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Reviews in American History 33.1 (2005) 78-83



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How The West—and the Nation—Was Won for Woman Suffrage

Rebecca J. Mead. How the Vote Was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868-1914. New York: New York University Press, 2004. viii + 272 pp. Photographs, notes, bibliography, and index. $40.00

Since World War II Americans have become accustomed to watching new political and social developments originate in the West and then eventually engulf the entire country. In her study of woman suffrage in the western states, Rebecca J. Mead shows that pattern of innovation occurring a century ago when every western state save one enfranchised women before a single state east of the Mississippi had done so. Historians routinely note the nineteenth-century victories for woman suffrage in Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and Idaho, but only a few have provided detailed studies of the movement in particular states, and Mead is the first to examine that development in the region as a whole.1

Mead pays most attention to Colorado, Washington, Oregon, and California, the latter of which occupies two chapters. She begins with a description of the early white suffragists in the West, whom Mead calls "organic intellectuals." Often self-supporting writers and lecturers, such as Abigail Scott Duniway, Laura DeForce Gordon, and Caroline Nichols Churchill, these women were highly individualistic freethinkers who helped spread suffrage ideas and form networks among sympathizers. Mead places the earliest debates over suffrage in the West in the frameworks of Reconstruction and the establishment of territorial and state governments: in these contexts, she examines how racial issues, particularly regarding the Chinese population, operated in suffrage debates as well as the usually overlooked enfranchisement of women by the Washington territorial legislature in 1883 and its nullification by the territory's Supreme Court in 1888.

Mead then turns to Colorado, where the first popular referendum enfranchised women in 1893—after an initial defeat in 1877 and fifteen years of suffrage activism. Both the mobilization of middle-class women, under the "society plan" devised by eastern suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt, and the support of Populists and labor were crucial to the suffrage victory. In fact, [End Page 78] the referendum gained majorities in several mining areas where no suffrage organization existed. Mead next examines California, where an 1896 referendum foundered on divisions among state suffragists and between them and the national organization, tensions with the Populists, and an opposition more effectively organized than in Colorado. By contrast, that same year the Idaho legislature enfranchised women with the support of Populists, labor, and Mormons, but with only a minimum of organized suffrage activity.

After a decade of disappointment, but not of suffrage inactivity, Progressivism provided the context for subsequent victories in the West, where Washington joined the suffrage fold in 1910 and Oregon in 1912. By setting these achievements in the context of referenda defeats in Washington in 1898 and in Oregon in 1900 and 1906, Mead demonstrates the relentless efforts it took for women to win the vote and the factors that ultimately secured their success. In Washington, suffragists obtained not just token endorsements but also the active support of farm, labor, and Socialist groups; the movement separated suffrage from Prohibition and linked it to the general movement of Progressive reform.

Similar conditions attended the California victory in 1911, but that campaign was distinguished by the use of parades, rallies and other tactics borrowed from the labor movement and by new public relations and advertising techniques. The tremendous diversity of the California movement inevitablyproduced conflicts among suffragists, but Mead also shows how decentralization enabled the movement to appeal to different groups in the population. After thousands of suffragists stood as poll watchers on election day, they had to wait two more days and endure newspaper reports of defeat before celebrating a narrow victory of 3,500 votes among nearly 250,000 cast. As was the case elsewhere in the West, "urban working-class support [mobilized by unions and Socialists] combined with the rural vote to...

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