Gender and Suffrage Politics: New Approaches to the History of Women's Political Emancipation

Birgitta Bader-Zaar

Journal of Women's History, Volume 23, Number 2, Summer 2011, pp. 208-218 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/jowh.2011.0016

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Katherine H. Adams and Michael L Keene. Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. xix + 275 pp.; ill. ISBN-10: 0-8078-5652-5 (pb). Julia Bush. Women Against the Vote: Female Anti-Suffragism in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. viii + 340 pp. ISBN-10: 0-1992-4877-X (cl). Louise Edwards. Gender, Politics, and Democracy: Womens Suffrage in China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008. xii + 334 pp.; ill. ISBN10: 0-8047-5688-0 (cl). Lisa Materson. For the Freedom of Her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 18771932. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009. xv + 344 pp.; ill. ISBN-10: 0-8078-3271-5 (cl). Louise Ryan and Margaret Ward, eds. Irish Women and the Vote: Becoming Citizens. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007. xxii + 258 pp.; ill. ISBN10: 0716533936 (pb). Allison L. Sneider. Suffragists in an Imperial Age: U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question, 18701929. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 209 pp.; ill. ISBN-10: 0195321170 (pb). Jo Vellacott. Pacifists, Patriots, and the Vote: The Erosion of Democratic Suffragism in Britain during the First World War. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. xvi + 227 pp. ISBN-10: 023001335X (cl). Birgitta Bader-Zaar

oman suffrage has been a prominent theme of womens history for over four decades. One might ask what can possibly still be written on the subject. As the publications reviewed here illustrate, there are a number of aspects to investigate which open up new questions. British suffrage historians in particular have introduced innovative perspectives influenced by the general methodological changes in the field of history. Among these changes are biographical approaches to ordinary suffragists
2011 Journal of Womens History, Vol. 23 No. 2, 208218.

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and suffragettes1 and shifts both towards cultural history2 and, as will be taken up here later, Empire from a postcolonial viewpoint. Analyses of American and British developments still dominate the field, and will do so as well in this review essay. Let me therefore first take up a study of a very different geographical region, China. Before sinologist Louise Edwards published her research,3 we were only able to catch glimpses of womens suffrage in China through the lens of contemporary Western suffragists, who generally viewed the country as uncivilized and its women as oppressed.4 In the historiographical survey introducing her book, Gender, Politics and Democracy, Edwards explains why the campaign of Chinese suffragists has been underexposed arguing that the suffrage movement was perceived as a bourgeois affair, especially in the Peoples Republic of China. Edwards six-chapter book is organized chronologically and relies upon newspapers and journals as sources. Edwards focuses on the period between 1898 and the beginning of the Communist era in 1948 and embeds suffrage history within the larger political context of the time. In the imperial era, suffragists who came from a privileged educated elite and even participated in military struggles conceived of a concept of the independent (educated) woman citizen who demanded full equality in the desired democratic republic. After the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911, they founded the first major womens suffrage society and were successful in enshrining the right to vote in provincial constitutions, 19191923. Throughout this period, they created a collective notion of womens unity of disadvantage vis--vis men (104). Also, awareness of class came to the fore and the movement began to include both middle-class and workingclass women. While the two major political parties, the Communists and the Nationalists, supported equality between men and women in the second half of the 1920s, women activists nevertheless had to make sure that womens rights were not marginalized. Under Nationalist Party rule (19271936), constitutional change expanded legal rights for women. However, the draft of a national constitution which included womens equal rights was not ratified, due to the Japanese invasion and civil war from 19361948. Nonetheless, in this period women remained active and united in their demand for a minimum quota of ten percent women in politics which, they argued, was necessary due to representation of difference. Taking up political scientist Carole Patemans question on the importance of cultural differences or political regimes in the history of womens suffrage, Edwards emphasizes the influences of the Western suffrage movement, for example militant activism in the Chinese parliament in 1912, but also highlights differences due to specific cultural and political

