Seneca Falls is inextricable from the limitations of nineteenth and early twentieth-century progressivism. And by continuing to foreground it, we leave ourselves little room to create new founding stories that might better address the challenges of the twenty-first century.
–Lisa Tetrault, 2014Footnote 1When Aileen Kraditors's The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 first appeared in 1965, women's history had not yet emerged as an academic specialty, and scholarly accounts of U.S. history rarely considered women as appropriate subjects for study.Footnote 2 Apart from Eleanor Flexner's Century of Struggle: The Woman's Rights Movement in the United States (1959), which Kraditor herself characterized as “very fine” (xi), Kraditor had little published scholarship upon which to build.Footnote 3 Today there are dozens of full-length studies on the history of suffrage, hundreds on the history of woman's rights and political activities more generally.Footnote 4 Scholars have now extensively examined subjects that Kraditor could barely scratch the surface of—such as suffrage movements in the South and the West, antisuffragism among women, and black women's political activism. Moreover, new approaches and perspectives have also emerged, including work that has interrogated how our current understandings of suffrage history owe substantial debts to historical memories purposefully crafted in the aftermath of Reconstruction.Footnote 5 Kraditor turned up a prodigious amount of unanalyzed primary-source material, out of which she created a compelling narrative about the ways that race, immigration, and labor figured into white suffragists’ efforts to enfranchise women during the Progressive Era. Since Kraditor, scholars have located and assembled much more material, assembling the personal papers of dozens of suffragist leaders and participants, publishing anthologies and microfilm collections of their correspondence and speeches, and republishing organizational histories and proceedings.Footnote 6 Paradoxically, the vastly expanded source base has not helped resolve many of the questions that Kraditor first raised, although scholars have gained an even greater appreciation for how complex—and instructive—the history of suffrage truly is.
In recent years, historians have offered many new insights concerning the ways that race, citizenship, imperialism, and memory have informed the processes by which the franchise was extended to specific groups of women in different regions of the country at various times—thus complicating the simplified view that women's struggles to obtain the franchise began with the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 and ended with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.Footnote 7 Although this new scholarship has reached conclusions vastly different from the ones that Kraditor first offered about the ways that racial concerns informed suffrage debates, much of this scholarship is indebted to Kraditor for using what we would today call an “intersectional analysis” of race, class, and gender—twenty years before such jargon was invented—and for framing questions about the interplay between racism and suffragism that continue to illuminate historiographic discussions.
This essay has two main sections. The first section summarizes the central issues that Kraditor brought to scholars' attention, in particular the ways that a political movement devoted to the extension of democracy contained within it antidemocratic elements, as well as how white suffragists articulated egalitarian statements about women's equality alongside racist assertions about white superiority. The second section examines how scholars since Kraditor have responded to these important insights, with some struggling to reconcile this complex and problematic history with a desire to create a usable past for women's ongoing political activism. Although the work of these scholars does not always reference Kraditor's work, the Pandora's box she opened is nonetheless an absent presence—the foundational backdrop to the central themes of suffrage historiography published from the 1970s through the present.
JUSTICE AND EXPEDIENCY; EGALITARIANISM AND RACISM
Aileen Kraditor was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1928. She received her Bachelor's degree from Brooklyn College and her MA and PhD (1963) from Columbia, with William Leuchtenburg serving as her advisor. Based on her dissertation, Ideas (1965) was Kraditor's first monograph. She quickly followed with a second monograph, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and his Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834–1850 (1967). A year later, Kraditor put together a collection of primary-source documents, Up From the Pedestal: Selected Writings in the History of American Feminism (1968)—an anthology whose useful shelf life lasted nearly two decades.Footnote 8
In the mid-to-late 1960s, as she published these early works, Kraditor was one of only a few women—Anne Firor Scott and Gerda Lerner were two others—working in a field that would later be designated “women's history.”Footnote 9 All three scholars launched successful careers slightly ahead of the women's movement. Kraditor began teaching at Rhode Island College before moving to Boston University in 1973. Scott joined Duke University in 1961, where she quickly rose to the ranks of full professor, staying through her retirement in 1991. Lerner taught the first women's history course in the country at the New School for Social Research in New York in 1963, then established programs in U.S. women's history at Long Island College in Brooklyn (1965–1967) and Sarah Lawrence (1968–1979) before leaving to organize a PhD program in women's history at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, where she remained for the rest of her career.
While Lerner and Scott have gained well-deserved reputations for founding and promoting U.S. women's history, Kraditor's relationship to this field is much more complex.Footnote 10 Kraditor never felt comfortable with the label “women's historian,” preferring instead to identify as an “intellectual” or “radical” historian, and her later work did not focus on women or gender.Footnote 11 Moreover, Kraditor became intensely critical of what she considered to be a lack of intellectual rigor in much leftist historiography—not just in women's history, but in U.S. history more generally. In particular, Kraditor abhorred what she considered to be an all-too-common tendency among scholars on the left to selectively choose from the past only those events that they deemed relevant to present-day concerns. She also criticized radical historians for underestimating ideology as an important factor in historical change as well as for an unwillingness to treat seriously the “ideas of the masses”—seeing them “mostly as obstacles to be overcome, illusions to be dispelled.”Footnote 12 In her “Preface to the Norton Edition” of Ideas (1981), Kraditor wrote, “It seems to me that the ideas expressed by articulate women in the past are worthy subjects for a historian to investigate and that we should encourage research in both social and intellectual history…. Unfortunately, a large proportion of the recent literature on women's history has been motivated more by the desire to provide current feminists with a heritage of oppression-plus-achievement than by the desire to find out what happened. It is, consequently, often of poor quality” (viii). Moreover there was some tension between Kraditor and Gerda Lerner, evident by the fact that Kraditor took offense at Lerner's insinuation that by writing about woman suffrage, she (Kraditor) had somehow marginalized other topics.Footnote 13 Nonetheless, in the early 1970s, several women's historians who assessed Kraditor's early works—both Ideas (1965) and Up From the Pedestal (1968)—mentioned her along with Lerner, Scott, and Barbara Welter—as having had a formative influence on the field.Footnote 14
