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Suffrage at 100

Women in American Politics since 1920

edited by Stacie Taranto and Leandra Zarnow

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Suffrage at 100 looks at women's engagement in US electoral politics and government over the one hundred years since the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.

In the 2018 midterm elections, 102 women were elected to the House and 14 to the Senate—a record for both bodies. And yet nearly a century after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, the notion of congressional gender parity by 2020—a stated goal of the National Women's Political Caucus at the time of its founding in 1971—remains a distant ideal. In Suffrage at 100, Stacie Taranto and Leandra Zarnow bring together twenty-two...

Suffrage at 100 looks at women's engagement in US electoral politics and government over the one hundred years since the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.

In the 2018 midterm elections, 102 women were elected to the House and 14 to the Senate—a record for both bodies. And yet nearly a century after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, the notion of congressional gender parity by 2020—a stated goal of the National Women's Political Caucus at the time of its founding in 1971—remains a distant ideal. In Suffrage at 100, Stacie Taranto and Leandra Zarnow bring together twenty-two scholars to take stock of women's engagement in electoral politics over the past one hundred years.

This is the first wide-ranging collection to historically examine women's full political engagement in and beyond electoral office since they gained a constitutional right to vote. The book explores why women's access to, and influence on, political power remains frustratingly uneven, particularly for women of color and queer women. Examining how women have acted collectively and individually, both within and outside of electoral and governmental channels, the book moves from the front lines of community organizing to the highest glass ceiling. Essays touch on

• labor and civil rights
• education
• environmentalism
• enfranchisement and voter suppression
• conservatism vs. liberalism
• indigeneity and transnationalism
• LGBTQ and personal politics
• Pan-Asian, Chicana, and black feminisms
• commemoration and public history
• and much more.

Contributors: Melissa Estes Blair, Eileen Boris, Marisela R. Chávez, Claire Delahaye, Nicole Eaton, Liette Gidlow, Holly Miowak Guise (Iñupiaq), Emily Suzanne Johnson, Dean J. Kotlowski, Monica L. Mercado, Johanna Neuman, Kathleen Banks Nutter, Katherine Parkin, Ellen G. Rafshoon, Bianca Rowlett, Sarah B. Rowley, Ana Stevenson, Barbara Winslow, Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Nancy Beck Young

Reviews

Reviews

Full of interesting and topically varied essays, this impressive book is a welcome start at remedying the serious neglect of women in political history.

This insightful and wide-ranging collection highlights women's myriad contributions to modern political life since 1920 alongside women's ongoing challenges in their quest for full equality.

This is the book we need in 2020. For far too long, political history narratives have cast a white and male gaze on the field, relegating women to the sidelines of politics and history. This book shows the intellectual payoff and political necessity of reclaiming women's place in both.

Suffrage at 100 recognizes that no single story can tell the whole of women's rise to power. From battles for the Equal Rights Amendment and against Jim Crow to a woman at the head of the Democratic ticket, this cutting-edge team of researchers and storytellers brings today's tensions between gender and power into sharp and illuminating focus.

About

Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x
9
Pages
472
ISBN
9781421438689
Illustration Description
23 b&w photos
Table of Contents

Introduction. From Voting Power to Political Power
Stacie Taranto and Leandra Zarnow
Chapter 1. A History of Women in American Politics and the Enduring Male Political Citizenship Ideal
Stacie Taranto

Introduction. From Voting Power to Political Power
Stacie Taranto and Leandra Zarnow
Chapter 1. A History of Women in American Politics and the Enduring Male Political Citizenship Ideal
Stacie Taranto and Leandra Zarnow

Part I. Voting Rights Real and Imagined: Women's Political Engagement in the Decades after Suffrage, 1920s-1950s
Chapter 2. Commemorating the History of the Nineteenth Amendment: The National Woman's Party and the Politics of Memory in the 1920s
Claire Delahaye
Chapter 3. After the "Century of Struggle": The Nineteenth Amendment, Southern African American Women, and the Problem of Female Disfranchisement After 1920
Liette Gidlow
Chapter 4. "My Money's on the Mare": Lessons from the 1930 US Senate Campaign of Ruth Hanna McCormick
Johanna Neuman
Chapter 5. "A Dead Husband Is a Better Ticket to Congress Than a Log Cabin": The Public Discourse of Widows in Office, 1920-1940
Katherine Parkin
Chapter 6. Beyond the New Deal Network: Mary Elizabeth Switzer at the Federal Security Agency, 1939-1945
Dean Kotlowski
Chapter 7. Elizabeth Peratrovich, the Alaska Native Sisterhood, and Indigenous Women's Activism, 1943-1947
Holly Miowak Guise
Chapter 8. "These Men Have Such Dominant Positions": The Women's Committee for Educational Freedom and the Gendered Battle for Liberalism in the 1940s
Nancy Beck Young
Chapter 9. "I Have Talked to You Not as Women but as American Citizens": The Gender Ideology of Presidential Campaigns, 1940-1956
Melissa Estes Blair

Part II. Women's Political Leadership Takes Shape: Reform and Reaction, 1960s-1980s
Chapter 10. From Suffragist to Congresswoman: Celebrating Political Action, Women's History, and Feminist Intellectuals in Ms. Magazine, 1972-1984
Ana Stevenson
Chapter 11. "You Know Where I Stand": Louise Day Hicks and the Politics of Race, Class and Gender, 1963-1975
Kathleen Banks Nutter
Chapter 12. On the Shirley Chisholm Trail: The Legacy of Suffrage and Citizenship Engagement
Barbara Winslow
Chapter 13. Envisioning the National Women's Conference: Patsy Takemoto Mink and Pacific Feminism
Judy Tzu-Chun Wu
Chapter 14. Married Congresswomen and the New Breed of Political Husbands in 1970s Political Culture
Sarah B. Rowley
Chapter 15. Madame Ambassador: Jeane J. Kirkpatrick and Global Diplomacy
Bianca Rowlett

Part III. Looking Toward a New Century for Women in Politics, 1990s-2010s  
Chapter 16. Palin versus Clinton: Feminism, Womanhood, and the 2008 Presidential Election
Emily Suzanne Johnson
Chapter 17. Tribute Politics: How Feminist History Became a Reference Point in the 2016 Election
Nicole Eaton
Chapter 18. Rooted in Community: The Scholarship of Chicana Leadership and Activism
Marisela R. Chávez
Chapter 19. Pave It Blue: Georgia Women and Politics in the Trump Era
Ellen G. Rafshoon
Chapter 20. Putting Women on a Pedestal: Monument Debates in the Era of the Suffrage Centennial
Monica L. Mercado
Chapter 21. Toward a New New Deal... and the Women Will Lead
Eileen Boris
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Index

Author Bios
Featured Contributor

Stacie Taranto

Stacie Taranto is an associate professor of history at Ramapo College of New Jersey. She is the author of Kitchen Table Politics: Conservative Women and Family Values in New York.
Featured Contributor

Leandra Zarnow, PhD

Leandra Zarnow is an assistant professor of history and affiliated faculty in the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at the University of Houston. She is the author of Battling Bella: The Protest Politics of Bella Abzug.