Many of the most-cited pieces in the comparative politics literature on democratization ignore or footnote women’s enfranchisement in democracies, using definitions of democracy focused instead on “universal” male suffrage. When they consider women’s enfranchisement, they theorize that it occurs for simplistic reasons like economic development, women’s rising employment, or a largesse that occurs at the conclusion of wars. Forging the Franchise is an important corrective to this narrowness and one that should be read by all comparative scholars interested in understanding the causes and historical processes that explain democratization.
Dawn Teele begins with a cross-national analysis of economic development, women’s employment, and war in explaining the enfranchisement of women and shows that these explanations do not actually explain it well. Arguing that democratization is best understood when one looks holistically at the extension of democratic rights to all groups, she divides countries into those that extended suffrage to all populations at once and others that took the slow road to democratization, extending the franchise to additional groups at different times. In this latter group of countries, democratization may be even more difficult, because existing elites are only likely to extend the franchise in situations where they find it advantageous; that is, when they face high competition and extending the franchise helps them consolidate power. Women’s movements can influence this calculus by mobilizing in ways that provide information to political elites that women will support them; however, such mobilizing strategies are difficult, because they often require organizing in ways that cross deep-seated cleavages such as class, race, or ethnic boundaries. These are difficult boundaries to cross, given that women’s suffrage activists, like their male counterparts, identify with their own class, race, ethnic or religious groups, creating barriers to cross-cleavage mobilization.
To demonstrate the power of this theory, Teele provides three in-depth case studies—the United Kingdom, the United States, and France—to illustrate her argument. Each is analyzed using a combination of historical process tracing and original data analysis that demonstrates the validity of key hypotheses. It is difficult to overstate the richness of the analysis, even in well-mined areas like the enfranchisement of women in the United States. In the U.S. case, for example, Teele collects a few key original measures—such as the strength of urban political machines and Woman’s Christian Temperance Union membership—thereby expanding the data on women’s suffrage in ways that will aid future scholars of this period.
In each of these cases, Teele discusses how her general theory operates within the country’s specific historical context. In the United Kingdom, she argues that universal suffrage was extended because of a strategic alliance created between the National Union (one of the women’s suffrage organizations) and the Labour Party. Although most stories of women’s enfranchisement in the United Kingdom focus on the Pankhursts and their dramatic protests, Teele argues instead that the key to suffrage was the lesser-known National Union, which provided important resources to the Labour Party at a crucial time when they were beginning to contest more parliamentary seats. This alliance led the Labour Party to focus on universal adult suffrage rather than manhood suffrage, which they were able to promote during the grand coalition in World War I. Although many historical accounts of women’s enfranchisement also highlight the role of Liberal politicians, Teele shows that Liberals were not strongly committed to this policy.
According to Teele, France represents the opposite case, in which political elites had little incentive to enfranchise women, despite a clear willingness to engage in other reforms that advanced democracy. Radicals were wary of women voters—believing they would vote for the monarchy and the church—and women’s organizations did little to contest that assumption. France’s fragile history with democratic institutions that devolved into dictatorships heightened this concern. But using an astute analysis of the 1919 vote on womanhood suffrage, Teele demonstrates that Radical deputies in highly competitive and religious districts were the ones who abandoned women’s enfranchisement.
Teele’s analysis of the United States leverages the ability of individual states to determine women’s enfranchisement. She begins by demonstrating that, although more states under Republican Party control adopted suffrage than those under Democratic control, this simply reflected Republican domination of the political map during the period. Third-party competition played a significant role: women were enfranchised where the major political parties faced stiff competition and hoped women would bolster their party strength. Important to women’s enfranchisement was the activity of suffrage activists who strategically organized in reaction to salient political cleavages of race, ethnicity, nativity, and class by building the movement across these lines and framing the suffrage issue to encourage parties to see women voters as a stalwart of the status quo. Although the argument that political competition makes a difference is not new in the United States (e.g., Corrine McConnaughy, The Woman Suffrage Movement in America: A Reassessment, 2013), Teele’s focus on the difficulties of gaining suffrage in the Northeast where political machines held sway provides a fresh perspective on this well-studied case and adds a new level of generalizability to her comparative perspective.
There are places, however, where additional analysis would have strengthened her argument. In the French case, Teele does not dive deeply into the reasons why suffrage activists did not mobilize across political cleavages, although such cross-cleavage mobilization was strategically important in the other cases. In the U.S. case, she emphasizes that progressive culture or Prohibition forces did not influence women’s enfranchisement, but she devotes less space to examining the role of third parties like the Progressives in creating political competition. Moreover, despite efforts to trace the historical phases of the U.S. suffrage movement from the mid-1800s onward, the story of the strategic activities of the women’s movement in pushing for the Nineteenth Amendment or in increasing political competition is absent. But in the end these are minor points in an otherwise careful and convincing analysis.
In this review I emphasized Teele’s contributions to the comparative literature on democratization, because scholars in that area are most in need of her perspective and yet are least likely to use her work. But Teele also has much to say to gender scholars of women’s representation or women’s movements. Her ability to incorporate the cleavage literature into a gender analysis and her sensitivity to gender’s intersectionality with race and class are exemplary. She also strikes the perfect balance between those of us who take a more movement-oriented approach and those who focus on political elites, showing the multiple ways that political elites’ decision-making might be influenced by movement mobilization.
Teele concludes her book by noting the generalizability of her theory to other extensions of the franchise, such as to blacks in South Africa and the United States, and by calling on comparative scholars working on democratization to take off their narrow blinders and expand their definitions and theories of democratization to incorporate the enfranchisement not just of women, but also of other excluded groups. Democratization scholars would do well to heed this call, particularly because Teele’s book demonstrates so successfully how doing so can enrich our understanding of the democratization process.
