| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Women and the Republican Party, 1854–1924. By Melanie Susan Gustafson. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. xii, 288 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-252-02688-8.)

Melanie Susan Gustafson's impressive study is full of insights into the connections between women's partisanship and their struggle for enfranchisement. The first chapters of the book grapple with the knotty questions of how party politics shaped the suffrage quest and why, despite myriad disappointments, woman suffragists stayed in the Republican fold. It is no coincidence, Gustafson shows, that the formal women's rights struggle was born at the same time that parties were incorporating women into their ritual life on a grand scale: women's participation in campaigns heightened their awareness of their own disfranchisement. The Republican party, more than any other, commanded women's loyalty because it was identified with the Union's triumph in the Civil War; because it made periodic overtures to women (such as the 1872 platform plank recognizing women's contributions to political life); and because, in order to actuate their reform agendas, women had to direct their arguments to the party in power. 1

Her awareness of such realities drove Judith Ellen Foster, the pivotal figure in Gustafson's book, to found the Woman's National Republican Association (WNRA) in 1888. The WNRA was the first women's partisan organization that was national in scope and recognized by the Republican leadership. By 1910, the year that Foster died, there were as many as a thousand local women's clubs under the WNRA's aegis. Foster included black women's clubs in the WNRA; her efforts complemented the efforts of black leaders such as Mary Church Terrell to get out the vote for the Republican party. . . .

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