Ideas never crossed over to the trade market, but it has done well as an academic text. The book is still in print and is still cited by historians, sociologists, political scientists, and legal scholars.Footnote 15 Immediately upon its publication, it was reviewed in prominent historical journals, including The American Historical Review, The Journal of American History, The Journal of Southern History, the New England Quarterly, and The Catholic Historical Review. Arthur Mann of Smith College pronounced it a “major contribution” to scholars' understanding of progressive reform in a review that appeared in the Annals of the Academy of Political and Social Science.Footnote 16
Despite offering a generally positive reception, the book's initial reviewers expressed a range of responses to Kraditor's main contention that pro-suffrage arguments were infused with ethnocentric, xenophobic, and antidemocratic sentiments. For some, this finding was not particularly surprising although it was nonetheless noteworthy. As Mann explained, Kraditor had shown how woman suffrage had “merged with the Progressive movement,” its white leaders holding “the typical progressive attitudes toward Negroes, immigrants, the working class, home, state, church, marriage.”Footnote 17 Other scholars were struck by the irony that white women suffragists who were arguing for an expansion of democracy would do so on such “illiberal” grounds. In The New England Quarterly, Elizabeth Bancroft Schlesinger, well known in intellectual circles despite not having an academic appointment, registered the surprise that likely was shared by others who encountered the book as the civil rights movement was gaining momentum. “It seems incredible today,” Schlesinger wrote, “that so many of those doughty champions of the woman suffrage movement could take so illiberal a stand on immigration, the Negro and organized labor, each of which they considered threats to democracy, while at the same time upholding the egalitarian preamble to the Declaration of Independence.”Footnote 18
Finally, although she would later voice criticism of some of Kraditor's arguments, in her initial review of the book, Anne Firor Scott praised Kraditor's “thorough study” of a “complex and disturbing phenomenon” and predicted that it would result in the revising of textbooks, with the result that “the oversimplification on the subject [of woman suffrage] … will quietly fade from sight.”Footnote 19
As scholars at the time recognized, Ideas was a bold and ambitious work, especially for a historian at the beginning of her career. Kraditor herself was keenly aware of the intellectual and methodological challenges she faced in tackling the subject. The political struggles that culminated in the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment spanned scores of years and hundreds of campaigns. By Kraditor's count, there were 480 campaigns to induce state legislatures to submit amendments to their electorates; 277 campaigns to persuade state party conventions to include woman suffrage in their platforms; 55 state referenda to add woman suffrage amendments to state constitutions, and 19 campaigns to convince Congress to pass a constitutional amendment (5).Footnote 20 To reduce this vast subject to something she could handle in a dissertation, Kraditor chose to focus on the leaders of the most prominent suffrage organization during the Progressive Era, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA)—most of whom were Anglo Saxon and Protestant and raised in the North. Kraditor supplemented this group with a few white suffrage leaders from the South who were involved with the NAWSA, women such as Laura Clay of Kentucky and Kate M. Gordon of Louisiana, and she included brief mention of a few black suffrage leaders—in particular, Mary Church Terrell of Washington, DC. Her research involved culling material from thirty-four manuscript collections at nine archives, including the unpublished papers of the four successive presidents of the NAWSA: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Anna Howard Shaw, and Carrie Chapman Catt.Footnote 21
Furthermore, the scope of Kraditor's study extended beyond the goals and strategies of white Anglo Saxon leaders, as she attempted to understand the thinking of the thousands of women who took part in suffrage debates, either for or against the reform. For this purpose, Kraditor relied on published primary-source materials—congressional hearings on suffrage proposals; editorials and news articles that had appeared in suffragist and antisuffragist organs (from Washington DC, New York, and Boston); and hundreds of articles, treatises, and books that advocated for or against suffrage, published between 1890 and 1920.
Today, Kraditor is best known among scholars for offering the terms “justice” and “expediency” to distinguish between two strains of suffragist argumentation, the former of which she associated with the earlier period (1848–1900), and the latter with the Progressive Era (1900–1920) (46). “Justice” arguments, Kraditor wrote, were those that emphasized the natural equality of all human beings and the universal right to the franchise on the grounds of a common humanity (44). Kraditor also referred to these as “natural right” (44, 53) or “egalitarian” arguments (127), and she traced them to suffragists' engagement with the antebellum abolitionist movement. “Expediency” arguments (sometimes referred to by other scholars as “instrumental” or “reform” claims) emphasized how enfranchising women and mothers would benefit society, as women, especially in their maternal role, would use their supposedly greater moral sensibilities and housekeeping skills to improve public morality and reform corrupt institutions, end war, and offer new social services (65–70). Often these claims made explicit reference to racial and class differences and thus functioned as “race-based claims for white women's ballots,” to quote Allison Sneider's succinct restatement of Kraditor's basic insight.Footnote 22
Kraditor's most provocative, controversial (and now discredited) claim was that egalitarian arguments grounded in natural rights philosophy receded during the Progressive Era at the same time that expediency claims became more frequent (73). While Kraditor deplored the shift in argumentation from justice to expediency, she also argued that Anglo Saxon women had succumbed to such tactics because they had had little choice. Herein lay the central meaning of her term “expediency.” White female suffragists who might have previously emphasized the right of all individuals to the franchise (regardless of race, class, immigrant status, and so forth) were finding that “the declining faith in democracy” on the part of Progressives and white male politicians was “becoming an obstacle to women's enfranchisement” (53). “If appeals to the principles of democracy,” Kraditor continued, “fell on deaf ears, then [white middle-class] women seeking the vote would have to use other arguments” (53). In her formulation of this claim, Kraditor sidestepped the question of whether Progressive Era suffragists, in fact, thought differently about race from their nineteenth-century predecessors, or whether they had similar beliefs but saw the futility of using what they now deemed to be ineffective arguments. As Kraditor commented, either these women “shared their men's skepticism as to the capacity of workers and nonwhites for self-government, or they found themselves without alternatives…. [W]hether they shared that skepticism or not, they were forced to use arguments which could find a favorable hearing from the men from whom they sought their political liberty” (53).Footnote 23
