African American Studies Commons^™

Bigger Than A Ballot Box, Joanne Goodwin

History Faculty Research

The relationship between the histories of woman suffrage and U.S. politics suffered from a reluctance on the part of both fields to include the other until recently. Political historians refrained from in-depth discussions of the eighty-year movement to gain the vote for women until the new political history expanded the definition of political actors and activities. Women's historians (with a few notable exceptions) discussed the suffrage movement as a type of voluntarist reform activity, rather than contextualizing it within political institutions and systems. Ellen Carol DuBois's study of suffrage through the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments departed significantly …