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REFLECTIONS ON AILEEN KRADITOR'S LEGACY: FIFTY YEARS OF WOMAN SUFFRAGE HISTORIOGRAPHY, 1965–2014

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2015

Louise M. Newman
Louise M. Newman*
Affiliation:
University of Florida
*
email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article assesses the impact that Aileen Kraditor's classic monograph, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement (1965) has had on fifty years of suffrage historiography. Kraditor is best known among scholars for offering the terms “justice” and “expediency” to distinguish between two strains of suffragist argumentation, the former of which she associated with the nineteenth century and the latter with the Progressive Era. Although specialists no longer believe in a firm divide between the two periods, many continue to differentiate between principled (egalitarian) arguments that called for suffrage as a universal right of citizenship and instrumental (expedient) claims that often contained racist assumptions about white women's superiority. The majority of scholars now accept Kraditor's fundamental insight that a political movement devoted to the extension of democracy contained within it antidemocratic and racist elements, but they have challenged other key aspects of Kraditor's work, including her characterization of white southern women's advocacy of suffrage and her Turnerian assumptions about why statewide suffrage referenda succeeded first (and primarily) in the West. In addition, scholars have expanded the terrain of women's political activism to include analyses of black women's suffrage activities and understandings of citizenship; in so doing they have connected the regional histories of the South and the Midwest, displacing Kraditor's national narrative. Collectively the field has moved far beyond Kraditor's focus on the National American Woman Suffrage Association to emphasize the enormous range of suffrage activities that took place before the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, demonstrating how woman suffrage encompassed new understandings of citizenship that were inseparable from the histories of Reconstruction, U.S. expansion, and western imperialism.

Type
Historiographical Interventions
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , July 2015 , pp. 290 - 316
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2015 

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References

NOTES

1 Lisa Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women's Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898 (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 198.

2 Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965; repr., New York: Norton, 1981). Hereafter all references to Ideas are cited parenthetically in the text and are to the Norton edition.

3 Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman's Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1959; repr., New York: Atheneum, 1968, 1973).

4 In “Getting Right with Women's Suffrage,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 5 (Jan. 2006): 7–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Jean H. Baker argued that scholarly interest in the history of woman suffrage was not as extensive as specialists in the field might want or expect. However, some new full-length monographs have appeared since Baker voiced this concern, including Allison L. Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age: U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question, 1879–1929 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Lisa G. Materson, For the Freedom of Her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877–1932 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Faye E. Dudden, Fighting Chance: The Struggle over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls (2014); and Sally G. McMillen, Lucy Stone: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

5 Tetrault, Myth of Seneca Falls, 69.

6 To cite one example: the publication of an extensive microfilm collection in the 1990s of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony's papers, edited by Ann Gordon and Patricia Holland, has meant that scholars have been able to examine the complexity of Stanton's and Anthony's thought in much more depth. Consequently, several new biographies and treatments of Elizabeth Cady Stanton's life and thought have recently appeared, notably Kathi Kern, Mrs. Stanton's Bible (New York: Cornell University Press, 2001); Sue Davis, The Political Thought of Elizabeth Cady Stanton: Women's Rights and the American Political Traditions (New York: New York University Press, 2008); and Lori D. Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009). Interestingly, Anthony still has not been scrutinized to the same degree. The most recent scholarly biography remains Kathleen Barry, Susan B. Anthony: A Biography of a Singular Feminist (New York: New York University Press, 1988). However, historians are beginning to reexamine Anthony's life and legacy. See the selections in Christine L. Ridarsky and Mary M. Huth, eds., Susan B. Anthony and the Struggle for Equal Rights (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2012), especially Ann D. Gordon, “Knowing Susan B. Anthony: The Stories We Tell of a Life,” 201–34. Moreover, historians of suffrage have relied heavily on the multivolume compendium, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda, Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1 (New York: Fowler & Wells, 1881); vol. 2 (New York: Fowler & Wells, 1882); and vol. 3 (Rochester: Susan B. Anthony, 1886), which focused on the activities of the National Woman Suffrage Association, slighting the activities of other suffrage organizations; see Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls, 71. Nonetheless, a spate of excellent biographies now exist on other woman's rights activists, both white and black women, who were important historically but who had not been as well researched as either Stanton or Anthony, including Dorothy Sterling, Ahead of Her Time: Abby Kelley and the Politics of Antislavery (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991); Andrea Moore Kerr, Lucy Stone: Speaking out for Equality (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992); Carolyn L. Karcher, The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994); Nell Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996); Patricia A. Schechter, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Jean Fagan Yellin, Harriet Jacobs: A Life (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2004); Carol Faulkner, Lucretia Mott's Heresy: Abolition and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); and McMillen, Lucy Stone (2015), to name a few.