Today, almost all specialists reject Kraditor's conceptualization of a divide between the supposed greater prevalence of egalitarian arguments during the nineteenth century and the greater prevalence of expediency arguments in the Progressive Era. In 1993, Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, whose study of white southern women built off Kraditor's foundation, was among the first to note that “a problem with this otherwise excellent study is exaggeration of the difference in suffrage arguments in the years before and after 1890.” My work, published in 1999, rejected the framework altogether, arguing that egalitarianism and racism—that is, a belief in white racial superiority—were fundamentally interconnected. Rebecca Mead, in a landmark study of suffrage in the West (2004), argued pointedly that Kraditor's “neat dichotomy is falsely reductive” as the “political struggle demanded a constant process of negotiation between ‘justice’ and ‘expediency’…[which were] often linked rhetorically as complements, not polarized as opposites.” And in 2008, Allison Sneider, situating various suffrage movements in the context of ongoing debates over U.S. expansion, pinpointed the impact that Kraditor's characterization of moral declension had had on subsequent scholarship. In Sneider's words, “Kraditor's expediency framework has encouraged historians to search for ‘outside factors’ to account for the supposed decline of egalitarian aims,” often describing individual white suffragists' use of racist arguments as “‘opportunistic,’ ‘strategic’ and ‘tactical,’” and thereby constructing racism as an individual failing as opposed to integral to the intellectual traditions of liberalism and republicanism from which these suffragists drew.Footnote 24
Beginning with Theda Skocpol's work in 1995 and extending through Holly McCammon's studies of the early 2000s, sociologists have engaged, and then rejected, Kraditor's arguments on empirical grounds.Footnote 25 In 2004, sociologist McCammon and her colleagues, Lydi Hewitt and Sandy Smith, quantified the use of “justice” and “reform” (their term for “expediency”) arguments used by suffragists between 1866 and 1919 and concluded that “a shift from the justice to the reform frame is not as well defined” as Kraditor had suggested.Footnote 26 To be fair, Kraditor herself was aware that her heuristic schema was not absolute, and she identified exceptions among the younger leaders, singling out Harriot Stanton Blatch in particular for her egalitarianism, while noting that there were those among the older suffragists, notably Harriot's mother, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had earlier mobilized racist and elitist claims.Footnote 27
Still, Kraditor considered these instances exceptions to the larger point that Progressive Era suffragists had had to deal with larger numbers of male citizens whom they deemed inferior to themselves—notably immigrant men, but also African American men whose voting rights had been constitutionally affirmed by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments but were being widely abrogated by state conventions in the 1890s and 1900s. Nor did Kraditor mince words in saying that it was ultimately a shared desire to “insure the supremacy of white Anglo-Saxon Americans against the threatened domination of Negroes and the foreign born” that enabled white suffragists from the North and South to find “common cause” (137). She backed this claim by noting that most of the 150 attendees at a NAWSA convention in 1903 supported an educational qualification meant to extend the franchise to elite white women only, thereby providing a method to offset the votes of formerly enslaved men, which some women felt was a better strategy than removing black men from the franchise altogether by using such methods as poll taxes and grandfather clauses.
Although historians have refuted Kraditor's assertions about the relative prevalence of justice-versus-expediency arguments, many continue to hold to the utility of differentiating between principled (egalitarian) and instrumental (expedient) claims. In the 1980s, women's historians, as well as political theorists and philosophers, explored how classic liberal arguments about individual rights assumed a male subject and thus made no accommodations for the gender differences of female citizens.Footnote 28 The shift in focus to what was called “equality-versus-difference” arguments was part of historians' efforts to understand how suffragists could argue that women were both equal to men and different from men, given how contradictory this combination appeared to scholars who had come of age with second-wave feminism and who were accustomed to associating difference with discrimination. As historians now realize, arguing that women were equal and different from men were not antithetical positions in either the nineteenth century or the Progressive Era.Footnote 29 Nor was this argument solely the domain of suffragists. As Anastatia Sims has perceptively noted, “although neither side would admit it, antis and suffragists grappled with the same dilemma: how could they assert women's equality with men while simultaneously celebrating the differences between the sexes?”Footnote 30 In other words, suffragists and antisuffragists alike acclaimed the supposed moral superiority of women and their greater skill, or innate ability, as homemakers and nurturers, with suffragists asserting the political usefulness and value of these attributes, even while bemoaning the deficiencies in intellectual development that they believed had resulted from women's political exclusion. And both beliefs, women as moral superiors to and intellectual inferiors of men, could be argued along with assertions of women's equality with men—equal by virtue of their birthright and common humanity, equal in the eyes of God and equal citizens for having been born in the United States.
Kraditor's work was critically important for highlighting the racist beliefs that were fundamental to, but not always directly expressed, in these debates (124, 127). Her work suggested that these formulations—women are morally superior, women are different but equal—which were often expressed using race-neutral language, nonetheless reflected a belief in white superiority. As Kraditor wrote, “In a period in which… political liberty was becoming linked with political capacity, women could prove their capacity either as members of the ‘superior race’ or as women. In that context they find that the ‘best’ argument of native-born, white, middle-class women was one which would prove their own capacity but not that of men or women of other sections of the population” (52). By the 1890s, Kraditor argued, “suffragists' rationale had reversed itself completely since the days before the new immigration. Before the 1890s, they had claimed the vote because all human beings, men and women, were equal. Afterwards, during the Progressive Era, most suffragists were willing to claim the vote because all human beings, native and foreign born, were not equal, and the inferior ought not to rule the superior” (126–27).
