A Simple Justice

Author(s):  
Melanie Beals Goan

When the Declaration of Independence was signed by a group of wealthy white men in 1776, poor white men, African Americans, and women quickly discovered that the unalienable rights it promised were not truly for all. The Nineteenth Amendment eventually gave women the right to vote in 1920, but the change was not welcomed by people of all genders in politically and religiously conservative Kentucky. As a result, the suffrage movement in the Commonwealth involved a tangled web of stakeholders, entrenched interest groups, unyielding constitutional barriers, and activists with competing strategies. In A Simple Justice, Melanie Beals Goan offers a new and deeper understanding of the women's suffrage movement in Kentucky by following the people who labored long and hard to see the battle won. Women's suffrage was not simply a question of whether women could and should vote; it carried more serious implications for white supremacy and for the balance of federal and state powers -- especially in a border state. Shocking racial hostility surfaced even as activists attempted to make America more equitable. Goan looks beyond iconic women such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to reveal figures whose names have been lost to history. Laura Clay and Madeline McDowell Breckinridge led the Kentucky movement, but they did not do it alone. This timely study introduces readers to individuals across the Bluegrass State who did their part to move the nation closer to achieving its founding ideals.

Author(s):  
Ben Epstein

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.


Plaridel ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Veronica Alporha

Manuel L. Quezon is often credited by historians like Encarnacion Alzona (1937) as a staunch advocate of women’s right to vote. Indeed, the history of the struggle for women’s suffrage often highlights the role that Quezon played in terms of supporting the 1937 plebiscite as the president of the Philippine Commonwealth. Various print media of the period like dailies and magazines depicted him, and consequently, the success of the women’s suffrage movement, in the same light (e.g., Philippine Graphic, Manila Bulletin). However, closer scrutiny of Quezon’s speeches, letters, and biography in relation to other pertinent primary sources would reveal that Quezon was, at best, ambivalent, on the cause of the suffragists. His appreciation of the women’s suffrage’s merits was tied and anchored on certain political gains that he could acquire from it. In contrast to the appreciation of his contemporaries like Rafael Palma, Quezon’s appreciation of the women’s right to vote was based on patronage politics and not on the view that the right to suffrage is a right of women and not a privilege. His support for the cause was aimed at putting himself at the forefront of this landmark legislation and thus the real champions of the cause—the women—at the sidelines


Author(s):  
Leonard Rogoff

Weil pushed a reluctant Federation of Women's Clubs to adopt a suffrage resolution. In 1914 she served as president of the Goldsboro Equal Suffrage League and five years later was elected president of the Equal Suffrage Association of North Carolina. Either North Carolina Tennessee would need to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment for women to achieve the vote, but North Carolina's political climate was conservative. Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, appointed Weil as state field commander. The legislature repeatedly voted down granting women the franchise or legal rights, and anti-suffragists campaigned that women's suffrage was immoral and would overturn white supremacy. Although the governor reluctantly endorsed women's suffrage, the state legislature tabled the motion, and Tennessee became the ultimate ratifying state.


Author(s):  
Dawn Langan Teele

This chapter presents a case study of women's enfranchisement in France. It considers evidence for the role religious cleavage played in hampering French suffrage politics. It argues that Catholicism influenced both the incentives of leaders in the Radical Party and the motivations of women who were suffragists. The first section delves into the rules governing electoral politics and the groups that were empowered throughout the period. The second section gives a brief introduction to the campaign for women's suffrage in France after 1870. The third section analyzes the failure of suffrage reform in the French legislature. In 1919, when a bill for women's suffrage was debated in the Chamber of Deputies, an amalgamation of Socialists, conservative republicans, some Radicals, and parties of the right brought it to a majority vote. But many among the Radicals, and nearly every member of Georges Clemenceau's cabinet, voted against the measure.


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