Votes for Women The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited

by Baker, Jean H.

• ISBN13: 9780195130171
• ISBN10: 0195130170
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-03-14
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

In Votes For Women, Jean H. Baker has assembled an impressive collection of new scholarship on the struggle of American women for the suffrage. Each of the eleven essays illuminates some aspect of the long battle that lasted from the 1850s to the passage of the suffrage amendment in 1920. From the movement's antecedents in the minds of women like Mary Wollstonecraft and Frances Wright, to the historic gathering at Seneca Falls in 1848, to the civil disobedience during World War I orchestrated by the National Woman's Party, the essential elements of this tumultuous story emerge in these finely-tuned chapters. So too do the themes and historical controversies about suffrage and its leaders, including Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, and Alice Paul. Contributors focus on how the suffrage battle was interwoven with constitutional issues at the federal and state level and how the suffrage struggle played out in different regions, especially the West and the South, as well as the activities of opponents to women's voting. Baker's introductory essay sets the stage for revisiting suffrage by making explicit the similarities and differences in interpretations of suffrage and shows how the movement intersected with other events in American history and cannot be studied in isolation from them. This volume is essential reading for those interested in American politics and women's formal participation in it.

Author Biography

Jean H. Baker is Professor of History at Goucher College. She is the author of Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography and The Stevensons: Biography of an American Family, among other books.

Table of Contents

Contributors	xi
Introduction	3	(18)
Jean H. Baker
The Case for Reform Antecedents for the Woman's Rights Movement	21	(21)
Alison M. Parker
Voices of Suffrage: Sojourner Truth, Frances Watkins Harper, and the Struggle for Woman Suffrage	42	(14)
Nell Irvin Painter
New York Strategy: The New York Woman's Movement and the Civil War	56	(21)
Faye Dudden
Woman Suffrage in Congress: American Expansion and the Politics of Federalism, 1870-1890	77	(13)
Allison Sneider
Pioneers at the Polls: Woman Suffrage in the West	90	(12)
Rebecca Edwards
Race, Reform, and Reaction at the Turn of the Century: Southern Suffragists, the NAWSA, and the ``Southern Strategy'' in Context	102	(16)
Marjorie Julian Spruill
Female Opposition: The Anti-Suffrage Campaign	118	(12)
Thomas Jablonsky
Carrie Chapman Catt and the Last Years of the Struggle for Woman Suffrage: ``The Winning Plan''	130	(13)
Robert Booth Fowler
Spencer Jones
America and the Pankhursts	143	(16)
Christine Bolt
The Next Generation: Harriot Stanton Blatch and Grassroots Politics	159	(15)
Ellen Carol DuBois
Alice Paul and the Politics of Nonviolent Protest	174	(15)
Linda Ford
Epilogue	189	(8)
Anne Firor Scott
Bibliography	197