7 Black scholars challenged this periodization in the 1980s as they explored the political history of African American women. Summarizing the import of this scholarship in 1997, Ann Gordon wrote an introduction for papers first presented at a 1987 conference, pointing out that the commonly agreed upon start date for the suffrage movement, 1848, was a decade too late and that the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 was much too early an end date. Instead Gordon followed these scholars' suggestion of 1837 as a more appropriate beginning to black women's public efforts “to define their roles independent of men,” since it marked the first Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, an interracial gathering held in New York City, and 1965 as a more appropriate end date, since it marked the passage of the Voting Rights Act, reaffirming the responsibility of the federal government to enforce the right to vote specified by the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments. See Ann D. Gordon, “Introduction,” African American Women and the Vote, 1837–1965, eds. Ann D. Gordon et al. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 2–3. Beginning in the 1990s, prominent white historians in U.S. women's history wrote short synthetic narratives that pointed out the limitations of the conventional periodization. See, for example, Nancy F. Cott, “Across the Great Divide: Women in Politics Before and After 1920” in Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, ed., One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement (Troutdale, OR: New Sage Press, 1995), 353–73; Ann D. Gordon, “Woman Suffrage (Not Universal Suffrage)” in Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, ed., Votes for Women!: The Woman Suffrage Movement in Tennessee, the South, and the Nation (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995), 3–24; and Anne Firor Scott, “Epilogue” in Jean H. Baker, ed., Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 189–96. Although published more than a decade ago, Scott's epilogue still usefully situates suffrage historiography in the larger field of women's history, reminding readers that the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 was not quite the divide that some may believe. This critique is now embedded in a larger one about the limitations of the “waves” metaphor—suffrage being construed as part of the “first wave” and the women's liberation movements of the 1970s as part of the “second wave” of feminism, a heuristic schema that has been firmly cemented by the classification system used by the Library of Congress. See Nancy A. Hewitt, “From Seneca Falls to Suffrage? Reimagining a ‘Master’ Narrative in U.S. Women's History” in No Permanent Waves: Recasting Histories of U.S. Feminism, ed. Nancy A Hewitt (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010); and Hewitt, Nancy A., “Feminist Frequencies: Regenerating the Wave Metaphor,” Feminist Studies 38 (Fall 2012): 658–80Google Scholar.

8 Kraditor also published an article, “Tactical Problems of the Woman-Suffrage Movement in the South,” Louisiana Studies (Winter 1966): 289–307. In the 1980s, Kraditor published two additional monographs: The Radical Persuasion, 1890–1917: Aspects of the Intellectual History and Historiography of Three American Radical Organizations (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981); and “Jimmy Higgins”: The Mental World of the American Rank-and-file Communist, 1930–1958 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988).

9 Scott also investigated the suffrage movement and published a key article, “The ‘New Woman’ in the New South,” South Atlantic Quarterly 6 (Autumn 1962): 473–83Google Scholar, as well as her now-classic monograph, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). Also see Anne F. Scott and Andrew M. Scott, One Half the People: The Fight for Woman Suffrage (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1975; repr., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982). Gerda Lerner analyzed the antebellum phase of women's rights and abolitionism in The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels against Slavery (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967).

10 In recognition of Gerda Lerner's and Anne Firor Scott's importance to the field, the Organization of American Historians awards the annual Lerner-Scott prize to the best doctoral dissertation in U.S. women's history each year.

11 Kraditor used the term “intellectual history” to refer to her approach in her preface to the Norton edition of The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement (1981), xii. However, in a paper she delivered to the annual conference of the Organization of American Historians in 1971, she referred to herself as a “radical historian.” See Greene, Jack P., “The Sixty-Fourth Annual Meeting of the Organization of American Historians,” Journal of American History 58 (Dec. 1971): 682–711CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 705.”

12 See Kraditor, Aileen S., “American Radical Historians on Their Heritage,” Past and Present 56 (August 1972): 136–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; quotation appears on 139.

