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Getting Right with Women's Suffrage
by Jean H. Baker, Goucher College
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My title is a gloss from Everett Dirksen, the long-time, now-deceased U.S. senator from Illinois who encouraged his party "to get right with Abraham Lincoln." As Republicans drifted away from acknowledging their partisan connection to the sixteenth president, Dirksen appreciated how Lincoln could serve as an invigorating, unifying theme for Republicans in the post-Civil Rights Era. The analogy, of course, is that suffrage history has been similarly marginalized, submerged even within the limited space given to women's history by attention to Progressive Era associations and service groups such as the General Federation of Women's Clubs, the PTA, women's literary clubs, as well as the settlement house movement and the Women's National Republican Club.1 |
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I believe that the women's suffrage movement should be interpreted as a catalyst—the essential one—for a new women's political culture that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By political culture, I mean, as Sydney Verba writes, "a system of widely held empirical beliefs and expressive values that define the situation" in which, in this case, women's actions took place. In its final stages the suffrage campaign transcended divisions of section, class, and ethnicity to create a unity among women never again achieved. Once the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, voting moved women out of a previously gender-segregated public culture and created an American one based on the anticipation of political equality. |
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Of course it is presumptuous to proclaim to a group of conscientious historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era that we have rejected suffrage in the same way as the Republicans spurned Lincoln. We have not relegated it to a footnote; we have not eliminated it from our teaching. But the study of suffrage is currently something of an afterthought. For example, of the 573 dissertations listed in the Journal of American History under the category of "women" and briefly in 2004 "women and femininity," in the ten-year period from March 1995 to March 2005, only thirty-three, using liberal definitions, have anything to do with suffrage history.2 Perhaps the topic is not so important. Do we need to get right with suffrage when so many possibilities exist for women's history? |
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How Important Is the Movement and Its Goal?
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After all, argue some social historians, isn't the struggle to get the vote of lesser importance to other more significant consciousness-raising women's causes and associations such as cleaning up local communities, joining lecture groups, contributing to temperance fountains, and organizing social clubs? In 1900 the largest suffrage organization, the National American Woman Suffrage Association, had only 10,000 members, at a time when the Woman's Christian Temperance Union claimed nearly half a million dues-paying members, although in a rapid spurt of growth, by 1915 suffrage organizations counted nearly a million members. |
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