Women's Voting Rights and the 19th Amendment

Looking forward to the 100-year anniversary of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 2020, this collection of original essays takes a long view of the past century of women's political engagement to gauge how much women have achieved in the political arena. The volume looks back at the decades since women won the right to vote to analyze the changes, developments, and even continuities in women's roles in the broad political sphere. Ultimately, the book asks two important questions about the last 100 years of women's suffrage: 1) How did the Nineteenth Amendment alter the American political system? and 2) How has women's engagement in politics changed over the last 100 years? As the volume traces women's forceful presence and limitations in politics over the past century, it also helps us look forward to consider the next 100 years: what additional victories might be won and what new defeats will need women's response?

Most Americans take for granted their right to vote, whether they choose to exercise it or not. But the history of suffrage in the U.S. is, in fact,the story of a struggle to achieve this right by our society's marginalized groups. In The Right to Vote, Duke historian Alexander Keyssar explores the evolution of suffrage over the course of the nation's history. Examining the many features of the history of the right to vote in the U.S.--class, ethnicity, race, gender, religion, and age--the book explores the conditions under which American democracy has expanded and contracted over the years. Keyssar presents convincing evidence that the history of the right to vote has not been one of a steady history of expansion and increasing inclusion, noting that voting rights contracted substantially in the U.S. between 1850 and 1920. Keyssar also presents a controversial thesis: that the primary factor promoting the expansion of the suffrage has been war and the primary factors promoting contraction or delaying expansion have been class tension and class conflict.

From 1865, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton led campaigns for equal rights for all but were ultimately defeated by a Congress and reformers intent on applying suffrage established with constitutional amendments and legislation to men only. Ignoring all women, black and white, advocates argued that enfranchising black men would solve race problems, masking the effect on women. This book weaves Anthony's and Stanton's campaigns together with national and congressional events, in the process uncovering relationships among these events and revealing the devastating impact on the women and their campaign for civil rights for all citizens.

When Women Won the Vote focuses on the final decade (1910-1920) of American women's fight for the vote--a fight that had already been underway for more than sixty years, and which culminated in the passage of the 19th amendment in 1920. Sandra Opdycke reveals how woman suffragists campaigned in communities across the country, building a mass movement and tirelessly publicizing their cause. Meanwhile, in Washington DC, the main suffrage organization led by Carrie Chapman Catt courted the President and Congress with diplomatic skill, while the smaller National Woman's Party, headed by Alice Paul, intensified political pressure with confrontational picketing and demonstrations. Supported by primary documents and online eResources, this book adds context by describing the historical events that shaped this crucial decade in American women's fight for the vote.

Four generations of women fought for the right to vote. Suffrage not only reminds us of the laws that conspired against women's equality in the post-Civil War United States, but it also illustrates--through the eyes of the suffragists themselves--the cultural and religious norms that had held women in second-class status for centuries. Early suffragists grappled with isolation and outright hostility as they lectured around the nation, even as they tried to reassure the public that politicized women would still serve the family. Others espoused outrage by organizing public protests. This book shows how lasting political change comes about through a combination of working from within the system and outside of it, and deftly illustrates the tensions within the movement. Although the vote was finally won in 1920, it was not without tremendous sacrifice. The book lays bare the strategies that led to the single-minded focus on the vote and the consequences of postponing action on so many other issues that remained for later generations to address, including reproductive freedom, labor rights, and equal pay.

The feminism of equal rights -- "Liberal feminisms" and political autonomy -- Putting suffrage first : liberal feminist responses to the Reconstruction amendments -- Frances Willard and the feminism of fear -- An exceptional victory : the Colorado campaign of 1893 -- Airs of respectability : racism and nativism in the woman suffrage movement -- The feminism of personal development and the drive for a federal amendment.

The volume contains the work of many reform agitators, among them Angelina Grimké, Lucy Stone, Carrie Chapman Catt, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Anna Howard Shaw, Jane Addams, Sojourner Truth, and Victoria Woodhull, as well as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Ida Husted Harper.

This engaging memoir, originally published 1970, relates Wells’s private life as a mother as well as her public activities as a teacher, lecturer, and journalist in her fight for equality and justice.

The personal is political -- Having their say: conversations with sisters and brothers -- Collisions: Black liberation versus women's liberation -- The Black church: what's the word? -- Race secrets and the body politic -- Black, lesbian, and gay: speaking the unspeakable -- No respect: gender politics and hip-hop -- Where do we go from here?

