Reexamining Women’s Nineteenth-Century Political Agency: School Suffrage and Office-Holding

Recognizing public education as a public good, policymakers have focused on providing those with direct interest in public schools opportunities to influence educational policy making. In the nineteenth century, this often meant providing women the right to vote on and to hold public school offices. Frequently conflated, suffrage and public office holding are actually two different, yet related, citizenship rights. Using state and territorial legislative records as a starting place, this article redefines the understanding of school suffrage by complicating the traditional narrative relative to its relationship with full woman suffrage. In doing so, it also provides evidence that before 1900 women were granted the right to hold public education offices, ultimately being elected in forty-three of forty-eight states before the twentieth century, thus broadening the understanding of women’s political agency prior to attaining full suffrage.