with the assistance of Alison Syring.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Durante, Dawn, editor | Hewitt, Nancy A., 1951 author of introduction.
Title: 100 years of womens suffrage : a University of Illinois Press anthology / edited by Dawn Durante ; introduction by Nancy A. Hewitt.
Other titles: One hundred years of womens suffrage
Description: Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019021437 (print) | LCCN 2019981530 (ebook) | ISBN 9780252042928 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780252084744 (paperback) | ISBN 9780252051784 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH : WomenPolitical activityUnited StatesHistory. | WomenSuffrageUnited StatesHistory. | FeminismUnited StatesHistory. | Womens rightsUnited StatesHistory.
Classification: LCC HQ 1236.5. U 6 A 17 2019 (print) | LCC HQ 1236.5. U 6 (ebook) | DDC 305.420973dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019021437
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019981530
CONTENTS
Nancy A. Hewitt
Ellen Carol DuBois
Andrea G. Radke-Moss
Mary Chapman and Barbara Green
Lady Constance Lytton
Kimberly Jensen
Laura L. Behling
Julie A. Gallagher
Nancy A. Hewitt
Carolyn Daniels
Bonnie Thornton Dill
Leonie Huddy, Erin Cassese, and Mary-Kate Lizotte
M. Margaret Conway
PREFACE
Publications by the University of Illinois Press (UIP) over the last several decades have contributed to the project of illuminating key figures and diverse types of work across gender, race, and class that contributed to the suffrage movement and to womens voting issues. In the pages of this anthology, you will find interesting and influential pieces on womens suffrage that have appeared between the covers of previously publishe UIP books. I have approached this project as a curator, assembling previously published pieces that are valuable on their own, but that also work cohesively among the other piecesor so I hope. As with any curatorial project, there are constraints. Were there no limitation on time, resources, copyright, or length, I know there are many other pieces that could have easily augmented this volume. Luckily, though, those important works are all out in the world, in libraries and on bookshelves and e-readers, and I hope you will seek them out.
This project arose with the simple realization that 2020 and the centennial of the womens vote was nearing, and that the University of Illinois Press has a legacy of publishing works on this history. That simple realization led to the much larger task of this book, which is the model of a collaborative effort across the Presss many departments. Particularly, Alison Syring took on the essential tasks of reviewing permissions, gathering files, and coordinating groundwork for this volumes publicationher support on this project transitioned a work in progress to a reality. The Press and I also owe a debt of gratitude to Nancy Hewitt, whose development advice and introduction are a gift to this volume, UIP, and discussions of womens suffrage. Her involvement in this book has been a great honor.
The chapters in this collection represent scholarship from different disciplines over a range of years. These reproductions of previously published material do not always reflect current conventions and terminology, but do give a sense of how the field of womens studies has developed. There is an obvious inconsistency in how authors refer to the very topic of the anthology itself. For the title and original materials, this volume uses the term womens suffrage.
As you turn the pages of this book, I think we are right to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment. I also think we must recognize the great work that is left to do and that is being done to extend all forms of equality and acceptance to marginalized and underrepresented groups throughout the world. As we know well, the equal right to vote, to marry, to immigrate, to religious freedom, does not mean equal or equitable treatment. While many pieces in this volume serve as a celebration of the centennial of an important landmark, other essays serve to remind us there is always more work to be done.
Introduction
NANCY A. HEWITT
This volume captures the long history of womens suffrage in the United States through intricate snapshots of key developments. The dozen articles gathered here illuminate the views and experiences of diverse groups of women suffragists as well as the wider political and cultural debates that their campaigns inspired. American politicians, journalists, and even some scholars point to the 1920 ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as the dawn of female enfranchisement. However, that claim obscures as much as it reveals. In fact, millions of women across the United States voted before 1920, and millions more were denied the right to vote after 1920. In addition, the national stage was only one arena in which women fought for first-class citizenship. In the 1830s and 1840s, women pressured churches, reform societies, and state governments to grant them the ballot. From the 1860s on, battles over local, state, territorial, and federal suffrage transformed the social and cultural as well as political landscape in the United States and reverberated with sister movements in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Finland, China, and other countries.
As campaigns for womens votes gained strength in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, suffragists faced hostility, ridicule, imprisonment, and forced feeding and were attacked as blue stockings, freaks, and sexual inverts. Rather than being silenced, however, suffragists escalated their efforts by staging mass marches, public protests, hunger strikes, and other spectacles in hopes of gaining publicity and support. The ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment on August 26, The articles collected here address the significance of these campaigns both before and after ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment as well as womens efforts to turn voting rights into political power. They introduce readers to crucial issuesof ideology and tactics, religion and race, sexuality and culturethat marked the battle for enfranchisement and to additional issuesgender unity and disunity and the gender gapthat arose as women entered the electoral arena en masse.
Although Abigail Adams begged her husband to remember the ladies in 1776 when John Adams was helping to forge a new compact of government for the rebellious colonies, it was several decades before groups of American women consistently pressed for the right to vote. Many of these requestssometimes stated as demandsemerged independently, but by the 1860s, the idea of enfranchising women had gained widespread attention if not support. As Ellen Carol DuBois argues in , a path-breaking article from 1975, the radical character of womens suffrage lay in advocates focus on the public sphere, and particularly on citizenship and their demand for a kind of power and connection with the social order not based on the institution of the family and their [womens] subordination within it. DuBois also claims that the exclusion of women from participation in political life in the early nineteenth century was so absolute and unchallenged that it did not require explicit proscription.