13 Gerda Lerner's comment appeared in an influential essay, “New Approaches to the Study of Women in American History,” Journal of Social History 3 (Autumn 1969): 53–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar; the relevant statement appears on 54. Kraditor's response to Lerner, published more than ten years later in her Preface to the Norton edition of Ideas was acerbic: “I did not then, nor do I now, think that any aspect of women's history is ‘what is important to know about women’ more than any other, or that a scholar's choice of topics should be guided by didactic motives,” v–vi.

14 An indication that scholars considered Kraditor an important intellectual presence in the newly emerging field of women's history can be discerned in Ruth Rosen's 1971 assessment and in Judith M. Stanley's 1973 essay; see Rosen, “Sexism in History or Writing Women's History Is a Tricky Business,” Journal of Marriage and the Family (Aug. 1971): 543; and Stanley, , “'I Desire You Would Remember the Ladies': Anthologies and Women's History: A Review Essay,” The History Teacher 6 (May 1973): 453–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Further evidence of Kraditor's salience at this point in time is suggested by the fact that she contributed a foreword to Ronald Hogeland, ed., Women and Womanhood in America (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1973). However in the mid-to-late 1970s, a shift in the perception of Kraditor's importance occurred as social historians with different kinds of questions became more prominent in the field. Especially revealing is Carol Smith-Rosenberg's acknowledgment of Kraditor's Ideas as a “prize-winning analysis of the suffrage arguments” but also as an example of “traditional women's history” that had failed to “develop a methodology appropriate to their subject matter.” Without mentioning Kraditor by name, but clearly having her work in mind, Smith-Rosenberg faulted such “pioneer” women's historians for continuing “to employ traditional sources developed by political historians: the letters, diaries, and public pronouncements of prominent activists, the official reports of political reform groups, public events reported in newspapers” and for a methodology that “remained descriptive, innocent of attempts at systematic analysis.” Smith-Rosenberg, Carol, “The New Woman and the New History,” Feminist Studies 3 (Autumn 1975): 185–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 186. In 1978, Ellen Carol DuBois identified Kraditor's Ideas as a significant work in her own monograph, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 15FN1. But in 2006 DuBois did not mention Kraditor when she reflected on the emergence of women's history as an historical subfield, identifying only Gerda Lerner and Anne Firor Scott; see Dubois, , “Three Decades of Women's History,” Women's History 35 (2006): 47–64Google Scholar. Nonetheless, as late as 1988, Linda K. Kerber referred to Kraditor's introduction in Up from the Pedestal as “pathbreaking” for its time; see Kerber, , “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman's Place: The Rhetoric of Women's History,” Journal of American History 75 (June 1988): 9–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp.12. For a more recent assessment along the same lines, see Morton, Marion J.'s mention of Kraditor in her review of Kate Wiegand's Red Feminism in American Historical Review 106 (Dec. 2001): 1834CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Recent searches of JSTOR, Google Scholar, and the Web of Science database (known informally as the reverse citation index) each produced hundreds of hits. While I expected historians and political scientists would know of Kraditor, I was surprised to find her work cited by legal historians and tested for its empirical validity by sociologists. See the following sociological treatments: Susan E. Marshall, Splintered Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Campaign against Woman Suffrage (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997); and Holly J. McCammon, Lyndi Hewitt, and Smith, Sandy, “'No Weapon Save Argument’: Strategic Frame Amplification in the U.S. Woman Suffrage Movement,” Sociological Quarterly 45 (Summer 2004): 529–56Google Scholar. Also see the work by the following political scientists and legal scholars: McDonagh, Eileen L. and Price, H. Douglas, “Woman Suffrage in the Progressive Era: Patterns of Opposition and Support in Referenda Voting, 1910–1918,” American Political Science Review 79 (1985): 415–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ritter, Gretchen, “Gender and Citizenship after the Nineteenth Amendment,” Polity 32 (Spring 2000): 345–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lawsky, Sarah B., “A Nineteenth Amendment Defense of the Violence Against Women Act,” Yale Law Journal 109 (January 2000): 783–816CrossRefGoogle Scholar. An educator, Jennifer Frost, used Kraditor to devise high school/college curricula in “Integrating Women and Active Learning into the U.S. History Survey,” The History Teacher 33 (May 2000): 363–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Finally, Patricia Greenwood Harrison adopted Kraditor's framework in a comparative study of British and U.S. suffragism; see Harrison, Connecting Links: The British and American Woman Suffrage Movements, 1900–1914 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2000).

