Votes for Women

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.

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.

Introduction Jean H. Baker
1. The Case for Reform Antecedents for the Woman's Rights Movement Alison M. Parker
2. Voices of Suffrage: Sojourner Truth, Frances Watkins Harper, and the Struggle for Woman Suffrage Nell Irvin Painter
3. New York Strategy: The New York Woman's Movement and the Civil War Faye Dudden
4. Woman Suffrage in Congress: American Expansion and the Politics of Federalism, 1870-1890 Allison Sneider
5. Pioneers at the Polls: Woman Suffrage in the West Rebecca Edwards
6. Race, Reform, and Reaction at the Turn of the Century: Southern Suffragists, the NAWSA, and the "Southern Strategy" in Context Marjorie Julian Spruill
7. Female Opposition: The Anti-Suffrage Campaign Thomas Jablonsky
8. Carrie Chapman Catt and the Last Years of the Struggle for Woman Suffrage: "The Winning Plan" Robert Booth Fowler and Spencer Jones
9. America and the Pankhursts Christine Bolt
10. The Next Generation: Harriot Stanton Blatch and Grassroots Politics Ellen Carol DuBois
11. Alice Paul and the Politics of Nonviolent Protest Linda Ford
Epilogue Anne Firor Scott
Bibliography