The movement towards suffrage was a long and varied phenomenon lasting more than one-hundred years. It touched upon many other social movements in its path. At times, some of these other movements were socially (and ideologically) related to woman's suffrage (e.g., abolitionism). In particular, the "woman's rights" (which tended to endorse pro-suffrage sentiments [Buechler 1986]) movement was inextricably interwoven with the genesis of the suffrage movement but was not always in agreement with its focus. The hundred years prior to the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 are herein considered the applicable time-frame.
The suffragist movement classically fulfills McAdam's criteria that it be a collection of "organized efforts, on the part of excluded groups, to promote or resist changes in the structure of society that involve recourse to noninstitutional forms of political participation" (McAdam 1982: 25).* Though white American women of the nineteenth century were not so marginalized as, for example, African-American women held in formal slavery, they were still legally and informally considered "non-persons," were denied the opportunity to earn wages above poverty levels, could not inherit property, were not granted custody of their children when divorced, could not serve on a jury and, of course, could not vote (Bjorkman and Porritt 1917, Ryan 1992).
The political situation in the United States during the genesis of the woman's suffrage movement might be perceived as one of relative stability (when contrasted with twentieth century Latin America). Despite a civil war, regular presidential elections (and their results) demonstrated relatively few notable aberrations.
| Party
Democrat | Person
Jackson |
| Democrat | Jackson | |
| Democrat | Van Buren | |
| Whig | Harrison | |
| Democrat | Polk | |
| Whig | Fillmore | |
| Democrat | Pierce | |
| Democrat | Buchanan | |
| Republican | Lincoln | |
| Republican | Lincoln | |
| Republican | Grant | |
| Republican | Grant | |
| Republican | Hayes | |
| Republican | Garfield | |
| Democrat | Cleveland | |
| Republican | Harrison | |
| Democrat | Cleveland | |
| Republican | McKinley | |
| Republican | McKinley | |
| Republican | Roosevelt | |
| Republican | Taft | |
| Democrat | Wilson | |
| Democrat | Wilson | |
| Republican | Harding | |
| Republican | Coolidge | |
| Republican | Hoover |
Of the twenty six elections outlined in Table 4.1, ten elections were won by Democrats, two by Whigs, and the other fourteen by Republicans. What is interesting to note is that from the period of the Civil War to the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, there were only four Democrat successes, in contrast to the fourteen Republican victories. What is most notable, however, is the almost continuous rule of a single party until the two consecutive Democratic victories directly prior to 1920.
When one looks at the particular variation of actually persons occupying the presidency, the variation diminishes further. Five people were elected more than once, meaning that more than a third of the elections merely returned a previous ruler to power. But these superficial symptoms of stability belie the turmoil in American politics during much of this period.
If nothing else served to indicate that there was political turmoil between 1815 and 1860, the ebb and flow of partisan organizations would tell the story. The War of 1812 was the death-blow to the Federalist Party... Even before 1812 it had virtually been reduced to a new England remnant... For several years after the war [of 1812], most national political conflict took place among Democratic-Republicans rather than between two distinct, well-identified parties. That began to change after 1824 when John Quincy Adams, one of four Democratic-Republican presidential candidates, defeated Andrew Jackson. By 1828, when Jackson triumphed over Adams, the factions were becoming more sharply defined. Jackson, now under the label Democratic, had a superb ability both to unite his supporters and to create enemies. By the time he left office, his protégé and successor, Martin Van Buren, was confronted with a well-organized opposition, the Whig Party. Whigs and Democrats fought it out on fairly equal terms for more than a decade, but after 1848 the former disintegrated over the issue of slavery. The Democrats held together-often tenuously-until 1860, when they, too, split apart. After 1854, however, they faced a formidable challenge from the Republican party, whose candidate, Abraham Lincoln, captured the presidency in 1860... This brief catalogue...leaves out such ephemeral smaller parties as the Anti-Masonic, Liberty, Free Soil, and Know-Nothing, some of them having made respectable showings in local, state, and even national elections (Walters 1978: 6-7).
Of course, after 1860, the trauma of the Civil War and Reconstruction provided little immediate respite from this political flux.
This volatile political climate was reflected in a less formal manner than the story of party creations, competitions, successes, and deaths. Underlying such manifestations were the actual strategies that politicians implemented.
A new style of political warfare began to emerge after 1800, as politicians learned how to court an expanding electorate. By 1810 a majority of state had lowered franchise requirements to the point where most adult while males could vote... This may have been democracy, but it also permitted anyone, including the worst sort of rascals, to help select the nation's leaders. Reformers complained that a degraded and sinful majority, manipulated by political machines, had more of a voice in the nation's affairs than they, the godly minority, did.
