Book Review

Canada and the United States

One of the distinctive attributes of historical writing is a comradeship that is shared with those who have gone before us: those who identified issues, uncovered manuscript sources, and laid an interpretive groundwork. Susan E. Marshall's book builds upon the work of Anne M. Benjamin, Jane Jerome Camhi, and this reviewer, as well as on James J. Kenneally's pioneering dissertation from 1963. For example, Marshall accepts the premise that while some of the female antisuffragists may have been bejeweled, plume-hatted aristocrats, others were hard-working professionals, occasionally careerists, who realized their achievements in venues such as journalism, higher education, and social welfare. Marshall also appreciates how some "antis" were drawn to the struggle by what they perceived as threats to the unique socioeconomic hierarchy that provided a female elite with access to spheres of civic influence, if not outright political power. Marshall's articulation of this point underscores that it was self-interest rather than cultural traditionalism that motivated so many antisuffragists, especially in the late nineteenth century. Finally, her book reinforces earlier arguments that an energetic opposition to suffrage drew women into a public activism that mirrored the decidedly nontraditional strategies of suffragists. Mass meetings instead of delicate teas, parades instead of parlor meetings, and in-person legislative testimony instead of male-delivered written representations became the mainstays of antisuffrage campaigns by the second decade of this century.

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