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This chapter discusses the woman suffrage movement in the South from a local perspective. Suffragists comprised the first Progressive Era group to promote the rights of women for the sake of their own equality. The Galveston Equal Suffrage Association should be credited with steering the momentum of women's public activism in two directions: suffragists sought to make permanent the gains made by women civic activists and voting rights would allow them to directly elect public officials whom they would hold accountable for sanitation and civic movement. The Galveston Equal Suffrage Association sharpened their focus on the progressive women's community. They sought gains for women in equal pay for equal work, in property rights for married women and equal opportunity in the workplace. For many, these ideas were too abstract, too unconnected. But suffragists provided a radicalizing influence for the women of Galveston.

This chapter details the development of a woman suffrage movement in New York State as it positions the state in the broad historical context of the national woman suffrage movement. Some rural upstate New Yorkers demanded social and political reforms for women well before the Civil War. As a result of controversy sparked by the Fifteenth Amendment, which granted African American men the right to vote, women founded two national organizations and the New York State Woman Suffrage Association. State leaders dominated the movement in terms of strategy and tactics, and several of them rose to national prominence. By the last decade of the nineteenth century, suffragists had come to recognize the importance of fluidity and pliability in addressing their appeals to the broadest possible audiences. The divergent groups advocating for women's enfranchisement disagreed with each other over specific strategies, tactics, and whom to include, but they unfailingly agreed that women needed the vote.

This chapter looks at the story of black women in the New York State woman suffrage movement, which is marked by strained racial relations and exclusionary practices. Black women, like white women, saw the vote as a panacea, able to solve their specific problems relating to racial violence, education, employment, and workers' rights. Although white women seldom invited black women to join in their suffrage activities, black women found ways to advance the cause and participate in the movement. Indeed, pervasive racism complicated black women's suffrage activism, but it cannot diminish their contributions to mainstream suffragism. Rarely separating women's political rights from other fundamental rights, black women's suffrage activism showed creativity and ingenuity and did not always mirror white women's activist strategies. Ultimately, black women's influence on black male voters helped secure women's political enfranchisement in New York State.

This chapter examines the relationship between the women’s suffrage movement and popular print culture in the United States from the nineteenth century to the turn of the twentieth century. In particular, it considers the status of oratory as the privileged sign of political agency and how suffrage campaigners resorted to a variety of print form such as periodicals, pamphlets, creative literature, and print cultural publicity stunts to influence government policy and expand women’s role in the public sphere.

This chapter examines the woman suffrage movement during the outbreak of war in Europe. Contradictions and upheaval related to the war marred the last three years of the suffrage campaign in New York. Most suffragists and anti-suffragists turned their attention from suffragism to patriotism, war preparedness, or pacifism between August 1914 and April 1917, when the United States entered the war. The movement, which previously faced divisions among members of its rank and file over tactics and strategies related to women's enfranchisement, now divided along new lines of patriotism and militarism. Sensitive to citizenship rights and responsibilities, most suffragists felt compelled to choose a position in response to the war. Nevertheless, they insisted on keeping their campaign before the public, most often linking suffrage with patriotism to highlight their worthiness for full citizenship.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the woman suffrage movement in New York. Across the seven decades between 1846, when a few Jefferson County women publicly claimed the right to vote, and the passage of the New York State referendum in 1917, thousands of women—and some resolute men—engaged in the irrepressible fight for woman suffrage. The movement crossed class, race, ethnic, gender, and religious boundaries during periods of great upheaval in the United States. At the same time, the movement itself caused social and political turmoil. Three generations of New York State women fought a complicated, sometimes frustrating, but ultimately rewarding battle to obtain the right to vote. In the process, women opened for themselves new opportunities in the social and political spheres.

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 explores communication innovations made by American social movements over time. These movements share political communication goals and outsider status, which helps to connect innovation decisions across movements and across time. The chapter primarily explores two long-lasting movements. First is the women’s suffrage movement, which lasted over seventy years of the print era from the mid-nineteenth century until the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Next is the long-lasting fight against racial discrimination, which led to the modern civil rights movement starting in the print era, but coming of age along with television during the 1950s and 1960s. Both the women’s suffrage movement and civil rights movement utilized innovative tactics with similarly mild results until mainstream coverage improved. Finally, these historical movements are compared with movements emerging during the internet era, including the early Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the Resist movement.

This chapter describes events in the life of Anna Howard Shaw from 1881 to 1889. Over the course of the 1880s Shaw willingly gave up the comfortable but limited life of a small town minister to dedicate herself to changing the inequalities of the social structure in ways that she believed would better women's lives more than any work she could do as a minister. Fortunately for Shaw, she turned out to have many of the talents, skills, and attributes that the leaders and the constituencies of the woman suffrage and women's temperance movements needed and valued. By 1888, Shaw would state that, “I have registered a vow that I will from this time forth never work for any political party, never give one dollar to any religious body, home or foreign, never listen Sunday after Sunday to the preaching of any man, never give one ounce of my strength of body or purse, or mind, or heart to any cause which opposes the best interest of women. ” Fortunately, Shaw achieved the independence to make those decisions.

This chapter examines Puerto Rico's political and social struggles under U.S. rule in the midst of economic changes between 1900 and 1930. It begins by focusing on the Partido Republicano in the early years of U.S. rule, which covered the period 1900–1904. The Partido Republicano and Partido Federal were political parties that had been formed soon after the United States took control of Puerto Rico and came to dominate Puerto Rican politics. Meanwhile, the labor movement developed its own version of reformist colonial politics. The chapter explores these parallel routes to accommodation, paying particular attention to the rise of other political parties such as Partido Unión, which emerged as a defender of both coffee and sugar propertied interests, Partido Socialista, and Partido de la Independencia. It also discusses the passage of the Jones Act of 1917 that extended U.S. citizenship to Puerto Ricans, along with the birth of a Puerto Rican community in New York and a women's suffrage movement in Puerto Rico.

This chapter talks about the satisfaction of recalling some of the achievements of the Women's Suffrage Movement in Britain, especially in a period when the possibilities of social progress and the practicability of applied social science are being questioned. The development of the personal, legal, and political liberties of half the population of the country within the span of less than eighty years stands as one of the supreme examples of consciously directed social change. The chapter then draws together some of the vital statistics of birth, marriage, and death for the light they shed on the changes that have taken place in the social position of women. Then, it suggests that the accumulated effect of these changes now presents the makers of social policy with some new and fundamental problems.