In White Women's Rights, I drew upon this dimension of Kraditor's work to argue against her argument that suffrage ideology had once been egalitarian but had become increasingly tainted with racism and xenophobia (137). I argued instead that notions of racialized sexual difference and racial hierarchy were consistently foundational to how white Anglo Saxon women conceived of their political roles and responsibilities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Reformers engaged in “civilization work”— which could take the form of “uplifting Negroes” for the Freedmen's Bureau, converting “savages” to Christianity in domestic and foreign missions, bringing “civilization” to Indians on reservations, and “Americanizing” immigrants in settlement houses—generally believed both in political egalitarianism and white racial superiority. Many of the white women involved in these forms of civilization work advocated for the possibility of racial equality for the future, but they also believed that Anglo Saxons were currently the most advanced race ever to inhabit the earth. Moreover, they thought that their own racial superiority was grounded in the physical, mental, and biological characteristics (i.e., their race-specific sexual differences) that distinguished them as white women from men of their race and from women of other races. They were capable of recognizing other individual nonwhite women as their equals, but not entire races, because their assumptions about racial superiority were grounded in beliefs that their sexual differences were racial traits that were characteristic of the white race and helped account for their society's supposed higher civilization.Footnote 31
The notion that political egalitarianism might be compatible with, if not grounded in, understandings of racial hierarchy has not been an idea that historians of woman suffrage have rushed to embrace—although political theorists have been more willing to consider the point.Footnote 32 Recently, however, Allison Sneider has formulated the argument in terms that I expect will be more palatable to historians, reminding us that “neither the classical liberal nor republican traditions on which nineteenth-century U.S. suffragists and abolitionists drew were inconsistent with the belief in natural hierarchies between men and women or between races.” As Sneider concludes: “To speak in the language of constitutional rights, or of a citizen's right to vote does not preclude the belief that some men and women are more fit to exercise these rights than others.”Footnote 33
SUFFRAGE HISTORIOGRAPHY SINCE KRADITOR
In this section, I describe some of the trajectories that suffrage historiography has taken since Kraditor first published her book fifty years ago. For this purpose, I have found it useful to divide the scholarship into three categories: (1) studies that were published in the 1970s and explored the political alliances between white woman's rights advocates and black and white abolitionists in the antebellum period, along with the breakup of that alliance in the late 1860s; (2) studies published from the late 1970s through the 1990s that challenged Kraditor for treating suffrage as if it were an “essentially white” movement, offering new narratives in which black women's political activities were central; and (3) studies from the 1990s and 2000s that explored suffrage movements in the South, Midwest, and the West, and which have made clear how suffrage encompassed new understandings of citizenship that were inseparable from the history of Reconstruction, U.S. expansion, and western imperialism.Footnote 34
Race, Region, and Citizenship
In Ideas, Kraditor characterized the period prior to the 1890s as a more “visionary” (86) moment in the history of suffrage, but she did not examine this moment in any detail. However, the rise of women's liberation movements in the early 1970s, along with the recognition of its historical ties to civil rights, inspired renewed interest in nineteenth-century antecedents—notably the historical connections between woman's rights and abolitionism. A number of works appeared in the 1970s that identified the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 as the founding moment of the nineteenth-century woman's rights movement, documenting the ways in which white women grew bolder and more outspoken about their own rights as their activities in the abolitionist movement during the 1840s and 1850s subjected them to intense public criticism. This body of work, which included Miriam Gurko's The Ladies of Seneca Falls (1976), Blanche Glassman Hersh's The Slavery of Sex (1978), and Barbara Berg's The Remembered Gate (1978), purposefully attempted to create a usable past for 1970s activists. As Gurko explained, “I first thought of writing [this book] after a conversation … with some young women who spoke of the current liberation movement as though it had no antecedents…. This book was written, therefore, to bring to a new generation the story of the remarkable ladies of Seneca Falls.”Footnote 35
The leading scholar in this group was Ellen Carol DuBois, and her now-classic monograph, Feminism and Suffrage (1978), remains important for understanding the political twists and turns of the critical years between 1865 and 1870. Writing amidst the fervent of the 1970s, DuBois noted that suffragism had “not been accorded the historic recognition it deserve[d]” largely because it was generally regarded as an isolated institutional reform that had not “solved the problem of women's oppression.”Footnote 36 DuBois was explicit about her political objectives, stating unapologetically, “I have written this study because I am a feminist and a radical,” and she intended her book “as a contribution, not [just] to the history of woman suffrage, but to the history of the feminist movement.”Footnote 37
As DuBois understood, woman suffrage was a minor concern of the antebellum woman's movement but became a major focus for white woman's rights activists in the aftermath of the Civil War, as Congress debated the future political status of recently emancipated slaves as part of the terms by which the former Confederate states would be granted reentry into the Union. However, it was soon apparent that white suffragists in the American Equal Rights Association (AERA) were divided over how to respond to the proposed Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, with some members, such as Abby Kelley Foster, willing to place woman suffrage on hold in order to support the proposed amendments, while others (including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony) were unwilling to do so.Footnote 38 By 1870, as the requisite number of states had ratified a version of the Fifteenth Amendment that extended the franchise to black men but not to white or black women, Stanton and Anthony had split off from their former abolitionist allies, and two rival woman suffrage organizations, The National Suffrage Association of Women, led by Stanton and Anthony; and the American Suffrage Association of Women, led by Lucy Stone and her husband Henry Blackwell, operated independently of one another for the next twenty years.Footnote 39
Although DuBois carefully examined Stanton's and Anthony's reactions to the Fifteenth Amendment and was explicit about the racism that lay at the heart of Stanton's speeches in this time period, in the end, she offered a positive evaluation of Stanton and Anthony's split from their former Republican and abolitionist allies and credited them with having created an “independent feminist movement.”Footnote 40 Thus, in contrast to Kraditor, who had characterized the earlier period as more visionary moment for white suffragists, DuBois argued that “the development of feminism before the war was restrained by the organizational connection of its leaders with the antislavery movement, which kept them from concentrating on the mobilization of women around a primary commitment to their own rights.”Footnote 41
In an anthology of Anthony and Stanton's correspondence (1981), which she published as a follow-up to Feminism and Suffrage (1978), DuBois explored further these two leaders' political actions during Reconstruction, offering this assessment: “Anthony and particularly Stanton reacted to the conflict between Black and woman suffrage in a racist fashion, despite their abolitionist backgrounds.” And while DuBois still emphasized that “political forces beyond their control had made it impossible to unite the demands of women and the freedmen,” she also pointed out that the response that Stanton and Anthony made had been a strategic choice with significant repercussions: “Stanton and Anthony took the further step of opposing feminism to Black suffrage. On the one hand, they argued that white women, educated and virtuous, were more deserving of the vote than the ex-slaves. On the other hand, they attempted to build feminism on the basis of white women's racism. At times, Stanton even fueled white women's sexual fears of Black men to rouse them against Black suffrage and for their own enfranchisement.”Footnote 42