16 Mann, Arthur's review in Annals of the Academy of Political and Social Science 363 (January 1966): 182Google Scholar.

17 Mann review of Kraditor, 182.

18 Schlesinger, Elizabeth Bancroft's review in New England Quarterly 31 (March 1966): 102–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Elizabeth Schlesinger was married to Harvard professor, Arthur Schlesinger, and the Schlesinger Library on the Radcliffe campus at Harvard University, which houses a renowned collection in U.S. women's history, is named for both of them.

19 See Scott, Anne Firor's review in Journal of Southern History 31 (Nov. 1965): 472–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Fifty years later, W. W. Norton is still using this quote on its website in its publicity for Kraditor's book; http://books.wwnorton.com/books/detail.aspx?ID=4704.

20 Kraditor's source of information for these statistics was The National American Woman Suffrage Association's Victory: How Women Won It: A Centennial Symposium, 1840–1940 (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1940), 53, 72.

21 These included the manuscript collections at the Library of Congress; the New York Public Library; New York Historical Society; the Bancroft and Huntington Libraries; and the archives at Swarthmore, Smith, Radcliffe (Schlesinger Library); and the University of Kentucky. In an appendix, Kraditor provided biographical information for twenty-six white leaders of the woman suffrage movement, which she gleaned from biographical dictionaries, noting that the group was highly educated, contained a significant proportion of single women (nine out of twenty-six had never married); and was ethnically and socially homogeneous, being composed almost entirely of Anglo Saxon, U.S.-born, middle-class women. Only one of these leaders, Lucy Burns, was Catholic; another was from Northern Ireland, probably Protestant. Kraditor, Ideas, 265–82.

22 Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age, 12.

23 Kraditor often pointed out exceptions or counter evidence to her generalizations. Thus, while she insisted that “arguments for woman suffrage based on fear of the foreign-born vote remained [predominant in suffrage discourse in the Progressive Era],” she was also aware that “some suffragists adopted a new sympathetic approach to the immigrant shortly after the turn of the century”; Ideas, 138.

24 Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 228FN74; Newman, White Women's Rights, 18; Rebecca J. Mead, How the Vote Was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868–1914 (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 5; Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age, 12–13.

25 Skocpol, Theda, “The Enactment of Mothers' Pensions: Civic Mobilization and Agenda Setting, or Benefits of the Ballot? Response,” American Political Science Review 89 (Sept. 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: 729FN5. McCammon, Hewitt, and Smith, “'No Weapon Save Argument,’” 534–35.

26 McCammon and her co-researchers agreed that a marked increase in “reform” arguments occurred between 1909 and 1915, but they argued that justice arguments prevailed again after 1915; see McCammon, Hewitt, and Smith, “'No Weapon Save Argument,’” 534–35.

27 Kraditor was aware that Stanton and Anthony, among others, had made similar claims in the late 1860s, as freedmen's rights were being debated in the context of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, but she did not consider this earlier discussion relevant to the changes taking place at the turn of the twentieth century. Instead, relying on Lasch, Christopher, “The Anti-Imperialists, the Philippines and the Inequality of Man,’ Journal of Southern History 24 (1958): 319–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and C. Vann Woodward's Origins of the New South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), Kraditor argued that the racism of the 1890s, which was especially widespread and virulent, centrally informed suffrage discourse during that period; Ideas, 164FN1.”

28 This literature is immense. A few of the most influential works by feminist philosophers and political theorists in the 1980s include Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); Zillah R. Eisenstein, The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism (New York: Longman, 1981); Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988); and historian Scott, Joan, “Deconstructing Equality-versus-Difference or the Uses of Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism,” Feminist Studies 14 (Spring 1988): 33–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Nancy Cott helped bring much needed clarity to this topic; see Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding Of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 5. For my gloss on this issue, see Newman, White Women's Rights, 18.

30 Anastatia Sims, “The Radical Vision of the Antisuffragists” in Wheeler, ed., Votes for Women!, 107.

31 Some of this phrasing is from White Women's Rights, 8, and some of it is from Allison Sneider's exposition of my thesis; see Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age, 13–14. My understanding of what I called “evolutionary discourse” emerged out of discussions I had with fellow graduate students at Brown University in the early 1990s, including conversations with Kevin Gaines and Gail Bederman; see Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 25, for a concise discussion of this intellectual paradigm.