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conditions.5 Chinese suffragists wished to develop a collective notion of women as human beings that deserved identification outside clan or familial relationships (3), but they also wove together both nationalist goals and equal rights. Cases of other nationalist movements, for example in Eastern Europe, can provide fruitful parallels here. Edwards book generally addresses the Western reading audience, which, however, in her definition only seems to span Australia, Britain, New Zealand, and the United States. This occurs, for example, when she compares the Protestantism of the Womens Christian Temperance Union as moral backbone to the Western suffrage movement with the significance of the Confucian reverence for education for Chinese women (2425). American historiography also biases her view of the use of equality and difference arguments within the Chinese womens movement.6 Thus, we do need a wider comparative view before we can really speak about inspiration from suffragist experiences around the globe (10). Notwithstanding, Edwards book is a fine general introduction into Chinese suffragist history. I will now turn to the large number of new publications on British and Irish suffrage history which unfortunately cannot be included entirely in this review.7 Womens suffrage in Ireland has been a focus of studies since the 1980s.8 However, Irish Women and the Vote. Becoming Citizens, edited by sociologist Louise Ryan and political scientist Margaret Ward, is the first collection of articles introducing a number of new perspectives on Irish suffrage history. Following a foreword by the first historian of the Irish suffrage movement, Rosemary Cullen Owens, Maria Luddy reminds readers of the importance of womens philanthropic and social reform work as forerunners of Irish suffrage activism in her introduction. Mary Cullen then recalls the republican tradition in suffragists understanding of citizenship, which included the values of individual autonomy, active co-operation with others to create the common good, and self-development through participation (15) and continued to mold womens ideas of a transformation of society through female values. An overview by Carmel Quinlan of the suffrage campaign from 1860 to the end of the nineteenth century, which concentrates on the Dublin Womens Suffrage Association and its drive to strengthen womens position in local government, sets the stage for specific approaches to suffrage history from 1911 to 1918. Historians from Ireland, Britain, and the United States take up local campaigns, specific themes, and suffragist biographies. Mary Clancy examines the local view represented by the more isolated region of Galway in Western Ireland. Paige Reynolds focuses on the Dublin Suffrage Week in December 1913, which is approached from the perspective of theatricality. Exploring the Belfast region, Denise Kleinrichert investigates the organization of suf-

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frage societies and trade unions among the working women in that citys textile mills. Myrtle Hill analyzes the distinctive nature of the nationalist and suffragist debate in Ulster in Northeastern Ireland, especially in the context of the Home Rule crisis in 1912 and 1913. Louise Ryan studies suffragists critique of sexual abuse and domestic violence in the suffragist newspaper Irish Citizen, Cliona Murphy investigates the undervalued role of humor in the suffrage movement, while William Murphy looks at the transformation of political imprisonment in Ireland in the course of challenges by the militant suffragettes. Margaret Wards essay highlights both the introduction of the hunger strike and war work as well as pacifism of the suffrage movement during the First World War. The theosophical and vegetarian philosophy of suffragist Margaret Cousins (in the contribution by Catherine Candy) and the intersections of nationalism and feminism in the person of Rosamond Jacob, both in her diary and her suffrage novel Callaghan (in the article by Leeann Lane), form the volumes biographical approaches. It closes with an outlook on the campaign for gender equality in jury acts, employment rights, and the 1937 constitution of the Irish Free State by Caitriona Beaumont. Various contributions also highlight the activities of British constitutionalist and militant suffrage organizations in Ireland, in Galway and Belfast for example. While a biographical directory to the authors would have been desirable, the volume on the whole gives a rich insight to the variety of suffrage experiences, which should inspire studies of the history of feminism in a broader European context. The flip side of the suffragist movement, the anti-suffragists or antis, forms an uncomfortable aspect of womens history from the feminist viewpoint and has therefore been much neglected in historiographyalthough the number of antis was considerable. Historian Julia Bush has pointed out that membership in the British anti-organizations was nearly as high as in suffragist ones. With her new book, Women Against the Vote, she has provided a detailed and differentiated account of British anti-suffragism. While Bush is not the first historian to approach this subject, her revisionist view focuses on the women in the movement (and their conflicts with male antis) using organizational records and activists papers.9 Antisuffragists were conservative women, but also well-educateda number of writers such as Mary Ward and Marie Corelli were to be found among their rankand they were active in social reform. They typically shared a vision of maternalism and womens moral superiority with suffragists, albeit without deducing demands of participation in national and imperial politics. Antis, however, were not wholly opposed to womens political activism. Forward-looking anti-suffragists hoped to see a more productive integration between womens specialized work, centered upon their