Immediately, other scholars, both white and black, entered into a discussion of how to best narrate the history of the suffrage movement and how to characterize the racial views of white suffragists in the nineteenth century. In an important theoretical essay published in 1982, Bettina Aptheker faulted both Kraditor's Ideas (1965) and DuBois's Feminism and Suffrage (1978) for treating the suffrage movement as “essentially white.”Footnote 43 Furthermore, she argued that it had been the intersection of abolitionism and woman's rights in the antebellum period that had sustained the radicalism of both movements, thus taking issue with DuBois's assessment that Anthony's and Stanton's break with abolitionism had been a positive development in the history of feminism. For DuBois, the emergence of an independent woman's movement was a phoenix rising out of the ashes of Reconstruction politics. For Aptheker, the break with abolitionist allies was the death knoll for a truly progressive (and multiracial) woman's movement, leaving a legacy that extended far into the twentieth century. “As the [nineteenth-century] woman's movement severed its self-conscious alliance with Afro-American freedom,” Aptheker argued, “it found itself without a progressive mooring…. It apparently never occurred to either [Stanton or Anthony] that … the neglect of or acquiescence in racism would inevitably force the women into a more and more conservative and politically ineffectual mold.”Footnote 44 DuBois later came to agree with this assessment, and in an essay published in 2000, she explained that what she had once regarded as a “necessary, productive, and though painful, positive development in American feminism,” she now saw as “a political defeat, with reactionary consequences for both the suffrage movement and the American constitutional tradition.”Footnote 45
Working at the juncture of African American and women's history in the 1970s and writing in response to both DuBois and Kraditor, black scholars also entered forcefully into these discussions. Because the field is vastly different now, it is important to remember that these scholars encountered a field in which black women's political activities were entirely overlooked. Looking back over two decades from the vantage point of 1998, Rosayln Terborg-Penn remembers: “The myths were pervasive,” especially “that historically black women were uninterested in feminist politics and that black men opposed feminist issues.”Footnote 46 To expose and counter these myths, black scholars, among them Terborg-Penn, Angela Davis, Bettye Collier-Thomas, Elsa Barkley Brown, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Cynthia Neverdon-Morton, Sharon Harley, Paula Giddings, and Adele Logan Alexander, documented black women's involvement in antebellum reform and Progressive Era politics, demonstrating how black women's engagement was much broader than their support of suffrage and included campaigns against lynching, segregation, and racialized forms of gender discrimination, along with activities in support of temperance, better education, and increased employment opportunities.Footnote 47 These scholars also introduced into the historical record the writings of many black women who had served as leaders in the abolitionist, suffrage, temperance, civil rights and woman's rights movements of the nineteenth century, including accounts by Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, Nannie Burroughs, Adella Hunt Logan, and Ida B. Wells-Barnet.Footnote 48
As black scholars labored to incorporate the political activities of black women into the historiography, they also critiqued the ways in which white scholars had downplayed or ignored racial divisions among black and white women. Drawing support from Kraditor, Giddings insisted in When and Where I Enter (1984) that “White feminists often acquiesced to racist ideology, undermining their own cause in doing so.”Footnote 49 Terborg-Penn noted that she had found Kraditor's Ideas helpful because of a passing mention that some black suffragists protested the racism in the woman suffrage movement, a finding that confirmed Terborg-Penn's intuition that “there had been black men and women who had fought both racism and sexism simultaneously.”Footnote 50
Since the 1990s, it has become customary for white scholars to acknowledge the ways that white suffragist leaders dealt with racial considerations, lamenting for example, Anthony's decision to campaign with George Train in Kansas and deploring the explicit racism expressed in Stanton's speeches and editorials published during Reconstruction, while at the same time offering various contextualizations. Some, such as political theorist Sue Davis, have situated Stanton's speeches and writings in a larger American intellectual tradition (including men such as Thomas Jefferson) that consistently failed to reconcile democratic ideals with ascriptive notions of racial difference. Davis has written: “Was she [Elizabeth Cady Stanton] a racist? Yes, But racism was a thoroughly entrenched, long-standing tradition in the nineteenth century…. That by no means excuses her racism. But the fact of the matter is that she shared the racial views of the overwhelming majority of thinkers and activists in the nineteenth century.”Footnote 51Lori Ginzberg, Stanton's most recent biographer, astutely observes how Stanton's support of universal adult suffrage in this period, expressed as a moral imperative, “obscured [the] larger flaw” that she supported this principle on “unabashedly racist grounds.” Ginzberg states, Stanton's “language was ugly, conscious, and unforgiveable … [and] exposed a strain in her thinking that was neither trivial nor simply a case of bad temper.”Footnote 52 Moreover, in grappling with Stanton's and Anthony's actions during Reconstruction, scholars have insisted that these not be taken as representative of all white suffragists' views, pointing toward the more egalitarian views of Abby Foster Kelley, Lucy Stone, and Lucretia Mott.Footnote 53
Southern Suffragism
Kraditor's book also has had a major influence in shaping historiography on white women's involvement in southern suffragist movements. As Marjorie Spruill has pointed out, “Historian Aileen Kraditor set the stage for this debate [about race] when she wrote that the ‘principal argument’ of the southern suffrage movement was that the ‘enfranchisement of women would insure the permanency of white supremacy in the South’ and portrayed the NAWSA as reluctantly permitting the use of racist tactics in the suffrage movement as a concession to the racism of southern women.”Footnote 54
Indeed, Kraditor's characterization of white southern suffragists was unequivocal: “[After the Civil War] Southern white women began building a suffrage movement the principal argument of which was that the enfranchisement of women would insure the permanency of white supremacy in the South…. When most Northern suffragists accepted the argument that woman suffrage in the South could be advocated as a ‘solution to the race problem,’ Southern suffragists could feel encouraged to join in the nationwide suffrage movement…” (165). Scholars writing on white southern suffragists have taken issue with this characterization, and no consensus has yet emerged on how best to represent the complicated racial dynamics of southern suffragism, in which the linking of women's rights with abolitionism, the legacy of the Civil War, and the ongoing commitment to states' rights, were all key features.Footnote 55 Anne Firor Scott, the first scholar to respond to Kraditor in her own monograph, The Southern Lady (1970), acknowledged that “some southern women talked as if their primary concern was to counterbalance the Negro vote,” but she thought such arguments represented only a “minor” part of white southern suffragists' ideology.Footnote 56 Like Scott, Elna Green also rejected Kraditor's claim that “racism was the major impetus for southern suffragism,” arguing that southern white women came to the suffrage movement in much the same way northern white progressive women did—as a result of wanting to resolve the New South's industrial and urban problems.Footnote 57 Suzanne Lebsock argued that when the focus was shifted to the arena of local and state politics, Kraditor's “elegant thesis” could not be sustained—that in Virginia, at least, the white women who became suffragists “did not use any white supremacist argument as their principal argument, and that it was the antisuffragists who succeeded in making white supremacy “an issue of considerable importance…. refus[ing] to give it up, even after the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified.”Footnote 58 Lebsock's research revealed that white suffragists in Virginia thought the antis' assertion that enfranchising women would endanger white supremacy was “nonsense,” “an old bugaboo,” and that suffragists only responded to antis' racist statements years into the debate when an editorial by Alfred Williams (which initially appeared in the Richmond Evening Journal in 1915) was reprinted as a broadside for distribution in other southern states.Footnote 59
