"The Battle for Suffrage: U.S. Women and the Right To Vote": Resources

Pioneering African American journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931) is widely remembered for her courageous antilynching crusade in the 1890s; the full range of her struggles against injustice is not as well known. With this book, Patricia Schechter restores Wells-Barnett to her central, if embattled, place in the early reform movements for civil rights, women's suffrage, and Progressivism in the United States and abroad. Schechter's comprehensive treatment makes vivid the scope of Wells-Barnett's contributions and examines why the political philosophy and leadership of this extraordinary activist eventually became marginalized. Though forced into the shadow of black male leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington and misunderstood and then ignored by white women reformers such as Frances E. Willard and Jane Addams, Wells-Barnett nevertheless successfully enacted a religiously inspired, female-centered, and intensely political vision of social betterment and empowerment for African American communities throughout her adult years. By analyzing her ideas and activism in fresh sharpness and detail, Schechter exposes the promise and limits of social change by and for black women during an especially violent yet hopeful era in U.S. history.

Grounded in the rich history of Chicago politics, For the Freedom of Her Race tells a wide-ranging story about black women's involvement in southern, midwestern, and national politics. Examining the oppressive decades between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932--a period that is often described as the nadir of black life in America--Lisa Materson shows that as African American women migrated beyond the reach of southern white supremacists, they became active voters, canvassers, suffragists, campaigners, and lobbyists, mobilizing to gain a voice in national party politics and elect representatives who would push for the enforcement of the Reconstruction Amendments in the South.

A beautifully illustrated and fact-filled history of American women's drive for political equality from the 1840s to 1920 and after. Top quality reproductions of rarely seen historical photographs, posters, leaflets, and color illustrations, with over 75 profiles of leaders of this early, nearly forgotten nonviolent civil rights movement. Collectable First Edition.

Part of a series of historical references, this volume addresses the Women's Suffrage Movement in America between 1820 and 1920, during which time leaders like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan Anthony spearheaded reform movements seeking equality for women. Eyewitness accounts are supplied by referring to contemporary records of observers and participants.

Chronicles the history of the women's rights and suffrage movements in New York State and examines the important role the state played in the national suffrage movement.

This book is the first comprehensive analysis of the campaign for women's suffrage to appear for over thirty years. It challenges the conventional chronology of the subject by arguing that the Victorian suffragists did not undergo a decline during the 1890s but, on the contrary, hadeffectively won the argument about votes for women by 1900. This view is supported by evidence of the ineffectiveness of Anti-Suffragism, and especially the difficulties it encountered in trying to reconcile female Antis, who were often feminists, with male Antis, who opposed all forms ofemancipation. The author adds a new dimension to the argument by discussing the beneficial impact on the British campaign of women's enfranchisement in New Zealand in 1893, and in Australia in 1902; and he shows how crucial to the shift towards suffragist support in parliament were Conservativemoves in favour of suffragism in the 1890s.The March of the Women also offers a fresh evaluation of the Edwardian militant campaign. At grass roots level divisions over tactics mattered less than among the London leadership, and suffragette groups were less rigidly divided. It places the Pankhursts and the WSPU in a fresh light byexamining their success in raising funds and in tapping the support of the British Establishment, at the same time attacking it and its values; while at the other end of the spectrum non-militants were making an important contribution to the cause by capitalising on working-class and Labour supportfor women's suffrage.

Suffragists in Imperial Age demonstrates how seemingly disparate conversations about the physical boundaries of national territory and the gendered boundaries of political space overlapped and inflected each other during post-Civil War efforts to rebuild the nation in new terms. This bookargues that US expansion was crucial to the development of the post-bellum US woman suffrage movement and shows how federal discussions of citizenship and voting rights in the context of creating territorial governments in the continental West and, after the Spanish-American War, in the Caribbeanand the Pacific, created space on the Congressional calendar for suffragists to instigate debate on the woman question. In the negotiation of global power relations across the twentieth century and into the present, political rights for women continues to function as a marker of success forexperiments in expanding democracy, as well as a bargaining chip for reasserting some degree of political independence for men. This book shows how by 1929, suffragists were on the verge of making women's voting rights an integral part of US colonial policy, and adding votes for women to the list ofmarkers symbolizing the achievement of "civilization" in US colonies.