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families and local communities, and the functions of national government (315316), as Bush writes. Thus, they saw womens place in the inconspicuous public service (3) of local government and also envisioned the idea of an own womens chamber which was to deal with policy areas which were deemed suitable for womens special expertise, a scheme we can also find among conservatives elsewhere in Europe as last resort in face of the impending enfranchisement of women. The leading British male antis, however, were not interested. Thus, antis could also change their minds on the issue and turn into suffragists, such as Violet Markham who moved away from opposition to the vote due to womens war work. The First World War has recently been of some interest to historians of British suffrage.10 Canadian historian Jo Vellacott, biographer of Catherine Marshall , the organizer of the National Union of Womens Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), has published a volume on democratic suffragists in this period. Sandra Stanley Holton uses the term democratic suffragists, originally coined by Margaret Llewelyn Davies from the Womens Cooperative Guild, in her book Feminism and Democracy to describe the more progressive strand of the British womens suffrage movement that advocated adult suffrage.11 Vellacotts recent work, Pacifists, Patriots, and the Vote, takes up the story of democratic suffragists during World War I in more detail than Holtons earlier study was able to do. Vellacott discusses suffragists war work and also covers the divisions in the NUWSS over peace and the split in the organization in 1915, when democratic suffragists resigned after the NUWSS executive had decided not to send delegates to the womens international peace conference at The Hague. Chapters both on the erosion of the alliance between the Labor Party and the NUWSS by 1916 and suffragists lobbying efforts for enfranchisement in 1917 present new facts on the issue of womens suffrage during the war. The section on the attempts of the peace faction to regain influence in the NUWSS, which were thwarted by the London Society for Womens Suffrage (LSWS), particularly features novel insights. Vellacotts attempt to explain differences between the democratic suffragists and the LSWS with cultural conditioning through the example of the Strachey and Marshall families seems misplaced though. Holton noted that womens enfranchisement was imminent when the First World War broke out and that the alliance of the democratic suffragists with the Labour Party had been crucial for the success of womens enfranchisement. Vellacotts conclusion suggests that she is critical of this view. She argues that the narrow form of womens enfranchisement in Britain in 1918, based on an age limit of thirty years for women (in contrast to twenty-one for men), was not inevitable; rather no effective attempt was made at any stage to win adult suffrage or even improvements in the womans clause

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(168). In her view the reasons for the acceptance of limited womens suffrage were both the end of the alliance between the Labour Party and the NUWSS, and the split with democratic suffragists within the NUWSS that ended its attachments to working-class members as well as its interest in a broad franchise. The Labour Party was reluctant to support equal votes for women as it did not wish to impede manhood suffrage. For a broader analysis, however, we still need to take a closer look at the papers of all the political parties involved. In her book, Holton mentions, for instance, that the NUWSS approached the Conservatives shortly before the outbreak of the war because members were not comfortable with the Labour alliance even then. Whether these plans continued during the war remains to be researched. The American Alice Paul was strongly influenced by the British suffrage movement during her stay in London from 1907 to1909, when she worked with the Pankhursts Womens Social and Political Union (WSPU). Katherine Adams and Michael L. Keene have dedicated their book, Alice Paul and The American Suffrage Campaign, to her as leader of the Congressional Union and the National Womans Party, whose work concentrated on womens suffrage at the federal level, and who introduced militant strategies to U.S. suffragists. This is not the first book on Alice Paul, although the blurb on the back cover wishes to give us the impression that she has been neglected in the history of suffragism.12 Reflecting the interests of its authors (who are not historians, but come from English literature studies), the book addresses Pauls strategy of nonviolence and visual rhetoric, meaning a combination of both verbal and nonverbal discourse with a persuasive impact on audiences (xviii). After a chapter introducing Alice Pauls upbringing, education, and her stay in London, the book presents certain influencing ideas of nonviolencefrom Quaker testimony to Henry David Thoreau, Tolstoy, and especially to Gandhialbeit without referencing when and where Paul actually read these works. The study also lacks specific details of suffrage history such as the nonviolent militant campaign of the British Womens Freedom League, founded in 1907, which Paul must have witnessed in London while cooperating with the WSPU. Nevertheless, Adams and Keenes account of the National Womans Partys visual campaign gives us a vivid insight into Pauls strategy planning and its execution. The authors include chapters on the cartoons by the artist Nina Allender for the journal The Suffragist, and on suffrage parades, automobile tours, lobbying and deputations, as well as the political boycott of the Democrats at the elections of 1914. The study ends with the picketing of President Wilson and later the Senate in 1917/1918, and the hunger strikes of the detained militants. The books special strength lies in communicating Pauls powerful intensity