At the other end of the spectrum, Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, agreeing with Kraditor's assessment of the significance of white supremacy arguments to suffrage debates nationwide, maintained that “the race issue” was “a major causative factor” in the emergence of “an organized regional movement” in the South.Footnote 60 Selecting eleven southern female leaders as the basis of her study, Wheeler argued that these white suffragists saw their movement “as a drive to clean up Southern politics by improving the quality of the electorate.”Footnote 61 They considered themselves “to be more desirable as voters than the black men who had been enfranchised by the Fifteenth Amendment and most were willing to use racist arguments to promote woman suffrage.” “Women who spoke eloquently of the inalienable right of women as citizens to self-government,” Wheeler concluded, “advocated or at least acquiesced in the restoration of white supremacy that took place contemporaneously with the Southern woman suffrage movement.”Footnote 62
In an outstanding account of white and black women's separate political activities in North Carolina, Glenda Gilmore staked out a middle position, arguing that white suffragists in North Carolina, like those in Virginia, downplayed racial concerns brought up by antisuffragists because they knew that if these concerns “became central to ratification discussions, they would lose” (204). But that didn't mean, as Gilmore recognized, that white suffragists rejected the ideology of white supremacy or that the issue of race did not dominate the campaign to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment in North Carolina. As Gilmore wrote, “Those white women who held equal passions for woman suffrage and white supremacy had to balance their attraction to the ballot with the putative detraction of black women voters.”Footnote 63
On the other hand, Gilmore, like Green and Scott, objected to how Kraditor's account defined the northern suffrage experience as normative, and she argued for a more nuanced view than the common understanding that white southern suffragists “came to the cause late, lacked grass roots support, and were, of course, racist.” While Gilmore acknowledged that “all of this is partially true,” she also pointed out that it “obscures rather than illuminates the racial politics of woman suffrage,” and her analysis of the immediate aftermath of ratification in North Carolina is fascinating on many accounts—in particular for showing the efforts black women made, after ratification, to exert their right to register, as well as white suffragists' response to those actions. As Gilmore explained, “after avoiding race during the ratification process, white woman suffragists reached for it [afterwards] as their first political tool…. Upper-class white southern women saw the Republicans as the party of rough-and-tumble masculinity and the working class. But above all, registering Democratic was a vote for whiteness.”Footnote 64
There seems to be no way to reconcile these different perspectives on white southern suffragism, nor do I think it productive for specialists to go back over this terrain even though there are some questions that have not been settled. One might wonder, for example, if the racial beliefs and tactics of white women in the lower South differed significantly from those of the upper South; or whether the proportional size of black populations (relative to whites) was a relevant factor; or whether interracial political alliances or personal relationships mitigated the most virulent forms of white racism and whether these alliances and relationships were more prevalent in urban areas, as opposed to rural areas. These kinds of comparative analyses have yet to be done, but I am not convinced that even were scholars to address such questions that the knowledge produced would compel us to reconsider two larger points that I take to be already well established: first, that racism, or a belief in white supremacy, was common among white southern suffragists but not determinative of whether they were willing to work with local black groups or individual black women (it might also be observed that the willingness of white women to work with local black groups, albeit uncommon, was not necessarily indicative of enlightened racial views); and second, that the vast majority of southern white women supported segregation and did not believe that woman suffrage would endanger those social arrangements.
Subsequent work has productively focused attention on the diversity of suffrage activities that emerged in the post-emancipation South and elsewhere during the 1870s, as well as on the distinct ways in which African American women understood citizenship and participated in politics.Footnote 65 As Elsa Barkley Brown explains, although white suffragists in the nineteenth century tended to speak of citizenship as something that pertained to and emanated from the individual, African American women conceived of citizenship as something that pertained to and emanated from the community, “wherein all—men, women and children freeborn and formerly slave … had inherent rights and responsibilities requiring no higher authority than their commitment to each other.” Barkley Brown argues further that utilizing this distinction is crucial, for without it scholars miss seeing that black women, although excluded from the official political arena, were very much part of an external political process where they “participated in all public forums—the parades, rallies, mass meetings, and conventions themselves.”Footnote 66
Thus, while from one perspective, scholarly discussions of southern white suffragism seem to have come to a standstill, from another perspective, it is evident that the field has moved on, focusing on the ways in which black women helped consolidate new understandings of citizenship and altered the political dynamics of white supremacy. Both Barkley Brown's work on South Carolina and Gilmore's work on North Carolina helped open the door to these new insights. “By their presence at the polls,” Gilmore explains, black women dared whites to use violence and won the dare.” White women “did not appeal to [white] men to protect them with shotguns” but instead “roused white women to outnumber black women—an unfortunate, but legal, method of winning elections”—the result being “new, more subtle provisions to sustain inequality in a state that became known for its comparative civility.”Footnote 67
North Carolina, however, was an exception, and Hannah Rosen in Terror in the Heart of Freedom (2009) demonstrates how black women in Tennessee, Arkansas, Florida, and elsewhere insisted on their citizenship even as southern states responded to the changing political status of freedpeople with violence. Rosen's discussion of these black women's understanding of citizenship drew from Barkley Brown's work in asserting that “freedwomen and freedmen themselves rarely envisaged suffrage as the right or possession of an individual man, but, rather, as an opportunity for a community to express its political consensus, a consensus that was shaped by and reflected the voices of women as well as men.”Footnote 68 Rosen also cited the work of Martha Jones who demonstrated that it was “black political leaders who put women's suffrage on the agenda in the [Reconstruction] era's constitutional conventions and state legislatures.”Footnote 69 But as arguments for woman suffrage failed to gain traction, and as blacks had to continually counter a “minefield of charges of flawed and dishonorable black manhood and womanhood,” Rosen argues, a more gendered discourse emerged, contributing to a “construction of citizenship as ‘manhood rights’ that did not allow for a clear position for black women in public life.”Footnote 70 Nonetheless, Rosen insists, “many black women in Arkansas at the time certainly perceived that they belonged in public life,” and “African American political cultures [throughout the South] would continue to include spaces for women's political voice in ways unfamiliar to white southern public life.”Footnote 71 Summarizing the insights of an entire subfield of black women's history, Rosen concludes, “a new generation of black women took on roles in education and civic organizations unusual for white women and initiated reform and suffrage movements before white southern women did.”Footnote 72
Equally significant, and Rosen's core contribution to this literature, was her exploration of how southern black women challenged antebellum understandings of citizenship, race, and gender by insisting upon federal protection from sexual violence. As Rosen explains, “one important aspect of … becoming persons recognized under the law as possessing rights—that is, of being citizens—was to assert their will and bodily integrity before white men.” Through their testimony against white men, which took place at congressional hearings and Freedmen's Bureau offices, freedwomen “went to great lengths and took enormous risks to seek out federal officials and to testify to, and to protest, racist political violence.” In doing so, they “asserted the legitimacy of federal power over affairs in the southern states.”Footnote 73
