scholarly journals Women & the Vote

Daedalus ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 149 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-39
Author(s):  
Dawn Langan Teele
Keyword(s):  
Voting Rights ◽  
Women's Suffrage ◽  
Electoral Incentives ◽  
Suffrage Movement ◽  
Global Patterns ◽  
Women’S Suffrage

There are four contexts in which women have won voting rights: as part of a universal reform for all citizens (15 percent of countries that granted women suffrage); imposed by a conqueror or colonial metropole (28 percent); gradually, after some men had been enfranchised (44 percent); or a hybrid category, often in the wake of re-democratization (14 percent). This essay outlines the global patterns of these reforms and argues that in a plurality of cases, where women's suffrage was gradual, enfranchisement depended on an electoral logic. Politicians subject to competition who believed women would, on average, support their party, supported reform. The suffrage movement provided information, and a potential mobilization apparatus, for politicians to draw on after the vote was extended. Together, both activism and electoral incentives were imperative for reform, providing important lessons for feminist mobilization today.

Innovation by Political Outsiders

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Epstein
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
Women's Suffrage ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Nineteenth Amendment ◽  
Suffrage Movement ◽  
Communication Goals ◽  
Print Era ◽  
Women’S Suffrage

This chapter explores communication innovations made by American social movements over time. These movements share political communication goals and outsider status, which helps to connect innovation decisions across movements and across time. The chapter primarily explores two long-lasting movements. First is the women’s suffrage movement, which lasted over seventy years of the print era from the mid-nineteenth century until the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Next is the long-lasting fight against racial discrimination, which led to the modern civil rights movement starting in the print era, but coming of age along with television during the 1950s and 1960s. Both the women’s suffrage movement and civil rights movement utilized innovative tactics with similarly mild results until mainstream coverage improved. Finally, these historical movements are compared with movements emerging during the internet era, including the early Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the Resist movement.

The Cold, Dark River

2021 ◽  
pp. 304-332
Author(s):  
Christopher Grasso
Keyword(s):  
Monetary Policy ◽  
Sexual Problems ◽  
Women's Suffrage ◽  
School Building ◽  
Large School ◽  
Suffrage Movement ◽  
Women’S Suffrage

After serving in Congress, Kelso resolved to open his own academy in Springfield. He supported the women’s suffrage movement in town. But he had borrowed heavily to build a large school building, and when few students enrolled, he was financially ruined. He ran for Congress again in 1868, but in a bitter campaign focused on monetary policy and filled with dirty tricks, he floundered and was badly beaten by his old nemesis, Pony Boyd. All of this only added to the strain of his marriage, already plagued by sexual problems and mutual jealousies. Kelso’s great tragedy, however, was not financial, political, or marital. In early September, 1870, his five-year-old son died suddenly from tetanus after stepping on a rusty rake. Only two weeks later, his fourteen-year-old son committed suicide. Kelso was shattered. The following year, his marriage in ruins, he took his eldest daughter Florella and headed west.

Ben Pimlott Memorial Lecture 2018The Women’s Suffrage Movement in the Balfour Family

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 299-320 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Pedersen
Keyword(s):  
Prime Minister ◽  
Memorial Lecture ◽  
Women's Suffrage ◽  
Suffrage Movement ◽  
Women’S Suffrage

Abstract Given on the centenary of women's suffrage, this lecture explores the tensions and conflicts the claim for the vote raised among elite women already enmeshed in parliamentary and political circles. Drawing on the unbuttoned and sometimes angry correspondence among A.J. Balfour's suffragist sisters-in-law Lady Frances Balfour and Lady Betty Balfour, Frances' collaborator (and suffragist leader) Millicent Fawcett, Lady Betty's militant suffragette sister Lady Constance Lytton, and their old friend (and wife of the anti-suffragist Prime Minister) Margot Asquith, it explores the appeal but also the costs of this democratic claim for such “incorporated” women - and explains why some nevertheless supported it.

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