Virginia Sapiro

Week 9:

This week continues our discussion of the impact of the 19^th Amendment and women’s enfranchisement, this time turning from women, partisanship, and voting, to women in elected and appointed office in the century since the Amendment was ratified. What progress has been made?  This was also our second week as on online class.

We opened by looking at another one of my timelines – this one, drawn largely from Center for American Women in Politics (thanks!) information, lists the “firsts” of women in office. The Timeline is attached at the end of this post. The students took some time to remark on things they noticed, and asked questions, many of which led to further discussion, or to my offering more contextual or follow-up information. As the discussion died down I followed up by asking whether they were impressed.  I mean, look at all those “firsts.”  Isn’t that great? When they seemed a little reluctant about reaching conclusions, I gave them mine:  I am not at all impressed. Far from it.  What the time line shows is how much continuing friction there is in our “democratic” system that continued – and continues – to strain women out of the sauce. And, we noted, a “first” does not mean women’s participation in that particular way has become normal. No, not impressed.

Our next step was to look at some data on change and comparison, starting with changes in the presence of women in Congress, by party. The data, familiar to women and politics scholars, show very little progress and virtually no partisan difference until the 1980s.  Sixty years after the 19^th Amendment no more than 10% of the members of Congress were women. Clear change occurred during the elections of the first “Year of the Woman,” 1992, when the number of women elected to Congress increased, but dramatically more so among the Democratic party. To give a little perspective on the partisan aspect of women’s entry into elective office I discussed the earlier part of the 20^th century, when Republican women tended to have more success than Democratic women in gaining state legislative seats, attributable in part to the processes  of political recruitment in those days and the different structures of the parties.

The presence of Democratic women in Congress has continued to grow substantially, while Republican women have made far less progress. After they made some stabs at trying to explain this, I discussed some of the primary reasons we might look to: Recent research shows that Republican women have more trouble getting support within their party than Democratic women do.  There has been a tremendous rise in the existence of organizations dedicated to encouraging women to compete for office, and training them to help them do so – and most, if not all of the large-scale efforts are aimed at Democratic women. We also discussed the Trump effect, both on the gender culture of the Republican party and on the mobilization of Democratic women to enter the fray.  But, despite this progress, we noted that women are still not much even a quarter of the members of Congress.

For a little comparative perspective, I gave them a list of the different countries of the world in order of what percentage of their lower houses of the national legislature are women. The data come from the Inter-Parliamentary Union. In those data, only Rwanda and Bolivia have a majority of women (61% and 53%, respectively); in all the rest women are a minority. Only 9 countries are listed as having between 40-49% women.  We scanned through slide after slide showing the “next” 15 in rank order, and finally found the United States, following the 2018 election listed at 79^th.  But, I pointed out, that’s significant improvement over the situation after the 2016, when the U.S. was tied at 100th. We discussed various possible explanations for the percentage of women in different national legislatures, and asked how that might be – or not be – understood as a measure of democracy.

We then surveyed the presence of women in different types and levels of elective office in the United States, from the local level through the national, including both legislative and executive offices.  We compared the different states in terms of the presence of women as state legislators, governors, and members of Congress and again, speculated about why we saw those differences and whether there were any patterns. Although I don’t have good answers, much of the object f this discussion was to help them think in social scientific ways: What are our hypotheses? What evidence do we have? What evidence would we need to be able to become more confident in our conclusions? Part of my goal is always not just to teach “the subject” but to teach thinking in a social scientific way.

Next up was a set of graphs and tables showing data on the federal workforce. When student think about “people in government” they usually think about elective office – and maybe some appointed political offices, but it is also important to understand the federal workforce. There are good data by gender and race, job category, agency, and comparison with the civilian workforce. We explored those data to examine the significance for understanding gender, government, and governance.

We ended with two Big Questions.

The first: Why are we stuck in terms of the number of women in elective office? Why, with 51% of the population, are women such a small percentage of those in office? Where is the friction? Here, they discussed and speculated; I brought in findings from research on gender and recruitment to office.

The second: Why does  the number of women in office matter? This, of course, leads to a subject long near and dear to my heart (Sapiro, 1981): gender and representation, including especially the question of descriptive representation.