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(34), her expectation of sacrifice and endless determination (35), which secured her followers loyalty and devotion. Allison L. Sneiders volume Suffragists in an Imperial Age reflects a new approach to suffrage history that contextualizes womens suffrage in the broader perspective of U.S. expansion. Embedding the issue of womens political rights in imperial politics is a method introduced in the 1990s to the historiography of British imperialism. According to this approach, the idea of Empire influenced suffragism to develop a focus on race and culture, as attributes of voting rights rather than citizenship in general.13 As Sneider relates, expansionism, which she defines both within the continent toward the West as well as overseas, raised the question of political rights for potential new citizens (5). Suffrage organizations used these imperial discussions to keep womens rights in the minds of legislators at the national level, in the face of an antisuffragist discourse which viewed voting rights as a state issue. Sneider goes so far as to argue that suffragists would have had a much harder time raising their question at the national level had the United States not pursued an imperial agenda (6). She has a point here; the pattern that women could only hope to have their political rights discussed on the national level when general debates on electoral reform were planned is also conspicuous in Europe. Sneider first turns to the debates from 1870 to 1875 on the annexation of Santo Domingo, at a time when suffragists began to present their cause at congressional hearings and argued about the connections between their demands and voting rights for African Americans. She then examines continental expansion and discussions of Indian citizenship and Mormon polygamy in relation to womens political rights in the 1880s, as Congress decided on the admission of western territories as states. This is followed by arguments over the annexation of the Philippines in the Spanish-American War (18981902), the problem of Hawaii, and finally the congressional debates on the expansion of voting rights to women in the Philippines and Puerto Rico (19141929). Referring to Louise Newmans study on the civilizing mission of womens activism among immigrants, Native Americans, or African Americans,14 Sneider stresses the foundational aspects of civilization discourse which could favor annexation, respectively political rights as a chance to uplift the savage by emancipating his women. She thus concurs with Newmans revision of Aileen Kraditors assumptions that essentialist suffrage ideology was motivated by expediency.15 Sneider, however, also emphasizes the divergent and contradictory opinions suffragists could hold when they argued about gender, race, and political rights (9). As the example of United States imperialism at the end of the 1890s shows, suffragists were

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less interested in criticizing imperialist politics than in protesting purely male citizenship in the new territories. On the whole, Sneider succeeds in veering us away from the more traditional view of suffrage history as a history of organizations and individuals or of strategies and campaigns, toward a broader perspective of the political world in which suffragists were embedded. The question remains how important imperial expansion overseas really was for the average suffrage activist. While references to black suffrage or the polygamy question were expansive, the civilization discourse in the context of annexation did not have wide repercussions in suffragist arguments. Here the American experience seems to differ from that of the British Empire. Finally, For the Freedom of Her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois by historian Lisa G. Materson is an excellently researched book giving us a rich insight in African American womens political activism from the 1890s to the 1930s as well as information on the workings of electoral processes in general. There has been some work on African American womens political influence on elections during Reconstruction; as Materson writes, her book is a continuation of that story (3).16 The perspective that the newly enfranchised men in the South did not own the vote as individuals, but acted politically on behalf of their community, meant that everybody, including women, was to benefit from the male franchise. This idea was also transferred to later periods and the North. Materson gives us conclusive evidence on how women in Chicago sought to realize their political goals not just in their own name or for the African American community of Chicago, but rather saw themselves as representatives of the Southern communities they had left behind after their migration to the North. By maintaining their relations to relatives and friends in the South, they saw themselves serving as proxy voters and canvassers for them, struggling in the effort to end their disfranchisement in the South. Enlivening her story with biographical examples of politically active women, Materson delves into the specifics of how political organizing worked on the local level from the perspective of these women. African Americans were particularly committed to the Republican Party due to experiences of disfranchisement in the solidly Democratic South. Materson follows black womens activism as voters, canvassers, and candidates from their first voting experience for school officials in Illinois in 1891 (where special womens ballots were printed at the elections of 1894!), through several municipal and federal office campaigns (including the 1913 Presidential election), and finally to full suffrage by federal amendment in 1920. Womens full enfranchisement triggered stronger activism on the national level, within, for example, the National League of Republican Colored Women. On the local level, associations based on church membership prevailed during these