Politicians disgusted reformers by seeking the electorate's lowest common denominator. No promise was too extreme, no spectacle too extravagant, if it got votes (Walters 1978: 7-8).
Throughout this period, the responsiveness of the federal government to various influences was typified by Grover Cleveland's election to the presidency in 1884. The "impression in the country was that he opposed the power of monopolies and corporations" (Zinn 1980: 252). Still, "when Cleveland defeated Blaine, Jay Gould wired him: 'I feel...that the vast business interests of the country will be entirely safe in your hands.' And he was right" (Zinn 1980: 252). As of the 1880s, popular influence of the government appeared difficult. Zinn mostly examines the ability of general consumer and the working classes to gain a substantial voice in political processes. But the conclusions suggest that government decision-making processes were largely un-open to more Americans.
This maelstrom both provided an opportunity for action (and, partially, an impetus for action). Stepping back from the inner-workings of particular politicians, one sees new patterns of political activity coalesce that contributed to the environment that fostered the suffrage movement.
[Post Civil War] politics had two important aspects. One was the general flowering of radical ambitions for social change that accompanied the defeat of slavery and encompassed demands for racial equality, sexual equality, and labor reform. The other was the process by which the power of the Republican party was marshaled on behalf of only one of these reforms, the demand for black suffrage. Stimulated by the former and thwarted by the latter, feminists came to realize that they needed an independent political base if they were to demand women's enfranchisement with any real force. The particular historical conditions under which they came to this realization shaped the nature of the movement they began to build in response to it (DuBois 1978: 19).
This situation underscores the importance of contemporaneous movements, such as the temperance movement, other moral reform movements, and the work towards abolition. The suffrage movement also "had links or overlapped with the Owenite and Fourier utopian socialist alternative communitarian movements" (Frank and Fuentes 1990: 145).
Various ancillary movements played a role in the genesis of the suffrage movement (by way of the woman's rights movement). The beginnings of these ancillary movements occurred more than a century prior to the 19th Amendment.
In the early 1800s, women began working for the reform in the areas of prostitution and prisons. Women's involvement in these issues almost always began through church auxiliaries and, in accordance with the dictates of the times, were separate from male reform organizations. Over time this church-related activity developed into an accepted role for women outside the home: benevolent philanthropy (Ryan 1992: 11).
Such work created an acceptable context in which the struggle for suffrage could eventually ensue. This "context" involved a two-fold benefit. First, women "were able to develop a confidence in their ability to organize and get things done... Second, they developed a conscious awareness of themselves and other women as a sex category" (Ryan 1992: 11).
This was a particularly eye-opening experience for middle class women--the bulk of the philanthropists. And it opened a whole new area about which they could concern themselves.
as they could see when they began associating with those less fortunate than themselves, women did not constitute a unified group equally affected by their sex classification. Early philanthropy was centered on poor widows, unmarried mothers, and prostitutes; the mission for the middle-class woman was to help these lost souls convert to a better was of life... However, interactions with prostitutes and poor women led reformers to feel that the problem was not deviant women; rather it was a social problem created by an unfair system... philanthropist women identified with "deviant" women, emphasizing the similarities of women rather than the differences... Here then was a germ of feminist thinking, a reversal of de Beauvoir's conception of women as "other"--that "moment in woman's self-perception, when she begins to see man as 'the other'...when her feminist self-consciousness begins" (Ryan 1992: 11,12).
The temperance movement was an important ancillary movement for the nascent suffragists.
In the 1830s hundreds of church-related temperance societies with women's auxiliaries were formed. Unlike early philanthropists, women who joined the temperance movement did not do so solely for altruistic reasons. Although temperance began as a campaign based on moralistic and ethical standards of behavior, a husband's consumption of alcohol could be destructive to his wife's life because married women were dependent on and subject to their husband. Women temperance workers did not generally believe in women's equality; they wanted restrictions on alcohol use in order to maintain a secure "moral" family life. Nevertheless, they were involved in an attempt to change gender relations since it was men's behavior they were trying to regulate (Ryan 1992: 14).
The abolition movement was probably the most important ancillary movement in the genesis of the suffrage movement.
In the course of speaking against slavery and the criticism they received for this activity, female abolition workers became self-consciously aware of women's subordinate position. Frances Wright, a British-born activist, publicly attacked the idea of an "appropriate sphere of woman" and shocked audiences when she lectured on the combined issues of anti-slavery, social reform, and women's rights. Two American speakers to confront criticism were Angelina and Sarah Grimke, who studied under Theodore Weld, an advocate of women's participation in the evangelism movement. In their lecture tours with the American Anti-Slavery Society, the Grimke sisters often received a negative reception--not on the content of their abolition talk, but because they were women speaking in public. As a result, they began including the issue of women's rights in their lectures (Ryan 1992: 15).