The "Firsts" Timeline:  TIMELINEHOWLONG

Slides: PO50519thWomeninGovtSince19thAm

All blogs in this series available here: http://blogs.bu.edu/vsapiro/politics-education-gardening-stuff-pegs/

Week 7

And finally, in week 7 of the course, we focus on the campaign for the 19^th Amendment. By now it should be clear that a crucial story of the 19^th Amendment is how much of the 19^th-century story of the struggle for gender equality in citizenship was only indirectly related to the amendment itself.  And a substantial part of ending gender discrimination in the franchise was accomplished by states, individually. Of course, a substantial part of the story of the ratification of the 19^th Amendment is also a story about state-by-state action, and that is partly what we discussed this week.

There are many ways we could have covered the final campaign for the Amendment. I chose to continue the theme of this campaign as an example of struggle for and resistance to the expansion of democracy, and to use the frameworks we explored in the first week of the course, looking especially at alternative storytelling, the significance of intersectionality, and understanding resistance. We also carried forward the theme from the previous week, on state-by-state campaigns, and the alternative explanations highlighted by Corrine McConnaughy’s research.

For these reasons I did not ask the students to prepare by reading a common book. Instead, they had their choice of one of four possibilities:

• Dawn Teele’s Forging the Franchise: The Political Origins of the Women’s Vote (2018). This is a very original comparative study of the U.S., France, and the U.S. to understand how political strategies and tactics of women’s movements provided incentives to politicians in competitive environments to win the vote. How does the story look when we use a comparative politics framework? What do we learn about the U.S. by not just looking only at the U.S.?
• Rosalyn Terborg-Penn’s African American Women and the Struggle for the Vote, 1850-1920 (1988).  Although the entire course is based on an intersectional understanding of gender, this book offers students an opportunity to read the story through a lens that puts African American women at the center. Although many of our readings incorporate both African American and white women (as well as other social groups) into the analysis, it is important for the students to learn from an approach that is centered on African American women and the whole African American community.
• Susan Ware’s Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote (2019). This offers the story of the national woman suffrage movement through vignettes focusing on 19 very diverse individuals and groups involved in the struggle. These vignettes shift the center across social groups, locations, and personalities. The writing often looks over its shoulder to the present time, which has benefits and drawbacks. But above all it gives students and opportunity to think about the range of specific people who were engaged – what opportunities and constraints they faced, and what they chose to do. It is impossible to read this and conclude that the movement was a monolithic group of a particular type of womab.
• Elaine Weiss’ The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote (2018). This is a nail-biter story of the ratification fight in Tennessee, the state that put the 19^th Amendment over the top. This is not just the story of Tennessee, however, but about one of the many state-level campaigns in which those not allowed to vote sought to secure the vote from those who could. It also makes clear that this is a deeply political story, involving partisan struggles and the linkage to many interests and interest groups.

When I arrange for the students to do different readings, I clarify to them how this works pedagogically. We are studying a problem – the campaigns for and against the passage of the 19^th Amendment. The story – and the class discussion – must encompass a wide range of forces and their interaction. By reading different works they bring to the classroom expertise in different aspects of the story and analysis, and the class discussion is devoted to bringing these together to create a higher-level understanding.

We began with an image-motivated discussion of resistance to woman suffrage. It is important for the students to understand how deeply misogynist the culture surrounding the woman suffrage movement was, and how profoundly inappropriate large segments of the population – perhaps a majority – found the idea of women voting. For this I turn to material culture, offering them a long series of slides depicting anti-suffrage caricatures found in postcards, political materials, sheet music, etc., and then some showing the images used by suffragists.

I drive home the point that the tropes found in the caricatures are instantly recognizable to them – the idea that politically engaged women have been rejected by men or should be are ugly, unloved, ignore their children and “henpeck” their husbands; and of course men themselves who support suffrage are not masculine. The pro-suffrage images offer classic depictions of liberty, justice, and women warriors.

We then turned to a third iteration of the timelines I have been using in class. Although we are not focusing primarily on chronology, chronology is important. We walked through a Late Suffrage Timeline to reach conclusions about different phases of the historical run up to the ratification. What were the paths the campaign took? What were the impacts of surrounding major events (like recessions, war, immigration) and changes in political and partisan leadership?

Finally, we discussed the students readings of their various books, giving them a chance to share the insights they gained on the 19^th Amendment campaign from the particular stories they read, and trying to create a bigger story from their different readings.

