4 - Local Citizenship and Woman Suffrage

Summary

Chapter 4 presents the historical case of women’s suffrage. Though prior to the Nineteenth Amendment women were deemed unsuited for citizenship at the national level because their designated role was exclusively within the private sphere of the home rather than the public sphere of politics, they nevertheless attained the right to vote in local elections in many places because the municipality was itself perceived as a private, home-like sphere dedicated to quotidian functions like the care of children that fell squarely within women’s sphere. Granting women the right to vote in local elections was thus consistent with the idea that local citizenship was qualitatively distinct from national citizenship.