Suffrage Movement (original) (raw)
Related papers
During the Women's Liberation Movement, Which Peaked During the 1970S, Almost a Hundred Years Later
2015
Deriving from the word for the pieces of broken pottery once used to cast votes, suffrage means the right to vote in elections. Full suffrage is usually defined as not only the right to vote but to run for office as well. Since most governments, even democratic ones, developed along patriarchal principles, many early republics permitted only men to vote. Even in the often-idealized Athenian democracy of fifth-century B. C. E. Greece, neither slaves nor women were permitted to vote.
Votes for Women" was one of the most important demands in early European Women's Movements, advancing to a powerful image of women's liberation. In the wake of the political transformation after the French Revolution visionary thinkers of the European Enlightenment -like Olympe de Gouges ([1791] 1980: 44), Mary Wollstonecraft ([1792] 1989: 61f) or Gottfried Hippel (1792: 194) -had pointed out the scandalous exclusion of women from civil rights in Europe (Sledziewski 2006: 47). Soon after, political activists mobilized for women's emancipation and equal political rights. For many feminists, women's suffrage symbolised the full recognition of citizenship for women as members of the state with all rights and obligations. This idea of political participation relates to a strong narrative tradition of historical women's movements in different European countries. Furthermore, women's suffrage was an important issue for processes of democratisation, state-building and the rise of liberalism in general (Mayhall/Levine/Fletcher 2000: xv). However, a deeper historical and empirical enquiry into the relations of the (early) Women's movement shows some limits of this universal idea: Not only was the claim for 'the Vote' addressed to patriarchal national systems which systematically excluded women from the public sphere of political affairs, but it was itself a battlefield of unequal power distributions. In many national movements, main organizations and important leaders of the suffrage campaign demanded only a limited vote to the same conditions as men. That demand did not include working class women and it ignored the exclusion of working class men from suffrage. This discrepancy forced heated debates at international gatherings of Women's Movement Organizations (N.N., 12.09.1910, Gleichheit: 387f). A comparison of the German and the British Women's Movement offers insights into the deep impact of gender and class relations on the struggle for the vote in different political environments. This perspective explains different outcomes of the suffrage campaign in both countries after World War I and shows the importance of representation in social movements itself.
Expanding the Suffrage Archive: Chronology, Region, Ideology, Biography, and Memory
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
In 1918, suffragists lamented that the global Spanish flu pandemic had complicated their efforts to get the Nineteenth Amendment through Congress. "Everything conspires against woman suffrage. Now it is the influenza," one suffragist told the New Orleans Times-Picayune. 1 After the Senate defeated the amendment by just two votes that fall, Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), vowed to never again watch another vote. Days later, she herself contracted influenza. Her friend and biographer Mary Gray Peck described Catt as "chained to bed like St. Lawrence to the gridiron." 2 But not even the flu could keep Catt from exercising the right she had devoted her life to securing. In November, she dragged herself from her sickbed to cast her very first ballot in her home state of New York, which had enfranchised women in 1917. Two years later, she would mark the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment by voting in her first presidential election. One hundred years on, another pandemic has hampered commemorations of the 1920 ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. Nonetheless, the anniversary has compelled scholars to revisit familiar questions and ask new ones about the history of women's suffrage and the legacies of the Nineteenth Amendment. What did it mean in a country so deeply divided by gender, race, class, region, ethnicity, and the significance of citizenship? How did women's campaigns for the vote and the eventual passage of the amendment impact ongoing struggles for universal suffrage, racial equality, and women's rights? How were efforts to define American citizenship influenced by suffragists? How did Indigenous women engage those conversations in their advocacy for tribal sovereignty? How did changing ideas about gender and sex, derived from new scientific thinking about brains and bodies, influence the debates about female autonomy? How did female anti-suffrage activists define and engage in politics? Perhaps most significantly, what new sources-beyond those generated by the mainstream, whitedominated suffrage groups-can we mine to tell a more complete and nuanced history of suffrage and women's rights more broadly? This special issue of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era marks the suffrage centennial by highlighting previously untold stories, new digital archives, and an expanded timeline. Notions of race, gender, sexuality, suffrage, and citizenship rights were central to multiple political debates and movements. The essays in this issue destabilize the idea that the movement for women's suffrage was singularly focused on the
Women's Suffrage and Cultural Representation: The making of a movement
Women’s Suffrage in Word, Image, Music, Stage and Screen: The Making of a Movement, 2021
The women's suffrage movement engaged with art in many different ways, enabling campaigners to express their political views as well as generating publicity for the cause. This chapter discusses the movement's engagement with art in terms of literature, the visual arts, music and drama, indicating how early feminist activists worked in these different fields in collective support of the campaign. It provides a brief outline of the women's suffrage movement in the UK and its key organisations, identifying some of the previous scholarship in the field. It also offers an overview of the contents of the volume, concluding with a one-paragraph summary of each of its chapters in turn.