Margaret Finnegan's pathbreaking study of woman suffrage from the 1850s to the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 reveals how activists came to identify with consumer culture and employ its methods of publicity to win popular support through carefully crafted images of enfranchised women as "personable, likable, and modern." Drawing on organization records, suffragists' papers and memoirs, and newspapers and magazines, Finnegan shows how women found it in their political interest to ally themselves with the rise of consumer culture--but the cost of this alliance was a concession of possibilities for social reform. When manufacturers and department stores made consumption central to middle-class life, suffragists made an argument for the ballot by comparing good voters to prudent comparison shoppers. Through suffrage commodities such as newspapers, sunflower badges, Kewpie dolls, and "Womanalls" (overalls for the modern woman), as well as pantomimes staged on the steps of the federal Treasury building, fashionable window displays, and other devices, "Votes for Women" entered public space and the marketplace. Together these activities and commodities helped suffragists claim legitimacy in a consumer capitalist society.Imaginatively interweaving cultural and political history, Selling Suffrage is a revealing look at how the growth of consumerism influenced women's self-identity.

Introduction : women and freedom of expression before the twentieth century -- The right of association : mass meetings, delegations, and conventions -- The open-air campaigns : suffragists take their message to the streets -- Petitions : the power and limits of women's sole political tool -- Parades : shoulder to shoulder, women march -- Pageants : acting onstage and offstage -- Picketing : women's first battle for first amendment rights -- Conclusion : the legacy of suffrage assemblies.

In demanding equal rights and the vote for women, woman suffragists introduced liberal feminist dissent into an emerging national movement against absolute power in the forms of patriarchy, church administrations, slavery and false dogmas.

Uncovers how women in the West fought for the right to vote By the end of 1914, almost every Western state and territory had enfranchised its female citizens in the greatest innovation in participatory democracy since Reconstruction. These Western successes stand in profound contrast to the East, where few women voted until after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, and the South, where African-American men were systematically disenfranchised. How did the frontier West leap ahead of the rest of the nation in the enfranchisement of the majority of its citizens? In this provocative new study, Rebecca J. Mead shows that Western suffrage came about as the result of the unsettled state of regional politics, the complex nature of Western race relations, broad alliances between suffragists and farmer-labor-progressive reformers, and sophisticated activism by Western women. She highlights suffrage racism and elitism as major problems for the movement, and places special emphasis on the political adaptability of Western suffragists whose improvisational tactics earned them progress. A fascinating story, previously ignored, How the Vote Was Won reintegrates this important region into national suffrage history and helps explain the ultimate success of this radical reform.

In Votes For Women, Jean H. Baker has assembled an impressive collection of new scholarship on the struggle of American women for the suffrage. Each of the eleven essays illuminates some aspect of the long battle that lasted from the 1850s to the passage of the suffrage amendment in 1920. Fromthe movement's antecedents in the minds of women like Mary Wollstonecraft and Frances Wright, to the historic gathering at Seneca Falls in 1848, to the civil disobedience during World War I orchestrated by the National Woman's Party, the essential elements of this tumultuous story emerge in thesefinely-tuned chapters. So too do the themes and historical controversies about suffrage and its leaders, including Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, and Alice Paul. Contributors focus on how the suffrage battle was interwoven with constitutional issues at the federal andstate level and how the suffrage struggle played out in different regions, especially the West and the South, as well as the activities of opponents to women's voting. Baker's introductory essay sets the stage for revisiting suffrage by making explicit the similarities and differences ininterpretations of suffrage and shows how the movement intersected with other events in American history and cannot be studied in isolation from them. This volume is essential reading for those interested in American politics and women's formal participation in it.