In 2020, we marked the one hundredth anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, a milestone achievement in women’s rights and voting rights. In this issue, we are reminded that the fight for women’s suffrage was but one part of American women’s political activism. We feature a roundtable celebration of Elisabeth Israels Perry’s After the Vote: Feminist Politics in La Guardia’s New York. The roundtable, moderated by Kathryn Kish Sklar and featuring Chris Capozzola, Liette Gidlow, Melanie Gustafson, Annelise Orleck, Kim Cary Warren, and Mason Williams, considers Perry’s last book as part of a long-standing and ongoing conversation about women’s history and political work. Throughout her life and career, Perry not only championed women’s history but also helped make the ideas, actions, and lives of women central to United States history—and to the history of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. She was long a champion of this journal and of SHGAPE. She served on the journal’s editorial board from 2000 until 2004 and was SHGAPE president from 1998 until 2000.
We see Perry’s rich legacy in this issue’s three articles. The issue begins with Kelly Marino’s study of the College Equal Suffrage League, an organization that brought the women’s suffrage movement onto college campuses and made women’s political work part of college life. Ruby Oram’s examination of debates over women’s vocational education turns to the politics of women’s work in Progressive Era Chicago. William Cossen examines women’s participation in the 1893 Columbian Catholic Congress to show how women were increasingly central to the shaping of American Catholicism. As always, we conclude with an exciting and wide-ranging collection of book reviews.