Lisa Materson's For the Freedom of Her Race (2009) shares with Rosen's work this key insight that black women were essential in keeping alive, from the 1870s through the 1930s, Reconstruction Era understandings of the role of the federal government in protecting the rights of black citizens. Materson shows how black women brought this understanding of citizenship and federal power with them when they emigrated from the South to Chicago in the 1870s and 1880s. Describing her book as “an epilogue to or continuation of a story that began in the South during the 1860s and 1870s,” Materson explores the activities of a generation of black women who actively worked to influence electoral contests before they could vote. Once they could vote in local elections during the 1890s, Materson argues, these women were acutely aware that they had access to the ballot box when the majority of southern blacks did not and thus saw themselves as “proxy” voters for their Southern brethren. (After the narrow defeat of a state constitutional amendment in 1891, Illinois's state legislature passed a less controversial Woman's Suffrage Bill that legalized women's voting for school-related offices and other matters. Consequently, Illinois women, white and black, voted in local school board and other elections decades prior to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.Footnote 74) Thus, black women in Chicago “created a hybrid political culture … that blended local political issues with a concern about black rights in the South…. They repeatedly looked for moments in electoral races, even small local contests, to focus attention on the ongoing struggles against disfranchisement, segregation, and forced labor in the South,” using elections “that had nothing to do with federal power to generate a public discussion about the power and authority of the Reconstruction Amendments.”Footnote 75
In sum, the historiography of suffrage in the South remains vibrant and productive, by enlarging its focus from the franchise to citizenship and by incorporating insights from the history of African American women's political engagements.Footnote 76 This subfield has also greatly expanded suffrage historians' understanding of the different conceptions of citizenship held by black and white southern women, showing how for black women, citizenship represented both a right of the community as well as a right of the individual.
Suffrage in the West
Kraditor was keenly aware that different dynamics operated in the western region of the United States, and she knew that she had not adequately addressed the question of why western states were the first to pass state suffrage referenda even though suffrage organizing had a much longer history in the Northeast.Footnote 77 In her preface to the Norton reissue of Ideas (1981), Kraditor referred readers to Alan Grimes's The Puritan Ethic and Woman Suffrage (1967), which had appeared two years after Kraditor first published Ideas and which drew its basic premise from Kraditor's own book.Footnote 78 Grimes's argument was that woman suffrage first succeeded in the West not because of any greater liberality or frontier commitment to freedom (which had been the dominant Turnerian idea to date and Kraditor's own assumption). Rather, he pointed to the same nativist feeling that Kraditor had identified among Anglo Saxon elites in the East—in particular, Anglo Saxon concern with the increasing percentage of immigrant working-class men and a belief that extending the vote to (white) women would in effect double the votes of men who had families, perceived to be the most desirable and stable segment of the voting population, as well as a conviction that women's votes would help regulate male vices—alcohol, gambling, and prostitution.Footnote 79
Today, the field has moved far beyond this view, with sociologists Holly McCammon and Karen Campbell and historians Rebecca Mead and Allison Sneider, among others, offering explanations that focus on the successful organizing efforts of women's suffrage organizations and their ability to connect suffrage to other pressing national issues (expansion, imperialism), the need to convince only state legislators as opposed to an entire male citizenry, and the specific political opportunities that woman suffrage organizations were able to exploit when there were more than two political parties competing for voter loyalty. For example, McCammon and Campbell found that in nine out of fifteen western states, suffragists received endorsements from third parties just prior to winning suffrage referenda in those states.Footnote 80 And as Sneider explains, “In an age of states' rights and Jim Crow, U.S. expansion in the continental West and overseas was … crucial to keeping alive a national discussion of the right to vote … [and] over time, [woman] suffragists would become experts at inserting their question into these national debates.”Footnote 81
Yet traces of Kraditor's analytical framework are still evident in the historiographical and sociological treatments of western suffragism. For instance, McCammon and Campbell have argued that western suffragists were significantly more likely to use expediency than justice arguments—the former sometimes referred to as public motherhood arguments because they emphasized “home interests,” upheld women's primary responsibilities as mothers and their relegation to the domestic sphere, and stipulated that voting would not alter these social arrangements.Footnote 82 And Mead, while she rejected the “false dichotomy” of opposing justice to expediency, nonetheless accepted that expediency “is an appropriate term to describe suffrage racism.”Footnote 83 Maintaining that western suffragists “frequently manipulated white racial fears even though nonwhite western racial-ethnic groups were geographically, culturally, and politically marginalized by the 1890s,” Mead further argues that white western suffragists avoided direct discussion of “the color question” while still reminding white western men how female labor promoted settlement and helped maintain white hegemony.Footnote 84
What emerges above all from the current literature on western suffragism is the complexity of the referenda process, which differed for each territory and state, and necessitated persistent and organized action on the part of both local suffrage groups and regional/national associations, as suffragists had to coordinate their activities over years, sometimes over decades. The earliest victories, which occurred in Wyoming and Utah territories in 1869 and 1870 respectively, were achieved by simple votes in territorial legislatures. Only one other territory (Washington in 1883) enacted woman suffrage prior to entering the union, and these three suffrage victories required confirmation, which was not always accomplished, when these territories applied for statehood.Footnote 85 The next success, which took place a decade later in 1893 in Colorado—the first state to enfranchise women in a popular referendum—was a radical victory, as Mead argues, because woman suffrage organizations had succeeded in directly linking their concerns to third-party politics “in a climate of financial panic and economic despair.”Footnote 86 As Mead points out, the unexpected success of this campaign demonstrated the importance of reform alliances and party endorsements, as well as the essential role of politicized urban clubwomen, establishing the reputation of Carrie Chapman Catt as the NAWSA's top organizer.Footnote 87 This success stimulated other Populist-inspired referenda in other states during the 1890s, but only one other campaign succeeded—Idaho in 1896. Then it took more than a decade for further progressive victories, in Washington State (1910), California (1911), Arizona (1912), Alaska (1912), Oregon (1912), Montana (1914), and Nevada (1914)—all of which predated the other two successful statewide campaigns held elsewhere (New York in 1917 and Michigan in 1918).Footnote 88
In some ways, though, these data are profoundly misleading as they represent only the states where statewide suffrage referenda succeeded. But many states had what scholars refer to as a “limited franchise,” that is, they had extended suffrage to women through legislation so that women could vote in local school board elections for example (as Illinois had done in 1891), but also sometimes in presidential elections. In 1920, when the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, the majority of states had some form of limited franchise, although only fifteen states had passed statewide referenda enfranchising women in all elections.