Slides here: PO50519thNationalCampaign

Late suffrage timeline here: Late Suffrage Timeline detailed

The full set of blogs for this course are available at http://blogs.bu.edu/vsapiro/politics-education-gardening-stuff-pegs/

Week 6

First up on this week’s agenda was finishing the discussion from last week. The theme was women’s political activism throughout the period from roughly 1870 until the ratification of the 19^th Amendment other than suffrage movement activism per se.  Different students had read articles focusing on different times, different groups of women, different types of activity, with different aims. The particulars this week included Ida B. Wells and the anti-lynching campaign, including her work in England; women in the Southern Farmers’ Alliance; the organization of women workers in the WTUL and its relationship to broader labor issues; a comparison of women’s and men’s club activities in Chicago at the turn into the 20^th century; the women of Hull House; the work of Hull House women and the Children’s Bureau; the food protests of women in New York’s Lower East Side in 1917 and the relationship to socialist organizing; and the public work of Catholic sisters.

How could we discuss so many, such diverse groups and actions? That was the point. As the students picked out the highlights of the works they read (and those we discussed last week), we were able to see how deep, broad, and diverse was the activism of women in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, even when they couldn’t vote. We considered the opportunities and constraints on different groups of women and the situations they faced.  We had a good discussion of the connections between “women’s roles” and popular conceptions of women and the work they did in public, most notably updating our earlier discussion of “Republican motherhood” with the concept of social housekeeping so important in the context of this period’s urbanization and urban problems. And we asked, again and again, why they hadn’t hear of most of this before, and what that meant.

Finally, on to the theme for this week: The state-by-state campaigns for suffrage in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The discussion was based largely on their reading of Corrine M. McConnaughy, The Woman Suffrage Movement in America: A Reassessment (2013).

We began by reviewing an important question: Why/how did the efforts for constitutional change end around 1870? We once again tracked the fracturing of the equal right coalition due to many forces: (1) The increasing gender conservatism among male African American organizational leaders in and after the 1850s and the increasing association of citizenship with masculinity among white and African American men, as discussed by Laura Free (Suffrage Reconstructed: Gender, Race, and Voting Rights in the Civil War Era (2016). This made many equal rights advocates less inclined to support woman suffrage. (2) The disagreement over the likely impact of advocating for a more comprehensive agenda of universal suffrage, including women, in the pursuit of what became the 14^th and 15^th Amendments. (3) The activation of racism key segments of the woman suffrage movement (notably Stanton, Anthony) whereby they resisted the prioritization of African American men with some argument lodged in racist logic. (4) The growing strength of a party system and its relationship to the equal rights coalition whereby the terms of possibility were increasingly set by the parties. As a reaction to Republican leadership mostly turning its back on woman suffrage, some suffrage leaders resolved to coalesce with any party that supported them – and when they worked with Democrats, that appalled antislavery leaders who (a) remained Republican loyalists and (b) hated the association with the pro-slavery party.  By the time the dust had nearly settled on the 15^th Amendment, an independent woman suffrage movement had arisen, but any opportunities for a 16^th Amendment, or even coalition support for a 16^th Amendment eliminating gender-based barriers to voting had evaporated.

So, what did the women’s rights/woman suffrage movements look like from 1870 to the end of the 19^th century? Famously, the former coalition had fractured into two national organizations, the National and American Woman Suffrage Associations, and we discussed the differences between those. But as we have seen in discussions of women’s political activism in the late 19^th/early 20^th centuries, a broken coalition does not mean activism and organization disappears; rather, it unties or loosens the linkages. There was a multiplicity of organization aimed at expanding women’s roles and opportunities in society and politics. And as women became increasingly involved in many different aspects of political and social activity, more and more found the lack of the franchise a barrier. And as Corrine McConnaughy underscores, as woman suffrage organizing grew across the country in many states and locales, they were not necessarily connected at all, or to any serious degree with any of the national organizations. Thus there continued to be a woman suffrage movement, but it was less coordinated and connected across the country organizationally, less centrally led.

We briefly looked at the growth of legislative proposals for woman suffrage of various types (municipal, school, presidential, full) and the spread of successful legislation. Clearly the efforts and successes picked up speed at the end of the 19^th century and especially after the turn of the century, so we turned our consideration to how to explain the instances and rates of success and failure, relying heavily on McConnaughy’s analysis and conclusions.

