| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Melanie Susan Gustafson. Women and the Republican Party, 1854–1924. (Women in American History.) Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 2001. Pp. ix, 288. $34.95.

What did women want from the Republican Party during its first sixty years? Melanie Susan Gustafson examines both the women who wanted the party's support for reforms and those who sought a greater place for women within the party. These individuals and groups frequently overlapped, and Gustafson is particularly interested in the complicated relationships among women reformers (especially suffragists), partisan women, and the Republican Party. Women's partisanship influenced their reform activism; at the same time, women's activism affected their roles in the Republican Party. As Gustafson argues, only by examining these relationships holistically can we gain a full understanding of U.S. political history. 1

Gustafson begins by discussing how a close yet intrinsically unequal relationship developed between the women's rights movement and the Republican Party. She follows the suffragists in their largely unsuccessful efforts to persuade the party to support women's enfranchisement, women's divided response to the party's inaction, and their continued allegiance (for the most part) to the party nonetheless. Gustafson explains the factors in the 1880s that enabled temperance worker Judith Ellen Foster to establish the Woman's National Republican Association, a move that greatly increased Foster's personal power but maintained Republican women within an auxiliary role. Gustafson documents how, in 1912, the hastily organized Progressive Party, in search of workers and resources, gave women both a suffrage plank and greater internal opportunities than granted by the Republicans. But as the Progressive Party declined, so did women's opportunities. She ends her book with the triumphant Republican Party of the 1920s that placed women in a separate organization, the Women's Division, where they stayed until 1952. . . .

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