Suffrage and the City

Suffrage and the City
Author: Lauren C. Santangelo
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2019-06-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190850388

In 1917, women won the vote in New York State. Suffrage and the City explores how activists in New York City were instrumental in achieving this milestone. Santangelo uncovers the ways in which the demand for women's rights intersected with the history, politics, and culture of New York City in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. The fight for the vote in the nation's largest metropolis demanded that suffragists both mobilize and contest urban etiquette, as they worked to gain visibility and underscore their cause's respectability. From the Polo Grounds to the Lower East Side, organizers championed political equality to anyone who would listen in the early twentieth century. Their Fifth Avenue parades showcased the various Manhattan subcultures, including industrial laborers, teachers, nurses, and even socialites, that they transformed into a broad coalition by the 1910s. Films and newspapers broadcasted their tactics to rest of the country, just as the national suffrage organization decided to draw on Gotham's resources by moving its own headquarters to midtown and thereby turning Manhattan into the movement's capital. The city's mores, rhythms, and physical layout helped to shape what was possible for organizers campaigning within it. At the same time, suffragists helped to redefine the urban experience for white, middle-class women. Combining urban studies, geography, and gender and political history, Suffrage and the City demonstrates that the Big Apple was more than just a stage for suffrage action; it was part of the drama. As much as enfranchisement was a political victory in New York State, it was also a uniquely urban and cultural one.

A Simple Justice

A Simple Justice
Author: Melanie Beals Goan
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2020-11-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0813180198

When the Declaration of Independence was signed by a group of wealthy white men in 1776, poor white men, African Americans, and women quickly discovered that the unalienable rights it promised were not truly for all. The Nineteenth Amendment eventually gave women the right to vote in 1920, but the change was not welcomed by people of all genders in politically and religiously conservative Kentucky. As a result, the suffrage movement in the Commonwealth involved a tangled web of stakeholders, entrenched interest groups, unyielding constitutional barriers, and activists with competing strategies. In A Simple Justice, Melanie Beals Goan offers a new and deeper understanding of the women's suffrage movement in Kentucky by following the people who labored long and hard to see the battle won. Women's suffrage was not simply a question of whether women could and should vote; it carried more serious implications for white supremacy and for the balance of federal and state powers—especially in a border state. Shocking racial hostility surfaced even as activists attempted to make America more equitable. Goan looks beyond iconic women such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to reveal figures whose names have been lost to history. Laura Clay and Madeline McDowell Breckinridge led the Kentucky movement, but they did not do it alone. This timely study introduces readers to individuals across the Bluegrass State who did their part to move the nation closer to achieving its founding ideals.

Woman Suffrage and Politics

Woman Suffrage and Politics
Author: Carrie Chapman Catt
Publisher: Seattle : University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 524
Release: 1923
Genre: History
ISBN:

"Every serious student of woman suffrage must take account of this vital contemporary document, which tells the story of the struggle for woman suffrage in America from the first woman's rights convention in 1848 to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Originally published in 1923, it gives the inside story of this remarkable movement, told by two ardent suffragists: Carrie Chapman Catt (of whom the New York Times wrote, 'More than anyone else she turned Woman Suffrage from a dream into a fact') and Nettie Rogers Shuler. Writing from vivid recollection, the authors offer some of their own ideas about what caused the United States to be the twenty-seventh country to give the vote to women when she ought 'by rights' to have been the first"--Unedited summary from book cover.