Winning Their Place Roundtable: A Response

Centennials are wonderful opportunities to reflect on the state of our historical studies. I want to thank David Turpie for organizing this roundtable, which allowed me to reminisce a bit about the origins of Winning Their Place and to ponder where we should go next. I would also like to thank all the contributors for their keen insights that provide exciting road maps for our future investigation into women and politics. Projects like this remind us that we are never done exploring our past.

Although Winning Their Place was published in 2009, research for it was conducted in the 1990s, and much of its theoretical framework was established even earlier. I grew up when little girls were told they could be mothers, teachers, or nurses, but that was it. Becoming president of the United States was simply unimaginable. There were no female professors in the History Department at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1970s when I was an undergraduate, and women’s contributions to history were never discussed in my courses. When I told my instructor that I wanted to focus on women during the Civil War for my senior thesis, he just chuckled and said, “Good luck with that.”¹

Much had changed by the time I enrolled in graduate studies at Arizona State University (ASU) in the early 1990s. Women’s history was still in its formative stage, written by women who had come of age during the civil rights movement and the modern women’s movement, so naturally their publications focused on their antecedents, especially the temperance, suffrage, and abolition movements. The national suffrage movement was well documented, providing me with the best framework for future research into women and politics―a solid improvement from my undergraduate experience.

A research methods class with Mary Rothschild, who founded the Women’s Studies Program at ASU, allowed me to delve into local history and write a biography of state suffrage leader Frances Willard Munds.² Mary worried I might not find enough material—she knew from her own experience that primary sources were scarce―so I scoured the archives where I met Melanie Sturgeon who was just finishing her PhD in history at ASU and starting her career at Arizona State Library and Public Records (ASLAPR). She told me that she had seen a box of suffrage material somewhere and to come back later. Sure enough, a few weeks later I was looking at a treasure trove of speeches, letters between local and national leaders, and ephemera which no researcher had viewed before. The resulting two-hundred-page paper I wrote for Mary Rothschild’s course was a rambling mess, but I realized that with so much untapped source material, at least a dissertation was possible.

It troubled me that the box of materials that would become the Women’s Suffrage Collection at ASLAPR had sat untouched for decades, deemed too unimportant to catalogue until Melanie rescued it. Aside from a couple of articles on the suffrage movement, most of Arizona’s history was mute on women in politics, even though the state has consistently ranked among the best in the country in electing women to office.³ In fact, some of the premier history texts falsely claimed that male politicians had granted women the vote.⁴ Frances Munds would have laughed at that notion since most of the gentlemen in the legislature had fought against the issue to the bitter end. It was Arizona’s male voters who gave suffrage a resounding victory at the ballot box in 1912.

Leaders of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) were surprised at the Arizona victory since they had spent little money or time on the campaign. I believe the success was achieved because Munds, who otherwise adhered closely to NAWSA’s tactics, made one critical exception. The national movement insisted women remain nonpartisan, using gentle persuasion to win over converts, which Munds felt was naïve. “They can talk all they want to about educating the dear public but a little political strategy will overbalance all the education you do...