| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Suffragists in an Imperial Age: U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question, 1870–1929. By Allison L. Sneider. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. x, 209 pp. Cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-0-19-532116-6. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 978-0-19-532117-3.)

The story of the fight for woman suffrage in the United States has been told before and often with great attention to its inconsistencies and complexity, but unlike the stories told by most historians on this topic, no obvious arcs of triumph, tragedy, or irony surface in Allison L. Sneider's new work. Institutions, organizations, and individuals expected to play large roles in this story do, but their reversals and incoherencies are not clipped to fit comfortably within any previous scholarly paradigm or reader's narrative expectations. That may be the book's most valuable contribution to methodological considerations. Sneider's admirable resistance to telling a "good story" short-circuits assumptions that are too easily made regarding the relationship between pro-suffragist activists and the lure of empire. Her painstaking research reveals that pro-suffrage views on particular questions of empire and the incorporation of territories as states varied widely between individuals and, for particular individuals, from one period to another, in the context of different types of expansion and different areas or peoples being considered for incorporation. There is no one configuration of political alliances and ideological commitments to discern here, she tells us, and, indeed, a very faint pattern of change over time emerges from her material.

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