Woman Suffrage and Women’s Rights

1. The Last Suffragist: An Intellectual and Political Autobiography (1997)

The Last Suffragist An Intellectual and Political Autobiography From the beginning, my decision to focus my scholarship on woman suffrage ran against the grain of the developing field of women’s history. In 1969, the year I selected my dissertation topic, women’s history was only an aspiration, albeit a widespread one. Feminism was still a word that even those of us who would go on to revive it were uncomfortable using. In graduate history programs all over the country, young women like myself were realizing that the history of women in the United States was an enormous unexplored territory, rich with compelling analytical questions. Our interest in women’s history was more a product of our political activism than our career aspirations. In buildings other than the ones where we took our graduate seminars, on evenings when we were not reading in preparation for our qualifying exams, we were writing feminist manifestos, attending meetings, calling demonstrations, and forming women’s liberation organizations. I was a graduate student at Northwestern, at the same time helping form the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union. Determined to unify our political and scholarly selves (and protected by a robust economy from too-great anxieties about our future careers), my generation wanted to contribute to a historical practice that would be useful, that would not only document social change but help realize it. Meanwhile, a few miles down the road, the signal 1960s organization Students for a Democratic Society was so committed to stopping the war in Vietnam by any means necessary that it was in the process of destroying its own existence . I have often wondered about the preoccupation of men of my generation with fighting either in or against the war and what role this 1 1 played in the new prominence of women in traditionally male environments such as the university. For the most part, women’s historians of the late 1960s and early 1970s were directing their scholarly energies toward women’s private lives—family, childrearing, sexuality.1 This was a perspective that was shaped by many factors. First, the entire practice of history was in the midst of a tremendous paradigm shift that would eventually go by the term social history.2 Itself an intellectual response to the larger politics and culture of “the sixties,” social history directed historians’ attention away from the designated rulers to the masses of common folk, with whom we believed the real fate of society lay. My teacher at the time, Jesse Lemisch, had called this new historical practice “history from the bottom up,” and those of us who adopted it did so with a crusading fervor .3 We were dedicated to a democratic approach to the power to make history, as much in our role of historian as in that of citizen. Although social history would eventually—two decades later—provide the basis for an invigorated approach to political history, for the time being, politics , at least in the formal sense of elections, officeholding, and government , was outside its purview. In addition, there was the strong sense that politics was not the place to find women’s overlooked and suppressed historical importance —their agency, to use the word that was coming to symbolize social historians’ intent to subvert old-fashioned notions of historical signi ficance. The relation between “public” and “private” life would soon surface as one of the fundamental problematics of modern feminist thought, but initially, women’s historians observed the distinction even as they began to challenge it. Public life, where women had been the objects of sustained and multifaceted discrimination, did not seem the arena in which women were going to be restored to history at the level to which we aspired. Indeed, that approach had been tried by an earlier generation of women’s historians and had manifestly failed to bring women into history.4 Given the frameworks of social history, to identify women’s agency, historians would have to focus on the things that most women did most of the time, on the very private and family concerns that had been considered too trivial and personal for historical investigation . 2 | The Last Suffragist A major factor in the lack of interest in political history was the larger disillusionment and contempt that surrounded formal politics in these years. The rise and fall of hopes for modern liberalism during the Kennedy-Johnson years, the inexorable growth of the...