A compelling and readable narrative history, How Long? How Long? presents both a rethinking of social movement theory and a controversial thesis: that chroniclers have egregiously neglected the most important leaders of the Civil Rights movement, African-American women, in favor of higher-profile African-American men and white women. Author Belinda Robnett argues that the diversity of experiences of the African-American women organizers has been underemphasized in favor of monolithic treatments of their femaleness and blackness.

Too Heavy a Load celebrates this century's rich history of black women defending themselves, from Ida B. Wells to Anita Hill. Although most prominently a history of the century-long struggle against racism and male chauvinism, Deborah Gray White also movingly illuminates black women's painful struggle to hold their racial and gender identities intact while feeling the inexorable pull of the agendas of white women and black men. Finally, it tells the larger and lamentable story of how Americans began this century measuring racial progress by the status of black women but gradually came to focus on the status of black men-the masculinization of America's racial consciousness. Writing with the same magisterial eye for historical detail as in her best-selling Ar'n't I a Woman, Deborah Gray White has given us a moving and definitive history of struggle and freedom.

Acclaimed by writers Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou, Paula Giddings’s When and Where I Enter is not only an eloquent testament to the unsung contributions of individual women to our nation, but to the collective activism which elevated the race and women’s movements that define our times. From Ida B. Wells to the first black Presidential candidate, Shirley Chisholm; from the anti-lynching movement to the struggle for suffrage and equal protection under the law; Giddings tells the stories of black women who transcended the dual discrimination of race and gender―and whose legacy inspires our own generation. Forty years after the passing of the Voting Rights Act, when phrases like “affirmative action” and “wrongful imprisonment” are rallying cries, Giddings words resonate now more than ever.

An account of the 1920 ratification of the constitutional amendment that granted voting rights to women traces the culmination of seven decades of legal battles and cites the pivotal contributions of famous suffragists and political leaders.

Glenda Gilmore recovers the rich nuances of southern political history by placing black women at its center. She explores the pivotal and interconnected roles played by gender and race in North Carolina politics from the period immediately preceding the disfranchisement of black men in 1900 to the time black and white women gained the vote in 1920. Gender and Jim Crow argues that the ideology of white supremacy embodied in the Jim Crow laws of the turn of the century profoundly reordered society and that within this environment, black women crafted an enduring tradition of political activism.

The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified on July 9, 1868, identified all legitimate voters as "male." In so doing, it added gender-specific language to the U.S. Constitution for the first time. Suffrage Reconstructed considers how and why the amendment's authors made this decision. Vividly detailing congressional floor bickering and activist campaigning, Laura E. Free takes readers into the pre- and postwar fights over precisely who should have the right to vote. Free demonstrates that all men, black and white, were the ultimate victors of these fights, as gender became the single most important marker of voting rights during Reconstruction.

Comprised of historical texts spanning two centuries with commentary on each period by the editor, this book covers the major issues and figures involved in the women's suffrage movement with a special focus on diversity, incorporating race, class, and gender. The writings of such figures as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony are featured alongside accounts of Native American women and African American suffragists such as Sarah Mapps Douglas and Harriet Purvis

This scholarly-based, popularly written text engages students with the history of how women overcame two centuries of discrimination, property foreclosures, rotten eggs, jail time, state and federal defeats and racism to win the right to vote. How Women Won the Vote will serve as a welcome text in courses in U.S., Women's Political, or Cultural history. It will also be useful as a reference for graduate seminars or colloquia

This comprehensive look at the African American women who fought for the right to vote analyzes the women's own stories and examines why they joined and how they participated in the U.S. women's suffrage movement. Terborg-Penn shows how every political and racial effort to keep African American women disfranchised met with their active resistance until black women finally achieved full citizenship.

Written by leading scholars of African American and women's history, the essays in this volume seek to reconceptualize the political history of black women in the United States by placing them "at the center of our thinking." The book explores how slavery, racial discrimination, and gender shaped the goals that African American women set for themselves, their families, and their race and looks at the political tools at their disposal. By identifying key turning points for black women, the essays create a new chronology and a new paradigm for historical analysis. The chronology begins in 1837 with the interracial meeting of antislavery women in New York City and concludes with the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

The 1913 Washington Suffrage Parade -- The Photographs -- Planning the Parade -- The Suffrage Hikers -- Before the Parade -- Upper Pennsylvania Avenue before the Parade -- Starting the Parade -- The Pageant -- The Struggle up Pennsylvania Avenue -- The End of the Parade -- Woodrow Wilson's Arrival and Inaugural -- The Aftermath

The epic history of African American women’s pursuit of political power — and how it transformed America.