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This chapter traces Jewish women's suffrage activism from the creation of National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in 1890 through the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 and its aftermath. Jewish women primarily worked for suffrage as individuals, though intense debate flourished among Jewish women's groups. The American Jewish press also devoted time and space to suffrage, and rabbis aired the issue within the community. Once the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in August 1920, Jewish women moved to apply their new rights to their sense of Jewish communal status as well as American citizenship. Indeed, immediately after winning the vote, the members of the sisterhood of The Temple in Atlanta successfully demanded representation on the synagogue board.

Chapter 6 explores the “equality versus difference” debate--a defining feature of feminism in modern America--through the lens of Breckinridge’s work in both the national suffrage organization, the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and its successor organization, the League of Women Voters. By exploring Breckinridge’s work with national feminist organizations during and after the suffrage struggle, this chapter highlights both women’s continuous activism and their ideological differences, especially their debate over the Equal Rights Amendment and so-called “protective legislation.”

Chapter One argues that the Genesis creation story played a defining role in debates about women’s rights for generations and that this is why so many women responded enthusiastically to Darwinian evolutionary theory in the second half of the nineteenth century. By refuting special creation and asserting human-animal kinship, Darwin offered attentive readers with a new way to think about the differences between women and men and an alternative, naturalistic creation story. Ultimately, Darwinian evolution inspired some freethinking (a nineteenth-century term referring to agnostics and atheists) feminists to renounce Christianity all together, forcing a split in the women’s rights movement. After 1890, in the wake of the controversy caused by Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Woman’s Bible, the women most influenced by Darwinian evolution were ousted from the largest suffrage organization, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). This chapter establishes the enthusiasm that a variety of women had for evolutionary theory in the 1870s and 1880s and why, after the 1890 merger of NAWSA, the women who continued to speak and write about the feminist applications of evolutionary theory did so in free thought, sex reform, and socialist venues, rather than within the suffrage movement.

Weil pushed a reluctant Federation of Women's Clubs to adopt a suffrage resolution. In 1914 she served as president of the Goldsboro Equal Suffrage League and five years later was elected president of the Equal Suffrage Association of North Carolina. Either North Carolina Tennessee would need to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment for women to achieve the vote, but North Carolina's political climate was conservative. Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, appointed Weil as state field commander. The legislature repeatedly voted down granting women the franchise or legal rights, and anti-suffragists campaigned that women's suffrage was immoral and would overturn white supremacy. Although the governor reluctantly endorsed women's suffrage, the state legislature tabled the motion, and Tennessee became the ultimate ratifying state.

This chapter considers the life of Anna Howard Shaw after her 1915 resignation from the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Official retirement, although at first it brought a lessening of her administrative responsibilities, in the end allowed Shaw the freedom to broaden her involvements. During these last years, much of the public, from the youngest suffrage supporter up to the U.S. president, saw her as an elder stateswoman, a role Shaw enthusiastically embraced. On February 14, 1917, Shaw celebrated her seventieth birthday. Close to two hundred letters, gifts, and congratulations from her long-time suffrage colleagues through President Wilson celebrated her life. On May 19, 1919, Shaw became the first woman to be honored with the Distinguished Service Medal, the government's highest civilian award. Shaw died on July 2, 1919.

This chapter on American women and politics during World War I explores African American women’s wartime activism and efforts of such women as Nannie Burroughs, Madame C. J. Walker, and Ida Wells-Barnett to transcend barriers of race and gender. It examines pacifist (such as Jane Addams) and radical (such as Emma Goldman) women who resisted war as well as those who called for war "preparedness." Finally it compares the approach of the National American Woman Suffrage Association led by Carrie Chapman Catt with that of Alice Paul's National Woman's Party in using the war effort to further the suffrage cause and women's equality.

This chapter examines the middle years of Anna Howard Shaw's presidency—from planning for the 1909 the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) Convention in Seattle through the 1912 convention in Philadelphia. While analyses critical of Shaw's presidency have most frequently used the upheavals of these years as the basis for judging Shaw as a failure as an administrator, the gains of these years as well as the full context and origins of these organizational conflicts have received scant in-depth attention. Class and race issues are especially significant for analyzing both Shaw's legacy as a leader and the positions of the suffrage movement as a whole. Money tensions had always haunted the NAWSA, but the fact that Shaw drew a salary for her presidency and had access to monies beyond the control of the NAWSA treasurer raised suspicions among the privileged leaders who linked financial need with corruption. That Shaw was also the strongest and most consistent supporter of universal suffrage brought additional resistance from those who were opposed to or willing to compromise on the extension of the franchise to African American and immigrant women.

This chapter examines the final years of Anna Howard Shaw's presidency from 1913 to 1915. By 1913 Anna Shaw could see the end of the struggle. The movement to extend that basic right of equal citizenship—full suffrage—to all women now had sufficient momentum to see it through to the final victory. After years of slow progress and the efforts of generations of women, Shaw was leading “the cause” with new leaders and organizations, extensive financial resources, regular attention from the media and politicians, and finally new suffrage gains in major western states. However, though she believed the success was inevitable and near, the final years of her presidency threw up hurdles that complicated Shaw's leadership and administrative efforts. This period, during a tremendous period of suffrage activism, Shaw confronted new difficulties and made occasional, but significant, missteps in her efforts to close the final chapter of the suffrage struggle. At that 1915 NAWSA Convention in Washington, D. C., Shaw turned the leadership position to Carrie Chapman Catt.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the life and accomplishments of Anna Howard Shaw (1847–1919) as well as the author's account of how she became interested in Shaw. It then sets out the book's primary purpose, which is to provide a much-needed biography of a major figure in U.S. women's history. The book is also a historiographic mystery. How and why have so few historians taken an in-depth look at Anna Howard Shaw? Why is there no discussion of the fact that she was the first and only salaried president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association? And certainly the core question remains: how important was Shaw to the woman's suffrage movement? The chapter urges two core changes to Shaw scholarship. First we must consider what the sources actually tell us. The second is to open up the analyses and consider the possibility of other views of Shaw.

This chapter examines the early years of Anna Howard Shaw's National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) presidency. With little scholarship on Shaw's leadership, most historians follow the position originated by Eleanor Flexner that Shaw's tenure was chaotic and that Shaw an ineffective administrator. The only major challenge to this view comes from the late Sarah Hunter Graham and her argument that these were the years of a suffrage renaissance. The tensions and conflicts under Shaw's leadership were essential for the change that revitalized the NAWSA. Key challenges involved economic and racial issues, the focus on the federal amendment, and what the move to New York and the professionalization of the staff meant. Feminist suffrage scholarship generally has concluded that a conservative and racist NAWSA and Shaw were finally challenged by younger, more radical leaders. However, a close examination of Shaw's presidency finds that the dynamics within the NAWSA and the suffrage struggle to be far more complex.