We outlined each of these major hypotheses, considered examples from woman suffrage history, but concluded that in the end, none of these actually explained why legislators – men with voting rights – extended or did not extend voting rights to women as a result of their deliberations and legislative processes:

• Ideology: attitudes toward women’s rights; public cultures of support or rejection for gender equality.
• Organizational capacity of women’s movements: How large were they? What were their resources?
• Strength of opposition movements
• Threats of violence or disorder

Each of these explanations plays a role, but they only get us to the door of the state legislature – not inside the deliberative process.  (Although we notes, there was not much threat of violence or disorder, unless one considered women voting disorderly – which some people did, in terms of the proper order of hearth and home.)

But considering the incentives and disincentives of legislators – their specific motivations – does offer more help, especially if we distinguish between the two forms McConnaughy discussed:

• Strategic enfranchisement: would extending the vote to women specifically benefit a legislator’s party in terms of electoral support? Would women be expected to vote disproportionately for the dominant party?
• Programmatic enfranchisement: Are key portions of the voting public, or third parties or other groups in coalition with the legislator’s party, possibly being a support to it or part of the opposition have as part of their platform of policy demands the enfranchisement of women?

Strategic enfranchisement depends on an assumption that women would be a voting bloc. Few legislators probably believed that in the first place, largely because of the stereotype that women would follow their husbands. But as states began to enfranchise women it became that women were every bit as diverse in their political views and partisan allegiances as men.

Therefore we pursued the details of programmatic enfranchisement through the data and evidence we read about, comparing the different states, and relating this back to the actions of Congress back in the old (1860s) days.

Slides from this week: PO59519AMENDStateCampaigns

To see the whole series of blogs:  http://blogs.bu.edu/vsapiro/politics-education-gardening-stuff-pegs/

Week 4

The rise of an independent woman suffrage movement is a fascinating story of transformation of the anti-slavery movement and the ensuing conflict within interlinked social movements over priorities, values, and strategies, all conditioned by national and regional politics and the rise of the American party system. Today we went back to the anti-slavery movement to chart an overview of women’s involvement and the impact of the movement on women, then focused on the rise and transformation of the woman suffrage movement up its break-up and dormancy beginning around 1870.

We began by looking again at the anti-slavery movement, picking out high-level themes from our discussion of Zaeske’s Signatures of Citizenship that would help us enter our discussion of the rise of the woman suffrage movement. We discussed four questions:

• How did women, especially white women in the North, get involved in the anti-slavery movement? Why did male leaders welcome their involvement, but not include them in leadership?
• What was the path they took from considering slavery as a moral issue to developing a more political consciousness about slavery? How did these different frameworks shape how they understood what they were doing in their antislavery work, and how did that relate to their understandings of appropriate women’s roles?
• Practicalities: What were their experiences? What skills and resources did it take? Imagine women in this era of a restricted woman’s sphere reaching out to ask people for signatures on petitions, explaining the issue to them.
• What were the impacts of involvement in the antislavery movement on their own political identity, sense of citizenship, understanding of their relationship to the ideas of the American Revolution and American political values?

This week's discussion launched from our reading of Faye E. Dudden, Fighting Chance: The Struggle over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America (Oxford University Press, 2011).

Both women’s history and African American history are often treated as though they are sui generis; they stand outside of “normal” history and considerations, and they are only about itself – African American history is about African Americans; women’s history is about women. In contrast, I believe it is important to understand the social movements we are discussing as cases to further our understanding of core aspects of the history of American democracy; to place them in a broader historical context; and to study them through a framework of what social scientists have learned about the dynamics of social movements. I therefore proceeded with a brief lecture on the nature of social movements, in light of which we will proceed to examine the rise and transformations of the woman suffrage movement.

My lecture emphasized 4 points and their implications. (1) Groups and individuals who have the power and resources to use conventional political structures and processes do not launch social movements. (2) Social movements usually take off because of some precipitating event – especially an event that politicizes what was not previously understood as political, and that creates a motivation for different groups and organizations to work together over shared concerns. (3) Social movements are not single, particular organizations. Social movements contain and link together different organization as well as people who are not members of particular organizations. (4) Finally, and most important, social movements are coalitions of groups and individuals with overlapping but different issues, priorities, and approaches to action.