32 Davis, The Political Thought of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 4.

33 Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age, 13.

34 See Lasser, Carol, “Century of Struggle, Decades of Revision: A Retrospective on Eleanor Flexner's Suffrage History,” Reviews in American History 15 (June 1987): 344–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Excellent bibliographies appear in Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls, 247–68; Dudden, Fighting Chance, 265–73; and Materson, For the Freedom of Her Race, 299–320. My selections of topics are not meant to be exhaustive. For example, Kraditor treated antisuffragism as a unified conservative ideology that opposed the expansion of women's political roles, and important studies have since reexamined antisuffragist ideology in an attempt to understand why so many white women opposed their own enfranchisement, seemingly against their own self-interest. This scholarship has found that female leaders of the antisuffrage movement were also leaders in other reform movements and did not, in contrast to male antis, concede a “natural” inferiority of their sex. Two key dissertations on antisuffragism were completed in the 1970s but were not published until 1994: Jane Jerome Camhi, “Women Against Women: American Antisuffragism, 1880–1920,” (PhD diss., Tuft University, 1973), published as a full-length monograph with the same title (Brooklyn: Carlson, 1994); and Thomas James Jablonsky's dissertation, “Duty, Nature and Stability: The Female Anti-Suffragists in the United States, 1894–1920,” (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 1978), revised and published under the title, The Home, Heaven and Mother Party: Female Anti-Suffragists in the United States, 1868–1920 (Brooklyn: Carlson, 1994). The first article to be published on antisuffragism was by a student of Kraditor's, Stevenson, Louise L., “Women Anti-Suffragists in the 1915 Massachusetts Campaign,” New England Quarterly 52 (March 1979): 80–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see Marshall, Susan E., “In Defense of Separate Spheres: Class and Status Politics in the Antisuffrage Movement,” Social Forces 65 (Dec.1986): 327–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thurner, Manuela, “'Better Citizens Without the Ballot’: American Antisuffrage Women and Their Rationale during the Progressive Era,” Journal of Women's History 5 (Spring 1993): 33–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Anastatia Sims, “Beyond the Ballot: “The Radical Vision of the Antisuffragists” in Wheeler, ed., Votes for Women! (1995), 105–28; Boylan, Anne's useful review of Camhi's and Jablonsky's books in Journal of American History 83 (June 1996): 247–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Marshall, Splintered Sisterhood; and Newman, White Women's Rights (1999), 56–85.

35 Miriam Gurko, The Ladies of Seneca Falls: The Birth of the Woman's Rights Movement (New York: Schocken Books, 1974, 1976); Blanche Glassman Hersh, The Slavery of Sex: Feminist-Abolitionists in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978); and Barbara J. Berg, The Remembered Gate: The Origins of American Feminism, the Woman and the City, 1800–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). Although Kraditor is not always cited directly in these works, paraphrases of her main argument are unmistakable. More recent treatments that have taken Seneca Falls as a point of origin include Judith Wellman, The Road to Seneca Falls: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the First Woman's Rights Convention (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004); and Sally G. McMillen, Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women's Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Wellman's characterization of Stanton is entirely positive, and she does not quote any of Stanton's incendiary language in the final chapter dealing with Reconstruction (226–27). McMillen's account carefully reviews the historiographic treatment of Stanton's racial views, characterizing Stanton's pronouncements of 1865 as “unquestionably racist and xenophobic,” while reminding readers that such views were not only “commonplace … for someone of her background and education but also among a broad spectrum of society” (161). Also valuable are Sylvia Hoffert, When Hens Crow: The Woman's Rights Movement in Antebellum America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995); and Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

36 DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, 17.

37 DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, 18, 20.

38 I am following DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, 63–64, 77.

39 Historians greatly lament this split. Some attribute it to personal rivalries among suffragists as much as to political and strategic differences over the Fifteenth Amendment and Kansas campaigns. For a variety of perspectives, see DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage,162–202; Barry, Susan B. Anthony,180–82, 391FN14; Dudden, Fighting Chance, 108, 115–21, 130–31; and Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls, 20–31.

40 DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, 20, 81. Feminism and Suffrage, along with a primary source reader, Elizabeth Cady Stanton/Susan B. Anthony: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), edited by DuBois, introduced scholars and students alike to the explicit racism at the heart of Stanton's writings.

