Dissertation Information for Rebecca Joyce MeadNAME:
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SCHOOL: ADVISORS: COMMITTEE MEMBERS: MPACT Status: Fully Complete Title: How the vote was won: Woman suffrage in the western United States, 1868--1914 Abstract: By the end of 1914, every Western state and territory except New Mexico had enfranchised its female citizens in the greatest innovation in participatory democracy since Reconstruction. The western situation developed in profound contrast to the East, where few women voted until after the passage of the nineteenth Amendment (1920). Reevaluation of this movement within its contemporary political context finally explains why the earliest successes occurred in the fluid "frontier" environment of western states and territories. Western women suffragists quickly realized that the key to reducing racial-ethnic tension and overcoming urban electoral opposition was working through trades unions and political parties as well as dissociation from prohibition. "Pioneer" suffragists were skilled lobbyists who took advantage of the small size of territorial legislatures, the statehood process, third-party challenges, and reform politics to elect sympathetic candidates and pass women's rights legislation. They formed prosuffrage farmer-labor-progressive coalitions and made major gains during both the Populist and Progressive periods. These political means won a radically political goal, full and autonomous female citizenship, linked to economic equity for women. By 1900, the growing presence of women in the work force and public life provided incontrovertible evidence of female abilities and bolstered their demands for equal citizenship rights. In addition, the suffrage movement gained respectability through the involvement of more moderate middle-class women interested in social reform, and their subsequent political activity in the equal suffrage western states during the 1910s was part of the Progressive avalanche of reform legislation. Western suffragists demanded their rights on the basis of justice, however, and acknowledged no obligation to rescue the world. Despite many tensions and conflicts, their collective accomplishment was a fundamental structural political reform, which permanently changed the composition of the polity and the legal status of women. This tremendous achievement was not a gift to women, but the direct result of several generations of hard work and dedication to this important goal. |
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