Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T01:06:29.075Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Getting Right with Women's Suffrage

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2010

Jean H. Baker
Jean H. Baker
Affiliation:
Goucher College
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

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.

Type
2005 Shgape Distinguished Historian Address
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , January 2006 , pp. 7 - 18
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2006

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Muncy, Robyn, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform,1890-1935 (New York, 1991)Google Scholar; Gustafson, Melanie, Women in the Republican Party, 1854-1924 (Urbana, 2001)Google Scholar.

2 “Recent Scholarship,” Journal of American History, vols. 81-91. To put this into perspective in terms of women's history, while I did not count dissertations on other topics in those years, in one month—September 2004—318 dissertations in all were listed.

3 Miller, Sydney, Progressivism and the New Democracy (Amherst, 1999)Google Scholar .

4 Keller, Morton, Rebuilding a New Society: Public Policy and Social Change in American Society, 1900-1933 (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 303Google Scholar.

5 Cott, Nancy, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, 1987), 99–101Google Scholar.

6 Schudson, Michael, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (New York, 1998), 173Google Scholar.

7 Hoff, Joan, Law, Gender, and Injustice: A Legal History of U.S. Women (New York, 1991), 6–81Google Scholar . Hoff also describes the legal history of women as a “broken barometer” because changes i n the legal and political system come after they would have helped in the struggle for justice—that is, the constitutional right to abortion came after the effective means and mass distribution of contraception, no-fault divorce after it could have helped women, etc.

8 On this point see Gidlow, Liette, The Big Vote: Gender, Consumer Culture and Middle-Class Power in the Early Twentieth Century (Baltimore, 2002)Google Scholar. For male fellowship, Baker, Jean H., Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (1985; New York, 1998), 291–304Google Scholar.

9 Skrownek, Stephen, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), 165–66 and passimGoogle Scholar.

10 Campbell, Ballard, Representative Democracy: Public Policy and Midwestern Legislation in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Sneider, Allison, “Woman Suffrage in Congress: American Expansion and the Politics of Federalism,” in Votes For Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited, ed. Baker, Jean (New York, 2002), 77–89Google Scholar.

12 Novak, William, “The Legal Transformation of Citizenship in Nineteenth Century America,” in The Democratic Experiment, ed. Jacobs, Meg et al. (Princeton, 2003), 85Google Scholar.

13 With a nod to economics, the concept of social capital is based on the idea of “capital” rooted in norms of reciprocity and networks of civic engagement—the sociality of communities with overlapping networks extending the efficacy of the engaged citizen. See articles under the heading of “Patterns of Social Capital” in journal of Interdisciplinary History 29 (Winter 1999)Google Scholar.

14 DuBois, Ellen and Dumenil, Lynn, Through Women's Eyes: An American History (Boston, 2005)Google Scholar.

15 Baker, Jean H., Sisters: The Lives of America's Suffragists (New York, 2005)Google Scholar.

16 Jeffrey, Julie Roy, The Great Army of Abolitionists: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Alovement (Chapel Hill, 2000), 1–2Google Scholar.

17 Anderson, Bonnie, Joyous Greetings: The First International Women's Movement 1830-1860 (New York, 2000)Google Scholar.