41 DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, 19.

42 DuBois, ed., Elizabeth Cady Stanton/Susan B. Anthony, 92.

43 Bettina Aptheker, Woman's Legacy: Essays on Race, Sex, and Class in American History (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982), 12. Although I think Aptheker's criticism has merit, DuBois's initial account did include a brief discussion of black men's and women's participation within the AERA and provided some context for understanding that activity. Out of fifty national officers and speakers at the AERA conventions held during its three-year history, DuBois found that there were five black women and five black men. Scholars have continued to explore black women's participation in the AERA, in particular Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's activities, and consequently we now know more than DuBois did about the ways in which the AERA sent out interracial teams—sometimes black men with white women, sometimes black women and white women, to canvass for universal suffrage; see Alison M. Parker, “Frances Watkins Harper and the Search For Women's Interracial Alliances” in Ridarsky and Huth, eds., Susan B. Anthony and the Struggle for Equal Rights,145–71.

44 Aptheker, Woman's Legacy, 50.

45 DuBois, “The Last Suffragist” in DuBois, Woman Suffrage and Women's Rights, 10.

46 Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, “African American Women and the Vote: An Overview” in African American Women and the Vote, eds., Gordon et. al., 11.

47 Much of this research appeared in dissertations in the 1970s, followed soon by articles containing some of the key interpretative insights. Full-length monographs, however, were not published until the 1990s. For example, portions of Rosalyn Terborg-Penn's dissertation, “Afro-American in the Struggle for Woman Suffrage,” (PhD diss., Howard University, 1977) were published as separate articles in the 1970s and 1980s. One important example is ”Discontented Black Feminists: Prelude and Postscript to the Passage of the Nineteenth Amendment” in Decades of Discontent: The Women's Movement, 1920–1940, eds. Lois Scharf and Joan M. Jensen (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983). But it took another fifteen years before a revised version of Terborg-Penn's dissertation appeared as a book: African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1998). Angela Y. Davis published an important volume of her essays in 1981; see Davis, Women, Race & Class (New York: Vintage Press, 1981). In 1984, Paula Giddings published an important full-length synthetic account on black women's political activism that spanned three hundred years, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: Bantam Books, 1984), esp. 119–31. Also in the 1980s and 1990s, additional articles on black women and suffrage appeared in a number of anthologies and encyclopedias. See, for example, We are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Dorothy Sterling (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984, 1997); and Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, 2 vols., eds. Darlene Clark Hine, Elsa Barkley Brown, and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn (Brooklyn: Carlson, 1993). In the late 1990s, scholarship that had been presented at the University of Massachusetts in 1987 finally was published in Gordon, ed., African American Women and the Vote, 1837–1965. That same year, 1997, Darlene Clark Hine's article, “Black Women's Culture of Resistance and the Right to Vote,” was published in Women of the American South: A Multicultural Reader, ed., Christie Anne Farnham (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 204–19. Other important work included Kathleen C. Berkeley, “'Colored Ladies Also Contributed’: Black Women's Activities from Benevolence to Social Welfare, 1866–1896” in The Web of Southern Social Relations: Women, Family and Education, eds. Walter J. Fraser Jr., R. Frank Saunders Jr., and John L. Wakelyn (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 181–204; Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Cynthia Neverdon-Morton, Afro-American Woman of the South and the Advancement of the Race, 1895–1925 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989); Adele Logan Alexander, Ambiguous Lives: Free Women of Color in Rural Georgia, 1789–1879 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1991); Shirley J. Yee, Black Women Abolitionists: A Study in Activism, 1828–1860 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991); Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Brown, Elsa Barkley, “Negotiating an Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition From Slavery to Freedom,” Public Culture 7 (Fall 1994): 107–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Scholarship on black women and electoral politics continues to be one of the most vibrant aspects of suffrage history; see my discussion of Materson's For the Freedom of Her Race in the text below.

48 Notable among these works are Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, ed. Alfreda M. Duster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); Mary Church Terrell, A Colored Woman in a White World (1st ed., 1940; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1980); Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South, 1st edition, 1892; made available on microfilm in 1976, and republished by Louise Daniel Hutchinson (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981, 1982). A Voice from the South was again republished in The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper, including A Voice from the South and Other Essays, Papers and Letters, eds. Charles Lemert and Esme Bhan (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998).