Mead's account, which offered detailed examination of the campaigns in Colorado, California, Washington, and Oregon, explores how women's suffrage organizations gained support from the many of the third parties that were active in this period (Grange, Farmers' Alliance, Greenback Party, Union Labor Party, Knights of Labor, Prohibition Party, Populists, Socialists, Nationalists, Workingmen's Party, and Progressives), and then leveraged that support to gain favor with the two main political parties as well. As Mead explains: “with more political options [in western states], women could and did threaten to abandon established parties unreceptive to female concerns.”Footnote 89 Mead also credits western suffragists with successfully cultivating farmer-labor-socialist alliances and utilizing direct-action tactics derived from popular politics and the labor movement, which included creative use of drama, advertising, and modern technology—cars, telephones, billboards, and slide shows.Footnote 90
Most important, perhaps, Mead asks historians to reconsider the general consensus that the Nineteenth Amendment had only minimal impact on politics and public policy, arguing that our focus on the failures at the national level in the 1920s has made it difficult to see the many significant state-level achievements prior to the 1920s. As many as 40 to 50 percent of women registered to vote once they had the right to do so, suffrage organizations reorganized themselves into nonpartisan civic leagues, and women succeeded in coordinating numerous reform projects—especially social welfare programs to protect women and children. As Mead argues, “Equal suffrage in the West was both cause and effect of Progressivism and heavily responsible for the avalanche of reform legislation passed during this period.”Footnote 91 In the West, women voters also quickly established partisan Republican, Democratic, and Populist clubs, and while they did not succeed in garnering power within the official party structures, “they achieved better representation at the grassroots level … especially once male politicians got over their fears of a ‘women's bloc.’” Moreover, women were able to get elected to a few local offices, usually as superintendents of schools or sometimes as state legislators—and again these successes, Mead argues, have been “largely overlooked because of the dismissive influence of the dominant paradigm [that]… woman suffrage—or early feminism generally—was a ‘failure.’”Footnote 92
In some ways, then, historiography on western suffrage movements has set an impressive new standard for future work, showing how imperative it is that future narratives delve into women's political activities at the local and state levels in the years leading up to, as well as immediately following, the Nineteenth Amendment. As the work of Mead and Materson have shown, women were actively engaged in electoral campaigns in the 1890s, both before and after they received the franchise from their states, suggesting that further exploration of this electoral ferment in other locales is likely to yield new insights into the ways that women contributed to the legislative successes of the Progressive Era.
CONCLUSION: CREATING NEW HISTORICAL NARRATIVES
With the publication of Ideas in 1965, Kraditor began a discussion about justice and expediency that has lasted half a century, arguing that political exigencies during the Progressive Era resulted in an unfortunate narrowing of the arguments used by the National American Women's Suffrage Association to advance the cause of the political equality of women. According to Kraditor, as the NAWSA sought to expand its organizing efforts in the South and found itself confronted with larger numbers of immigrant populations in the North and East, it increasingly relinquished its principled arguments about the right of all women to the suffrage, emphasizing instead the social benefits of a limited, educated suffrage that would enfranchise the so-called better classes of women. Although subsequent historians have challenged Kraditor's sense of chronology and brought much needed nuance to her claims about the racism that was integral to the woman suffrage movement, Kraditor definitively showed how one of the nation's most dramatic movements for democracy had both antidemocratic motivations and consequences.
Since Kraditor, scholars have challenged and modified this understanding in significant ways, exploring how the history of suffrage varied greatly from region to region, state to state, and locality to locality, in particular emphasizing how differently black and white women conceived of citizenship in the post-emancipation South. As we have seen, this attention to regional, local, and racial differences has greatly expanded historians' perspectives and deepened our understanding of how local elections fought over specific goals (such as who would be elected to the Board of Trustees of a state university) nonetheless involved vehement debates over issues of national importance, including the legacy of Reconstruction, the meanings of freedom, citizenship, and political liberty.Footnote 93
Suffrage historians have also long been aware of the disproportionate share of attention that has been accorded to the NAWSA and to Stanton's and Anthony's role within the movement, a consequence of the fact that they authored and edited much of the extant documentary record, excluding the ideas and activities of those with whom they had the most bitter ideological and strategic conflicts—notably Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell.Footnote 94 Moreover, in addition to recent important works that reevaluate Stanton's and Anthony's perspectives, we now also have many insightful accounts of other leaders, both white and black, as well as narratives that carefully situate suffrage debates within discussions of U.S expansionist policies at home and imperialist ventures abroad. In short, historians are now fully cognizant of how, in the words of Allison Sneider, “debates about voting rights and equal citizenship for women also constituted debates about the boundaries of the nation and the power of the state.”Footnote 95
Finally, scholars have clearly shown how the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, with its stipulation that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex,” did not mean that after 1920 all female citizens could vote. Southern states found ways to disenfranchise black women within a decade of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, less than half the time it had taken them to disenfranchise black men after the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment.Footnote 96 The voting rights of Native American women were not secured under the Nineteenth Amendment since the citizenship of Indians remained unresolved for another generation, and the citizenship of immigrant women (and thus their voting rights) is very much still an unresolved question.Footnote 97
It is my hope that as the field generates even more community studies, state-based accounts, and regional histories that are sensitive to the distinctive political dynamics of the local, we will reach better understandings of the various and different trajectories that various groups of women took toward securing the franchise, seeing even more clearly how ratification of suffrage was an important—but certainly not a final step—in securing women's right to equal citizenship. Even though Aileen Kraditor showed little interest in local activism in her classic work, the questions that she raised fifty years ago remain central to our understanding of the democratic—and antidemocratic—legacies of the woman suffrage movement.
