Although the historiography of American women’s suffrage has expanded significantly over the last several years, most historians still typically center their attention on the supposed heart of the suffrage movement: its leadership and strategies in the eastern half of the United States. However, a comprehensive understanding of the suffrage movement and its complexities requires the acceptance that it was not limited to the northeastern United States. In Uprising: How Women Used the US West to Win the Right to Vote, Tiffany Lewis, an associate professor of rhetoric and communication, seeks to disrupt this traditional narrative by focusing on the history of women’s suffrage in the American West. By doing so, she hopes to explain how the West influenced the national movement, specifically through rhetoric, visuals, and regionalism. Lewis reminds readers that the suffrage movement’s first victories occurred in the West, where, she argues, it took advantage of “the region’s fluid politics, women’s innovative agitation tactics, and suffragists’ coalitions with other reform movements” (xx).

Using the American West as a vehicle to propel suffrage meant confronting stereotypes of the mythic West. Suffragists navigated the region’s positive and negative connotations with methods gleaned from the era’s many reform movements, learning to communicate through popular means such as maps, cartoons, and parades. Examining the suffrage movement through popular perceptions about the American West, Lewis also shows how suffragist rhetoric and tactics evolved over time. Although suffragists initially embraced the American fascination with the mythological western frontier, Lewis argues that “eventually, suffragists used their civilized image of the West to imply that the region’s civilization and voting rights were spreading east, just as the United States expanded west from the Atlantic to the Pacific” (xxx).

Lewis’s book is organized chronologically. It begins with an analysis of Abigail Scott Duniway, Oregon’s famous suffragist who “appealed to turn-of-the-century American’s fascination with the West by leveraging the frontier myth as a regional rhetoric to champion voting rights” (4). Looking at Duniway’s work between 1885 and 1905, Lewis writes that she fed into the myth of the frontier West to demonstrate the toughness of white western women who had civilized the region and had therefore proven themselves worthy of voting rights. In her next chapter, Lewis examines the influence of maps as visual arguments for the suffrage movement. “Duniway’s West was exception for its mythic heroes, frontier heroines, and inherent freedom,” Lewis argues, but suffrage maps, which depicted the West as more civilized than the East, “envisioned the East as barbaric and uncivilized—the nation’s new frontier” (62).

Lewis also explores how anti-suffragists responded to suffrage successes in the American West. Although anti-suffragists had been fighting the suffrage movement throughout much of the nineteenth century—and especially during the 1890s, when activists began winning western states—Lewis nevertheless limits her analysis to the years between 1903 and 1919. While Lewis does not sufficiently explain or adequately justify why she chose those dates, she nevertheless demonstrates how anti-suffragists attempted to associate the tide of suffrage across the West to the region’s supposed barbarism and underdevelopment. Lewis writes that the anti-suffragists “portrayed the West as moving backward in their social progress, being dragged toward barbarism by the existence of woman suffrage” (93). Hoping to demonstrate that the region was still the wild frontier that Americans in the East thought it to be, anti-suffragists employed racial tropes and civilizational discourses in an attempt to stem the western advance of suffrage.

Helen Ring Robinson, Colorado’s first woman state senator, and Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress, would campaign for women’s suffrage “by performing traditional white femininity and constructing women’s political participation as a fulfillment of their uniquely feminine roles” (99). Both Robinson and Rankin had long activist careers, but Lewis focuses on the years from 1913 to 1918 when Robinson and Rankin were embarking on their elected political careers and speaking explicitly on behalf of the suffrage movement. Lewis argues that by then, western suffragists had moved beyond the rhetorical strategies of Duniway and other western suffragists who had, during the late nineteenth century, still promoted the “traditional image of the West as a mythic frontier” (124). By the second decade of the twentieth century, Robinson and Rankin had embraced a more modern American West, a West of economic development and technological advancement. Lewis’s emphasis on this rhetorical pivot concludes with the recounting of a transcontinental suffragist car trip. The West-to-East journey, made in 1915, evoked not just a traditional frontier mythology of women who had won the vote and civilized the West but also a reversed eastern trek in which western women would help bring civilization to the “disfranchised women of the East” (162). Indeed, Lewis argues, western suffragists “imagined the US East as the new mythic frontier to conquer for women’s voting rights” (129).

There is no doubt that Tiffany Lewis’s Uprising is a valuable and necessary contribution to the historiography surrounding women’s suffrage in the United States. Not simply recounting popular rhetoric or recreating suffrage cartoons, Lewis explains how the movement’s strategies proved so important and impactful. Moreover, as Lewis explores the western movement’s various strategies and approaches, she acknowledges the movement’s racial limits. She reminds readers that the women’s suffrage movement in the West was largely white, and she frequently explores the racial rhetoric surrounding western suffrage battles—particularly how white suffragists excluded nonwhite women from the movement and how both suffragists and anti-suffragists mixed ideas of race and civilization together in their many appeals.

Overall, however, Lewis’s contribution is a simple and essential reminder of the geographical variety and persistent regionalism of the suffrage movement. Above all, like Rebecca Mead in her work How the Vote Was Won (2004), Lewis reminds readers of the central role western women played in the success of the women’s suffrage movement.Footnote ²