In sum, this general milieu of a myriad of social reform movements (notably temperance, abolitionism, women's rights and, eventually, suffrage) overlapped and cross-pollinated.
The involvement of women in the abolition movement had a two-fold affect. This is implied in the narrative where women abolitionists were poorly received and then decided that women's rights were an important issue, too. On the one side, abolitionism got women more involved with social reform. On the other side, "Although women and men worked together in abolition societies, in the mixed-sex groups women had their place" (Ryan 1992: 15). To the extent that this was true, abolitionism was something of an anti-women's movement. But this eventually fostered the women's rights (and then suffrage) concerns.
Indeed, it was at the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, where women were refused recognition as delegates, that Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton first discussed the idea of organizing a women's rights convention [that would come to fruition in 1848] (Ryan 1992: 15).
In the aftermath of the Civil War, in the debate's between once allied suffragists and abolitionists, the issue of attempting to extend suffrage beyond freed black males provided a fatal step in the ancillary nature of the two lobbies. Rather than hampering women, this event refocused the older women's rights movement into a more specific women's suffrage movement (Ryan 1992: 20).
The level of industrialization of the United States increased both steadily and, alternately, drastically at points during the genesis of woman's suffrage. The period directly preceding the Nineteenth Amendment's ratification-the latter war years-witnessed a dramatic increase in industrial output as implied by the jump in gross national product in Figure 4.2.
But the most notable increase in industrial capacity occurred between the 1860s and the onset of the twentieth century. Zinn describes the various aspects of this expanding industrialism:
Between the Civil War and 1900, steam and electricity replaced human muscle, iron replaced wood, and steel replaced iron... Machines could now drive steel tools. Oil could lubricate machines and light homes, streets, factories. People and goods could move by railroad, propelled by steam along steel rails; by 1900 there were 193,000 miles of railroad. The telephone, the typewriter, and the adding machine speeded up the work of business.
Machines changed farming. Before the Civil War it took 61 hours of labor to produce an acre of wheat. By 1900, it took 3 hours, 19 minutes. Manufactured ice enabled the transport of food over long distances, and the industry of meatpacking was born.
Steam drove textile mill spindles; it drove sewing machines. It came from coal. Pneumatic drills now drilled deeper into the earth for coal. In 1860, 14 million tons of coal were mined; by 1884 it was 100 million tons. More coal meant more steel, because coal furnaces converted iron to steel; by 1880 a million tons of steel were being produced; by 1910, 25 million tons. By now electricity was beginning to replace steam. Electrical wire needed copper, of which 30,000 tons were produced in 1880; 500,000 tons by 1910...
And so it went, in industry after industry-shrewd, efficient businessmen building empires, choking out competition, maintaining high prices, keeping wages low, using government subsidies (Zinn 1980: 247, 251).
This technological expansion was matched by a notable expansion in both the size of the US population (which "quadrupled between 1850 and 1920" [Morgan 1972: 56]) and in the active work force. "The total work force more than matched this increase [in population], expanding almost six times in the same period, and in fact nearly doubling in size between 1890 and 1920" (Morgan 1972: 56).
Buechler suggests that "The deepest structural roots of women's political mobilization in the nineteenth century may be traced to societal transformations associated with capitalist industrialization" (Buechler 1990: 12). These transformations produced the two-fold result of what Cott (1978) calls The Bonds of Womanhood. There were two basic "bonds". The first "bond" involved the increasing attempt to sequester women within the nuclear family. DuBois, too, recognizes this plight in the bifurcation of public and private spheres occurring in the 1700s and 1800s (DuBois 1975). Three years later she writes:
With the growth of industrial capitalism, production began to move outside the home. Yet woman's place, her "sphere," remained within the family. Outside it there arose a public life that was considered man's sphere. Although public life was based on growing organization of production outside the home, its essence was understood not as economic experience, but as political activity. Beginning in the 1820's and 1830's, an enormous upsurge of popular political energies took place--among working men, in the antislavery societies, and in almost every other aspect of ante-bellum life. The woman suffrage movement was women's response to these developments. Driven by their relegation to a separate, domestic sphere, which had always been marked by inequality, especially their own, women were also drawn, like the men of their time, by the promise that political activity held for creation of a truly democratic society (DuBois, 1978: 16).