49 Giddings, When and Where I Enter, 6. In making these claims, Giddings drew directly from Kraditor and unpublished works by Rosalyn Terborg-Penn and Bettina Aptheker; see When and Where I Enter, 370–71, FNs1, 19, 23, 25.

50 As late as 1998, when Terborg-Penn published a revision of her dissertation, she was still highly critical of how historiography treated “African American women in ways that often distort[ed] their voices and participation in the [suffrage] movement”; see Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920, 35.

51 Davis, The Political Thought of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 225. Others, like historian Faye Dudden, have emphasized the political challenges of those “chaotic, desperate years” of Reconstruction. Dudden, Fighting Chance, 8.

52 Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 121. Ginzberg also deals forthrightly with Stanton's racial views in a talk she has given discussing her book: http://www.gilderlehrman.org/multimedia#!87787.

53 See Sterling, Ahead of her Time: Abby Kelley and the Politics of Antislavery; Kerr, Lucy Stone: Speaking out for Equality; Faulkner, Lucretia Mott's Heresy; and McMillen, Lucy Stone.

54 Spruill, “Race, Reform and Reaction at the Turn of the Century: Southern Suffragists, the NAWSA, and the ‘Southern Strategy’” in Votes for Women, ed. Jean H. Baker, 102–3.

55 As I discuss in the text, much of the initial work responding to Kraditor's book was highly critical of her characterization of southern suffragism, faulting her for exaggerating what her critics thought was at most a very minor part of white women's repertoire of arguments; see Scott, The Southern Lady, 182; and Suzanne Lebsock, “Woman Suffrage and White Supremacy: A Virginia Case Study” in Visible Women: New Essays on American Activism, eds. Nancy A. Hewitt and Suzanne Lebsock (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 62–100. Other early work that was more favorable toward Kraditor included Paul E. Fuller, Laura Clay and the Woman's Rights Movement (Lexington; University of Kentucky Press, 1975), 191FN36. In the 1990s, longer treatments of southern suffragism were published, including Wheeler, New Woman in the New South (1993); and Elna Green, Southern Strategies: Southern Women and the Woman Suffrage Question (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). Wheeler agreed with Kraditor, while Green sided with Scott and Lebsock. Interested readers may want to consult the excellent bibliographies in Green and Wheeler for studies of local white southern suffragism.

56 Scott, The Southern Lady, 182.

57 Green, Southern Strategies, xii and 204FNs1, 2.

58 Lebsock, “Woman Suffrage and White Supremacy,” 64, 65.

59 Lebsock, “Woman Suffrage and White Supremacy,” 70–71.

60 Wheeler, New Women of the New South, 101.

61 None of the eleven white leaders upon whom Wheeler focused openly advocated for the voting rights of black Southerners prior to 1920, and none joined the interracial movements of the 1920s or publicly defended the voting rights of black women after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. Wheeler; New Women of the New South, 187.

62 Wheeler, New Women of the New South, 101, 184, 187.

63 Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 203.

64 Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow, 204, 216.

65 Tetrault emphasizes the diversity of activities and organizations that emerged in the 1870s that were not under the control of either the American or National Woman's Suffrage Associations, mentioning specifically The Pacific, a regional association founded in San Francisco in May 1871; and the Western Woman Suffrage Association, launched in Chicago in the fall of 1869; see Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls, 53–55. Tetrault is currently working on a second monograph that explores local/state suffrage organizing across the country in the period from 1865–1900.

66 Barkley Brown, “To Catch the Vision of Freedom,” 74.

67 Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow, 224.

68 Hannah Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 14.

69 Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom, 168. Rosen references Martha S. Jones, All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 132FN125.

70 Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom, 168, 169.

71 Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom, 169.

72 Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom, 169.

73 Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom, 11, 214, 224.

74 Materson, For the Freedom of Her Race, 20.

75 Materson, For the Freedom of Her Race, 11, 20.

76 Much important work has been published that I was not able to incorporate into this discussion, including Jane Dailey, Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Elizabeth Regosin, Freedom's Promise: Ex-Slave Families and Citizenship in the Age of Emancipation (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002); Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003; and Martha S. Jones, All Bound Up Together The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). Interested readers may want to consult the excellent bibliography contained in Hannah Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom, 359–79.