The nature of social movements as coalitions almost always means they are fundamentally fragile, always threatened by the centrifugal forces of their differences in a context of limited power and resources. It is useful to analyze the different groups and organizations within a social movement in terms of:

• Shared vs different social bases, including those deriving from geographic location
• Shared vs different specific issue concerns;
• Shared vs different priorities, even where they share issue concerns;
• Shared vs different preferred strategies/tactics

Given this, it is amazing, frankly, when social movements rise and become sustainable for a significant period of time.

Social movements cannot be understood out of context, especially contextual features that change over time. These changes, in turn, may heighten the significance of what is different across coalition partners, as compared with what is shared. Stressors such as insufficient resources or other crises may create the need for creating sharper priorities for the use of available resources or reconsidering their repertoire of strategies and tactics increase the potential for combustion of the coalition.

How, then, can we apply this framework to the antislavery and woman suffrage movements? What examples could we see in the 1830s – 1870 period?  The students readily found many examples in discussion, and led them to a very nuanced discussion of critical periods in this history, especially with respect to the 1840 split in the abolition movement and the conflicts within the antislavery/woman suffrage alliance and the woman suffrage movement itself.

One important implication of the idea of a social movement as a coalition is that the common tendency to define the woman suffrage movement in terms of a single organization – the NWSA and its leaders (Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton) or even the NWSA and the AWSA is wrong. It is especially misleading in discussions of African American women in the woman suffrage movement, by defining their organizations as somehow outside of or different from the woman suffrage movement. A social movement considered as a coalition involves groups and individuals who may work together explicitly, or may work together in parallel.

Thus, in terms of race and the woman suffrage movement, we will examine where we find race integrated groups, organizations, and actions and where we find race segregated groups, organizations, and actions. We will look at where there are conflicts along race lines within the woman suffrage and antislavery movements.  And we will consider the variety of orientations intersectionally across race and gender in issues, priorities, and actions.

Before we turned to specifics of the woman suffrage movement history we considered a couple of other framing problems and concerns:

We have to be very careful about certain critical core terms, all of which are used or interpreted with different meanings at different times, making all the difference in the world in discussions of the politics of rights and citizenship:

• “Man.” When does this mean male? Or human? Or a citizen? Or a male citizen?
• “Women,” “Woman suffrage,” “Woman suffrage movement.” Does this mean all or any woman>? Some women only? Which women?
• “Universal suffrage.” This is sometimes meant to refer to all adults, sometimes all male adults, sometimes all white male adults.
• “White,” “Black,” “Negro.” Depending on context, these terms referred to race, sometimes to race and gender.

Understanding these terms in context – as used in documents, speeches, etc. – takes great care, and makes a lot of difference.

It is also important to understand how deeply unpopular the antislavery movement and antislavery activists were, even where people did not approve of slavery itself. Participating in the movement was challenging and often dangerous, especially for women. It was dangerous for women both because the abolition movement was unpopular and because most people did not approve of women becoming active in politics.  Likewise, the woman’s rights movement and woman suffrage movement was deeply unpopular. Throughout the period we are discussing, the very idea of women voting was widely regarded as so out of the question, so unnatural, proposals for woman suffrage could be safely ignored – not even attacked. Thus, there was nothing “conservative” about being part of the abolition or woman suffrage movement, ever. The deep racism we will see in parts of the woman suffrage movement, shows that people can engage in politics that is radical on some dimensions, and retrograde in others.

I prefer that historical “names” not be abstract, but have faces. We therefore took a few minutes to look at a gallery of images of some abolition and suffrage leaders the students have read a lot about in this early period and understand them as people; in chronological order: Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Josephine Griffing, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell, Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, George Francis Train.

Finally, we launched into the launch of the woman suffrage movement.  We began with a discussion of how the movement arose in the first place.

Given that the woman suffrage movement grew out of the antislavery movement, and that race issues were such an important part of the story of the rise and early transformations of the movement, I wanted the students to deal seriously and deeply with questions of sexism and racism in this period, and how they understand it. I therefore asked them to spend a few minutes thinking over the following questions. I asked them to sketch some notes on what this question brought to their mind and how they resolved it. I told them I would not ask them to share their notes, or their self-reflections:

What do you think should have been the most important priority after Emancipation:

• Universal suffrage (meaning gender & race inclusive)
• Black male suffrage
• White female suffrage

When we moved to discussion, I asked them to talk about how various leaders they read about answered these questions and why.

