Book Review

Each of these books promises—and each, in a different way, delivers—a new perspective on the history of women's politics, woman suffrage, and feminism.	1
Melanie Gustafson, Kristie Miller, and Elisabeth I. Perry set out to challenge the widespread assumption that political parties, unlike woman suffrage and reform organizations, "were an exclusively male domain in which women's roles were severely limited or even nonexistent." In We Have Come to Stay, they collect seventeen articles about the history of women in political parties from the 1880s through the 1950s that should put this assumption to rest once and for all. The articles, a mix of political biographies, election case studies, and examinations of women in the Republican, Democratic, Socialist, and Prohibition parties, begin with the story of Judith Ellen Foster, president of the Woman's National Republican Association in the 1890s, and end with an analysis of the little-known mid-twentieth-century campaigns to mandate equal representation for women in state political party structures.	2
The authors generally agree that women in political parties faced recurring tensions between the politics of gender and the politics of party. They also agree that, although a surprisingly large number of women were active in party politics, women's participation never translated into equal power. This point is brought home in a fine essay by Robyn Muncy, who uses the Colorado election of 1912 to show that even at a moment when state laws, political parties, and third-party competition encouraged women to vote and run for office, parties tended to run women candidates against other women, thereby leaving most positions to men.	3
The authors disagree, sometimes sharply, on other matters, including the extent to which women's political culture was distinct from men's political culture. In her study of women in the Prohibition and Republican parties, Rebecca Edwards argues that in the late nineteenth century middle-class women's politics largely complemented middle-class men's politics. As she points out, even Frances Willard's famous call for "home protection," so often interpreted as evidence of women's political culture, was borrowed from Republican men who used the same phrase to champion high tariffs.	4
Perhaps the most striking essay in the collection is Paula Baker's gendered analysis of party workers. In the nineteenth century, Baker argues, political parties marshaled squadrons of male campaign workers who expected to be paid for their labor in political favors if not in currency. In the twentieth century, however, parties are staffed primarily by women volunteers who rank so far below professional campaign managers that they no longer expect or receive any return for their labor. Baker challenges us to wonder how this history of the feminization of political party work may have shaped historians' subsequent complaints about the "weakness" of twentieth-century political parties.	. . .