How Women Got the Vote

A statue of Esther Hobart Morris stands in front of the state capitol in Cheyenne, Wyoming, commemorating the woman who served as the first female Justice of the Peace in the United States and was, as the inscription on the pedestal of the monument states, a “proponent of the legislative act which in 1869 gave a distinction to the Territory of Wyoming as the 1^st government in the world to grant women equal rights.” It is at the foot of this statue that Jad Adams, the author of Women and the Vote: A World History, begins his exploration into the history of women’s suffrage. In fact, the historical event that the statue commemorates and the person chosen to represent it seem to have given Adams the set of questions that defines the trajectory of his book, as well as an organizational framework and the outline of an argument.

The questions are obvious, and the reader begins to raise them along with Adams as he recalls stumbling upon the monument to Morris when traveling across the United States by bus in the 1970s. Why was the vote first introduced in Wyoming and not, for example, in New York, where the Seneca Falls Convention and Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Declaration of Sentiments marked the beginning of the first organized women’s suffrage movement in 1848, a good two decades before the Wyoming act? Who was Esther Hobart Morris? Why do we know so little about her compared to such other notable suffragists as Stanton and Susan B. Anthony? Why do we know so little about women’s rights history in Wyoming? These questions become Adams’ points of departure as he sets off on a journey—one perhaps inspired by memories of his student trip across the country—to write the history “of a single, clear, and measurable objective: the right to appear on an electoral register.” His purpose is to explore how it happened that, while “before 1893 no women had the right to vote for a national parliament,” within a century, “almost every nation in the world had women voters” (p. 8).

Adams’ justifications for writing such a history seem convincing, as he identifies several major lacunae in the existing historiography of women and the vote. As he rightly points out, many of the existing works that narrate women’s struggle for political equality were written either by the women themselves—the History of Woman Suffrage (four volumes, published between 1881 and 1922) by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, for example—or by such sympathetic politicians as William Pember Reeves, the New Zealand cabinet minister who found himself involved in discussions of women’s suffrage and recorded his experience in State Experiments in Australia and New Zealand (1902). Predictably, these narratives—often produced with the goal of placing their authors at the center of the story and drawing a picture of a movement that was propelled by a single agenda and guided by an undivided leadership—omit from their pages many of those whose contributions did not conform to this uncomplicated view.

Secondary literature on the topic, although vast, is similarly incomplete, as it focuses largely on women’s suffrage in Great Britain and the United States. Thus, such recent titles as Sally McMillen, Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement (2008), and Ben Griffin, The Politics of Gender in Victorian Britain: Masculinity, Political Culture, and the Struggle for Women’s Rights (2012) joined the earlier works of Ellen DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America (1978), Woman Suffrage and Women’s Rights (1998); and Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (1996), still considered classics in the field...