The discussion was rich and sophisticated, opening deep consideration of the variety of ways that racism and sexism played substantial roles in both movements and their transformations. With respect to sexism, the exclusions and/or relegation of women to foot soldier positions in the antislavery movement were deep and broad – part of the 1840 split in the abolition movement was over the role of women. We thought through what it would have felt like for women who had been active in antislavery for a decade, two, or three who had grown in their political consciousness to be told to that women should wait, subordinating their aspirations to others.

We talked about the choice among most African American (and white) male antislavery activists to prioritize extending the franchise to African American men but not women. We considered again the ways in which manhood and citizenship were so fundamentally tied, so that denying men their citizenship rights is “emasculating.” What is the equivalent for women? We also focused on the sexism (as we would understand it now) among women activists themselves, who adhered to many or most of the norms of the early 19^th- century sphere of women – who were reluctant to speak in public or exert leadership or engage in overt disagreement and conflict with men, accepting the norm of deferring.

With respect to the racism of many white people in the antislavery and woman suffrage movement, we began by probing how it could be that someone would devote years, even decades to risky behavior fighting the existence of slavery, yet be manifestly (to our eyes) racist. (We compared the idea of men who respect many women, would be against many forms of gender discrimination, and yet be manifestly – to our eyes – sexist.) We explored the racist statements of Stanton and others – their timing, the text, the situation to understand the workings of the racism in the movement.

Contrary to many claims today, their point was not that the priority should be to enfranchise white women first. It was to say that it made no sense to them that inferior (i.e. uneducated, illiterate, etc.) mostly non-white but also white men (“Think of Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung….” making laws for us.) The formulation they used was usually to say that not one more man of those categories should be granted the vote before women were – women who included so many more deserving citizens.”

We also explored some of the reasons why many white antislavery activists limited their understanding of the goals of that movement to ending slavery, while African American and many white antislavery activists saw a much broader emancipation agenda that would fight for equal rights.  It was clear to everyone in class that this analysis does not make the racism (or ethnocentrism, or class priority views) “better” or less vile. But it is important to understand the dynamics of both the sexism and racism that were so fundamental to these movements.

Earlier we talked about the importance of context: All of this was conditioned also by some critical things going on in the larger political system – most especially, (1) sectionalism, the Civil War, and Reconstruction; and (2) the rise of the American party system. For reasons we have read about, it is not possible to understand the politics of the social movements we are discussing without understanding the movements’ ties to the Republican party, and the way both the Republican and Democratic parties used and played the movements, exacerbating the divides and conflicts within them.

We ended the class with a return to the politics of coalition, including bringing it down to the personal human level in the relationships among Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, so full of conflicts over these questions, but also so linked in coalition and even friendship throughout their lives.  How does that happen?

Next week we will track in detail the particulars of the rise and early transformation of the woman suffrage movement, then explore the wide range of ways that women were active in politics throughout the 19^th and early 20^th centuries up to the 19^th Amendment. It is crucial that we understand that the suffrage movement was far from the only political game in town for women and politics.

The slides for this class are here: PO50519thAMRiseofSuffMovePPT

A detailed timeline of the period we are discussing, which will also be the basis for some of next week's work, is here: Suffrage Timeline detailed

The full set of blogs for each week of the Centennial course is here: http://blogs.bu.edu/vsapiro/politics-education-gardening-stuff-pegs/

Week 2.

It is not possible to understand the rise of women’s rights movements, including the suffrage movements, without first understanding the situation women faced in the historical lead-up to that period. This is especially important because we can be sure that very few students have any background in women’s history. They haven’t begun to imagine what it was like to be a woman – from any social group – in the 17^th, 18^th, or early 19^th century. They don’t know how the law considered women as compared with or in relation to men, or how women spent their days, or what their relationship was to the political system or major events such as, even, the American Revolution.

The readings for this week included the first chapter of Rosemarie Zagarri’s Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007) and 2 chapters of Linda K. Kerber’s Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (University of North Carolina Press, 1980).  Zagarri’s chapter has a very good discussion of the implications of the American Revolution for women; a useful brief explication of the  period from 1790 to 1807, when women gained then lost the right to vote in New Jersey; and a consideration of women as citizens and rights bearing people in the Early Republic. The Women of the Republic readings provide a good introduction to the legal situation of women, especially the common law framework of coverture and the concept and reality of Republican Motherhood.

