Stacie Taranto - Suffrage at 100: Women in American Politics since 1920

1. STACIE TARANTO AND LEANDRA ZARNOW
2. STACIE TARANTO AND LEANDRA ZARNOW
3. Womens Political Engagement in the Decades after Suffrage, 1920s1950s
4. The National Womans Party and the Politics of Memory in the 1920s
5. CLAIRE DELAHAYE
6. The Nineteenth Amendment, Southern African American Women, and the Problem of Female Disenfranchisement after 1920
7. LIETTE GIDLOW
8. Lessons from the 1930 US Senate Campaign of Ruth Hanna McCormick
9. JOHANNA NEUMAN
10. The Public Discourse of Widows in Office, 19201940
11. KATHERINE PARKIN
12. Mary Elizabeth Switzer at the Federal Security Agency, 19391945
13. DEAN J. KOTLOWSKI
14. HOLLY MIOWAK GUISE
15. The Womens Committee for Educational Freedom and the Gendered Battle for Liberalism in the 1940s
16. NANCY BECK YOUNG
17. The Gender Ideology of Presidential Campaigns, 19401956
18. MELISSA ESTES BLAIR
19. Reform and Reaction, 1960s1980s
20. Celebrating Political Action, Womens History, and Feminist Intellectuals in Ms. Magazine, 19721984
21. ANA STEVENSON
22. Louise Day Hicks, and the Politics of Race, Class, and Gender, 19631975
23. KATHLEEN BANKS NUTTER
24. The Legacy of Suffrage and Citizenship Engagement
25. BARBARA WINSLOW
26. Patsy Takemoto Mink and Pacific Feminism
27. JUDY TZU-CHUN WU
28. SARAH B. ROWLEY
29. Jeane J. Kirkpatrick and Global Diplomacy
30. BIANCA ROWLETT
31. Women in Politics, 1990s2010s
32. Feminism, Womanhood, and the 2008 Presidential Election
33. EMILY SUZANNE JOHNSON
34. How Feminist History Became a Reference Point in the 2016 Election
35. NICOLE EATON
36. The Scholarship of Chicana Political Leadership and Activism
37. MARISELA R. CHVEZ
38. Georgia Women and Politics in the Trump Era
39. ELLEN G. RAFSHOON
40. Monument Debates in the Era of the Suffrage Centennial
41. MONICA L. MERCADO
42. EILEEN BORIS

STACIE TARANTO and LEANDRA ZARNOW

I INTEND TO take the cause of womenAmericas oppressed majorityto the halls of Congress. Antiwar grassroots organizer Bella Abzug delivered this promise in 1970 as a Democratic congressional candidate from New York City. Abzug had spent much of the last decade chasing down the halls and buttonholing Congressmen as a lobbyist for Women Strike for Peace.

Halfway across the country in southern Illinois, Phyllis Schlaflya longtime conservative Republican activist who would become the face of antifeminism in the coming yearswas also mounting a bid for the US House of Representatives in 1970. She too emphasized the need for more women in politics. But rather than link that desire to liberal and increasingly feminist policy proposals, as Abzug did, Schlafly argued that greater female political representation could boost conservative Republican priorities, such as reducing federal social spending and expanding defense. As the economy strained from global market shocks and domestic deindustrialization, Schlafly declared, Women do the family spending. They are more careful with other peoples money and better at getting a dollars value for every dollar spent.

At a time when the two major parties were gravitating away from the center and becoming more polarized, female activists on both the grassroots Left and Right tried to justify womens place in the overwhelmingly male political world by leaning into that growing partisan divideclaiming new space for women in the process. In a few years, Abzug and Schlafly would be squaring off against each other to debate the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution and the merits of feminism more broadly. Yet they agreed in one respect: politics had long been a male pursuit sorely in need of more women, particularly those who shared their respective policy priorities.

It is telling that both Abzug and Schlafly made womens limited representation in public office part of their congressional campaigns in 1970the year that marked the fiftieth anniversary of womens suffrage. The issue of gender parity in politics remains unresolved as we mark the one hundredyear anniversary in 2020. Women have remained outsiders in American politics and American political history since achieving the constitutional right to vote with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Looking at the US Congress, the increase in women elected in most campaign cycles since women got the vote has been one or two percentage points, and before 1981, the total number of women serving in Congress in any given session never extended beyond twenty. While Schlafly did not win her House bid in 1970, Abzug did as one of fifteen women in Congress. This bipartisan cohort tried to break through the old boys club on Capitol Hill but found the resistance to their structural challenge palpable. Congresswomen experienced difficulty convincing male legislators to take their expertise seriously in areas not related to women and children. Congresswomens internal reform and policy proposals were buoyed by a mass feminist movement that ushered forth new legal rights for women in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Yet, feminist organizing focused on the political arena did not ultimately translate into equal female representation in politics at any level.