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years, but also independent womens clubs were founded. The middle-class status and the politics of coalition of many activists, however, tended to prevent the mobilization of poor women. Also, ideologies of racial uplift, propagating that properly educated mothers and homemakers were the key to the very survival of the race (12) proved to be counterproductive regarding claims to represent the African American community. Conflicts also ensued about whether black or white candidates were to be backed: one of the final chapters deals with the support of white Republican Ruth Hanna McCormick, who ran for the House of Representatives in 1927 and 1928 and the Senate in 1929 and 1930 on the understanding that she would act beneficially for the African American community once elected. Discord also related to the question of a move towards support of the Democratic Party, especially after the Republicans failed to push through a federal anti-lynching bill at the beginning of the 1920s. With Republican men, these tensions especially concerned the clergy, who feared a loss of political influence should politically active women become too independent of them. The book concludes with the womens endorsement of the Democratic Party after Franklin Delano Roosevelts election in 1932, which Materson attributes not only to the context of economic depression, but also the history of Republican inaction and the question of repealing the 18th Amendment on Prohibition of alcohol. The multitude of angles from which the history of womens suffrage has been approached is undeniably highlighted by the publications reviewed here. Far from despairing over the increasing difficulty in establishing a consolidated history of suffrage, the diversity and varieties of suffrage history should be acknowledged as enriching our analysis. Relating to the non-Western experience, Louise Edwards has called for a recognition of diversity and partiality . . . if we are to break the Orientalist practice of homogenizing and generalizing (14). Undue generalizations have, however, also been a problem in western suffrage historiography. Only if we consider plurality will we be able to insert specificities in a broader perspective of womens suffrage, either to identify common, diverse trends or patterns in developments or to discover the entangled history of womens political emancipation. Notes
1 Sandra Stanley Holton, Suffrage Days: Stories from the Womens Suffrage Movement (London: Routledge, 1996). 2 Laura E. Nym Mayhall, The Militant Suffrage Movement: Citizenship and Resistance in Britain, 18601930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

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See also Louise Edwards and Mina Roces, eds, Womens Suffrage in Asia: Gender, Nationalism and Democracy (London: Routledge, 2004). See Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Womens Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
4

Carole Pateman, Three Questions about Womanhood Suffrage, in Suffrage and Beyond: International Feminist Perspectives, ed. Caroline Daley and Melanie Nolan (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 346.
5 6 A reference to Carol Lee Bacchi, Same Difference: Feminism and Sexual Difference (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1990) might have been helpful to avoid any antagonism between the two arguments (rather side by side than versus). I wish to thank Gisela Bock for drawing my attention to this book. 7 Not included here are Myriam Boussahba-Bravard, ed, Suffrage Outside Suffragism: Womens Vote in Britain 18801914 (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), and Krista Cowman, Women of the Right Spirit: Paid Organisers of the Womens Social and Political Union (WSPU), 190418 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2007).

For example, see Rosemary Cullen Owens, Smashing Times: A History of the Irish Womens Suffrage Movement 18891922 (Dublin: Attic Press, 1984); Cliona Murphy, The Womens Suffrage Movement and Irish Society in the Early Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: Prentice Hall, 1989).
8

See, for example: Brian Harrison, Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Womens Suffrage in Britain (London: Croom Helm, 1978); Martin Pugh, The March of the Women: A Revisionist Analysis of the Campaign for Womens Suffrage, 18661914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), chapter 7; for the United States: Susan E. Marshall, Splintered Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Campaign Against Woman Suffrage (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997).
9

Nicoletta F. Gullace, The Blood of our Sons: Men, Women, and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship During the Great War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Angela K. Smith, Suffrage Discourse in Britain During the First World War (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).
10

Sandra Stanley Holton, Feminism and Democracy: Womens Suffrage and Reform Politics in Britain 19001918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
11

See Christine Lunardini, From Equal Suffrage to Equal Rights: Alice Paul and the National Womans Party, 19101926 (New York: New York University Press, 1986).
12

See Antoinette M. Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 18651915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Jane Rendall, Citizenship, Culture and Civilisation: The Languages of British Suffragists, 18661874, in Suffrage and Beyond: International Feminist Perspectives, eds. Caroline Daley and Melanie Nolan (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 127150.
13

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Louise Newman, White Womans Rights: Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 18901920 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965).
15

Elsa Barkley Brown, To Catch the Vision of Freedom: Reconstructing Southern Black Womens Political History 18651880, African American Women and the Vote, 18371965, eds. Ann D. Gorden et. al. (Amherst, MA.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 6699.
16