This week had two main goals – beside an introduction to the socio-political and legal situation of women up to the Jacksonian era, this class also offered a substantial exercise in thinking historically, following up on our discussion of historical story-making from the week before. (See the slides: PO50519thAMCItizenshipPPT)

I developed and handed out a 6-page Timeline of Rights, Law, Policy, & Politics, listing simply dates and events. (See the Timeline: Timeline19thAmendSp20 )  I asked the students to divide themselves up into a few groups and spend 20 minutes reading and discussing the time line, identifying one or two interesting historical stories they detected, or identifying a couple of interesting questions or puzzles the timeline raises. When we reconvened together, each group presented its stories and puzzles. In each case I facilitated substantial discussions in which we pursued the stories and puzzles together, and through which I could draw some overarching points that will be important throughout the course.

Some of the questions the students identified:

• Instead of things just getting “better and better,” sometimes rights that were there were taken away – why? (Discussion: “progress” as a bad framework for understanding history. What specific situations led to increase or decrease in rights?)
• Rights were granted first in the Midwest/West – especially Territories: Why?
• Utah: Why did they grant women rights so early and why did the federal govt take them away?
• Bradwell v IL: Weird that women started getting degrees and qualifications, but then weren’t allowed to use them.
• Also in terms of education: Why is Mississippi the first place where women could get degrees (and they were granted limited voting rights very early there) when Mississippi otherwise has been so anti-egalitarian? (Discussion: Always note who is responsible for increase or decrease in opportunities or rights: Fed? State? Local? Which branch? Private bodies like religious organizations?)
• Muller v Oregon 1908: What was the big deal about 10-hour workdays for women? (Discussions: Different views of advancing women: pure equality vs protecting them from the special brutalities imposed on women ; i.e. equality vs equity. Also: Changes in women’s status and opportunities were often moved not primarily because of views of gender, but because of other issues such as, in this case, governmental intrusion in the labor market or, in other cases, party advantage.)
• Why did women get to vote in school elections in so many places first?
• Why was the vote often limited to taxpaying women and what was the significance for women?

We then moved to a combined lecture/discussion on gender, the law and policy to get a baseline for women’s situation before the suffrage movement. Although we mainly covered the common law, we took some time to note the variety of legal frameworks existing in the colonies and Early Republic, and conditions that would create variations in how the legal system affected women.

We worked our way through a classic discussion of the law of coverture and its implications using the famous passages in Blackstone’s Commentaries. The point was to make clear that even focusing on free white women, regardless of class or wealth, the law of coverture meant married women could not own their own property other than the clothes on their back, could not make contracts, seek employment without their husband’s permission, or have a right to keep any earnings from their employment. If a woman no longer resided with her husband, either because she left him or he left her, she was assumed to have abandoned him and if they were still married she still lived under the law of coverture, as she did if her husband was, say, lost at sea but they had not proof of his death. She had no rights over her children. She had rights only to the widow’s portion (1/3 of his property) at his death, which meant, if the property was a farm, she had to sell her portion – that is, her source of income. There was no such thing as rape in marriage because she had given her consent at marriage. He had a right to “correct” her, as they did their children, so his brutality against her would have to be very extreme indeed for anyone to protect her. Because of all of this, a “free” woman’s situation depended very much on the beliefs, attitudes, behavior, and whims of her husband, although he could make no binding contracts with her to circumvent the law because, by law, they were one person, indivisible.

We moved next to a consideration of women’s social roles and gendered expectations, emphasizing two aspects that are very important for understanding women’s standing and potential in politics: women in public, and women and communication. The main point is that women were not supposed to appear in public unaccompanied by men except in very circumscribed circumstances, or they would be regarded as deeply suspect. Moreover, there was a limited range of subjects women were able to discuss acceptably, and they were certainly not supposed to presume to teach or inform men. This, obviously, makes it very difficult to have an impact on public decision-making.

The remainder of the class was supposed to begin to look at women’s political roles relating first, to elections, and then the broader subject of republican motherhood but, not surprisingly, we were out of time. Next week!

(Look to the right, to Recent Posts, to connect with the other weeks.)