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Getting Right with Women's Suffrage

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2010

Jean H. Baker
Jean H. Baker
Affiliation:
Goucher College
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Extract

My title is a gloss from Everett Dirksen, the long-time, now-deceased U.S. senator from Illinois who encouraged his party “to get right with Abraham Lincoln.” As Republicans drifted away from acknowledging their partisan connection to the sixteenth president, Dirksen appreciated how Lincoln could serve as an invigorating, unifying theme for Republicans in the post-Civil Rights Era. The analogy, of course, is that suffrage history has been similarly marginalized, submerged even within the limited space given to women's history by attention to Progressive Era associations and service groups such as the General Federation of Women's Clubs, the PTA, women's literary clubs, as well as the settlement house movement and the Women's National Republican Club.

Type
2005 Shgape Distinguished Historian Address
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , January 2006 , pp. 7 - 18
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2006

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References

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8 On this point see Gidlow, Liette, The Big Vote: Gender, Consumer Culture and Middle-Class Power in the Early Twentieth Century (Baltimore, 2002)Google Scholar. For male fellowship, Baker, Jean H., Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (1985; New York, 1998), 291–304Google Scholar.

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