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  • Feminism and Woman Suffrage: Debate, Difference, and the Importance of Context
  • Jean Quataert and Leigh Ann Wheeler

Women’s historians argue about feminism—about whether feminist history and women’s history are one and the same, about whether historians should identify women in the past as feminists even when they rejected the label, and about whether sexual displays of female bodies exploit or empower women. Feminist activists disagree over goals, strategies, and whether to work in mixed or single-sex groups, among other matters. Feminism is and has ever been the stuff of disagreement, debate, and difference as made amply clear in the articles featured here. Each explores a wide range of activism by suffragists, feminists, and their opponents in different times and places. They take us from an engaging methodological discussion about writing feminist biography, to arguments in the nineteenth-century United States that equated disability and disfranchisement, to unexpected war-related influences on woman suffrage in Japan and France, to a survey of women’s activism in twentieth-century Fiji and to the causal connections between transnational feminism and the rise of the antifeminist New Right in the 1970s’ U.S. We include as well a lively and sometimes contentious discussion among performers and women’s history scholars as they reflect on the politics of sex and performance raised by The Down & Dirty Show featured on the 2011 program of the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women. Participants consider a number of provocative questions: What does The Down & Dirty Show suggest about the legacy of the feminist sex wars in women’s history? How does context shape the politics of erotic spectatorship? Who feels empowered to speak about these matters, who feels silenced, and why? More practically, should the Berkshire Conference continue to sponsor such shows and should registration fees pay for them? For the first time in the Journal’s history, readers can enter the conversation by posting to our online comment thread at http://www.journalofwomenshistory.org/down&dirty.

In our lead article, “The Book I Couldn’t Write: Alice Paul and the Challenge of Feminist Biography,” Susan Ware kicks off this exciting issue with an introspective discussion of her efforts to write about the life of a worthy but inaccessible historical figure. Ware’s ruminations on feminist methodology, insights about the relationship between a biographer and her subject, and reflections on the elusive Alice Paul make for a fascinating read. Few sources document Paul’s “interior or personal life.” Without these, [End Page 7] Ware wonders, “how can you write a feminist biography?” How indeed when “one hallmark of recent feminist biography has been its focus on the interplay between the personal and the political in constructing the narratives of individual women’s lives?” Ware surmises that Paul’s singular devotion first to the movement for woman suffrage and then to the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) may have prevented her from developing the sort of rich private life that animates the best biographies. Even so, this intriguing article exposes fascinating but little-known details of Paul’s life. It also raises many themes that recur in the pieces published here, including Alice Paul herself, as well as transnational connections and differences and disagreements among feminists.

Yvonne M. Pitts examines the role that the concept of disability played in arguments made by opponents and proponents of woman suffrage. In “Disability, Scientific Authority, and Women’s Political Participation at the Turn of the Twentieth-Century United States,” Pitts shows how authorities ranging from Aristotle to nineteenth-century evolutionary biologists and prominent jurists justified excluding women from political participation by casting their perceived differences from men as disabilities. Physical delicacy, emotional frailty, mental inferiority, and maternity all were cited as evidence that women were less able political actors than men. Significantly, neither side in this debate questioned whether the “disabled” should be disfranchised. Woman suffragists argued that women were no more disabled than many men who were allowed to vote and that female characteristics labeled as gender-specific disadvantages were only disabilities under laws and customs crafted by men. But they agreed with anti-suffragists, Pitts argues, that “significant innate incapacity or disabilities justified exclusion” from the...

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