77 Other early treatments of western suffragism are contained in Dee A. Brown, The Gentle Tamers: Women of the Old West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1958; repr., New York: Bantam Books, 1974); and Beverly Beeton, Women Vote in the West: The Woman Suffrage Movement, 1869–1896 (New York: Garland, 1986). Readers interested in this subject may consult the bibliographies contained in Mead, How the Vote Was Won, 231–62; and McCammon and Campbell, “Winning the Vote in the West,” 79–82.

78 Alan P. Grimes, The Puritan Ethic and Woman Suffrage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), cited in Kraditor Ideas, vii.

79 Grimes, The Puritan Ethic, 106–11, 134. My commentary is indebted to the analysis of Grimes's thesis provided by McCammon and Campbell in “Winning the Vote in the West,” 57–59.

80 McCammon and Campbell, “Winning the Vote in the West,” 63; also see Mead, How the Vote Was Won.

81 Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age, 7. This book offers superb discussions of how suffragists responded to President Grant's attempt to annex Santo Domingo in 1870, how suffragists thought about Indian citizenship and Mormons' practice of polygamy in the 1870s and 1880s, and how suffragists reacted to the Spanish-American War of 1898–1902.

82 McCammon and Campbell, “Winning the Vote in the West,” 63.

83 Mead, How the Vote Was Won, 5.

84 Mead, How the Vote Was Won, 5, 6. Although Mead's study is primarily concerned with the activities of white suffragists, she does mention a few black women who were active in the suffrage movements in Colorado and California, noting that black women sometimes organized with white women but more often established their own groups when they lived in communities that had sufficiently large black populations. Mead identifies Elizabeth Piper Ensley, a founding member of the Colorado Equal Suffrage Association and the Colorado Association of Colored Women's Clubs; Sarah Overton, who was a vice president of the San Jose Suffrage Amendment League and also involved in school desegregation; and Naomi Anderson, who was a WCTU organizer in Kansas in the 1880s, campaigned for suffrage in Kansas in 1894, and then continued her suffrage activism when she moved to Sacramento sometime in the 1890s, where her work drew praise from Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. See How the Vote Was Won, 7–8.

85 Mead examines these distinct histories in How the Vote Was Won. Utah women were enfranchised in 1870, then disfranchised in 1887 by the U.S. Congress as an anti-polygamy measure, then reenfranchised in 1896 with statehood. Women of Washington territory were enfranchised by the territorial legislature in 1883 then disenfranchised by the territorial Supreme Court in 1888, then reenfranchised by popular vote in 1910.

86 Mead, How the Vote Was Won, 53.

87 Mead, How the Vote Was Won, 53. Historians have known since the early 1990s that many white suffrage organizers who were prominent in the merged National American Woman Suffrage Association (Susan B. Anthony included) had extensive experience in organizing suffrage campaigns in the West. Details about Kentucky suffragist Laura Clay's leadership of the 1906 Oregon campaign are available in Fuller, Laura Clay and the Woman's Rights Movement, 97ff.

88 Mead, How the Vote Was Won, 2; McCammon and Campbell, “Winning the Vote in the West,” 56.

89 Mead, How the Vote Was Won, 4.

90 Mead, How the Vote Was Won, 4.

91 Mead, How the Vote Was Won, 17.

92 Mead, How the Vote Was Won, 173.

93 Materson, For the Freedom of Her Race, 20.

94 For a brilliant exposition of how the first history of suffrage was crafted by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, see Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls, 112–44. Tetrault's analysis enables scholars to appreciate these women not just as activists, but also as historians, who were developing a valid method at a time when professional modes of historical inquiry were just coming into existence. Tetrault further points out that Stanton and Anthony purposefully wrote this history to educate future activists, with the intent of offering “a collective memory of where the movement had been [so that] they would learn the right lessons about where it needed to go” (113).

95 Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age, 16–17.

96 Terborg-Penn, African American Women, 11–12.

97 The granting of citizenship and suffrage to Native Americans has its own complex legislative and judicial history that includes passage of the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924 and the Nationality Act of 1940, as well as court decisions that led to the lifting of prohibitions against Indian voting in 1948. There is a vast literature on this subject. Interested readers may want to consult the following: Daniel McCool, Susan M. Olson, and Jennifer L. Robinson, Native Vote: American Indians, the Voting Rights Act, and the Right to Vote (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Beth H. Piatote, Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship and Law in Native American Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); and Collins, Robert Keith, “Native American Sovereignty and U.S. Citizenship American Studies 52 (2013): 115–22.”CrossRefGoogle Scholar