The second "bond" Cott's title refers to is manner in which this "removal" from public life fostered the opportunity for women to bond (outside the public eye) with other women. And even the apparently limiting nature of the attempted relegation of women to exclusively domestic roles provided some opportunities. For example, the ideology of behind the "cult of true womanhood" may have suggested that women not participate in the public sphere. But in positing the moral purity of women, it granted women the opportunity to gradually become public figures as part of social reform movements, such as the temperance and abolition movements (Buechler 1990, Epstein 1981, among others). Demographic analysis of the particular women involved in the suffrage movement largely supports the material assumptions behind these lines of reasoning. Suffragists were significantly more likely to be married & to have children than even other kinds of reformers. They tended to have fathers and husbands in high social status categories. And they tended to have had some occupational involvement at some time (Harris, 1988). This provided the situation in which the suffrage cause could coalesce.
In addition to having the effect of bonding women together, industrialization and urbanization particularly benefited women of the middle class in ways fortuitous to the suffrage movement.
Middle class women, being beneficiaries of the [creation of affluence through industrialization and urbanization], had time for outside activities. Through their charity work they became aware of class inequalities; but even more starkly, they were confronted with the negative effects of gender differentiation (Ryan 1992: 11).
The US per capita gross national product generally increased during the period 1870 to 1920, as reflected in Figure 4.2, but the growth was erratic. From 1870 to 1895, growth was minimal. Then, from 1895 to 1910, the general level of affluence as reflect through the growth of per capita GNP increased more notably. This was followed by a slight downturn preceding the war.
And the war precipitated a very rapid increase in per capita GNP directly prior to the granting of woman's suffrage. (It is interesting to note the drop off in per capita GNP nearly a full decade before the traditionally labeled start of the "Great Depression".) Prior to 1870, one finds the beginning of this generalized growth beginning after 1814: "spectacular evidence of change came from the performance of the American economy after 1814. Precise figures are impossible to give, but it is clear that the standard of living for most free Americans was improving" (Walters 1978: 5).
Later in the century, both the size of the US population (which
"quadrupled between 1850 and 1920" [Morgan
1972: 56]) and the number of people in the active work force expanded
dramatically. "The total work force more than matched this
increase [in population], expanding almost six times in the same
period, and in fact nearly doubling in size between 1890 and 1920"
(Morgan 1972: 56).
More people were working, and the variety of the type of work
many people (e.g., women) could engage in increased (Morgan
1972: 56ff).
From the 1830s to the 1930s, the percentage of people in the US residing in urban centers increased steadily from a little under ten percent of the population to more than half the persons living in the United States. As reflected in Figure 4.3, there were almost no notable increases or decreases in the rate of movement from locales of less than 20,000 persons to places exceeding that population. This rapid expansion set in around 1820. As Walters recounts it:
new cities sprang up and old ones boomed after 1820. In 1810 there were 46 "urban areas" (defined as places with 2,500 or more population). In 1860 there were 393, including two cities, new York and Philadelphia, with over half a million residents (Walters 1978: 5).
Buechler (1990) suggests that urbanization contributed to the "cult of domesticity" in a manner similar to industrialization. Both served to attempt to further isolate women into their role within the nuclear family. But, again, this was a two-fold "bond" which not only involved the increasing attempt to sequester women within the nuclear family. Urbanization also fostered the opportunity for women to bond with other women. In this way, urbanization has been seen as a contributing condition in the genesis of the suffrage movement. But this reasoning has not gone unchallenged. In particular, the role of rural, Quaker women (with their "long history of sexual equality and considerable social distance from the urban, bourgeois world of separate spheres" [Buechler 1990: 16-17]) has been noted (see, e.g., Hewitt 1986). Yet these Quaker women expressed their views within an increasingly urban society, to increasingly urban ears. Regardless of the particular causal link between urbanization and the movement, it was an inarguable element in the march towards suffrage.
So it appears that increasing urbanization had dual effects on the context in which the suffragists moved. Smith succinctly summarizes a further duality stating that the "nation's creative energies centered [in cities], but the city was at the same the most problematic area of American life. Poverty, crime, disease, the war between capital and labor, the threatening presence of immigrants, the demoralizing impact of the 'new' all were dramatically apparent in the American cities" (Smith 1984: 910). At the same time, however, cities provided a basis for hope, as well, in that "the concentration of the nation's manifold problems in specific geographical locations encouraged the hope that they would prove susceptible to science" (Smith 1984: 910) and the cultural progress they were deemed to embody. One example of this "progress" is found the remarkable changes that occurred in Chicago near the end of the 1800s.
In Chicago the Art Institute was founded in 1879, the American Conservatory of Music four years later. Sullivan Adler's Chicago Auditorium was opened in 1889, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra was founded in 1891. The University of Chicago opened its doors in 1892, and the Field Museum the following year. In less that a decade cultural agencies requiring a combination of capital and culture of staggering magnitude made their appearance in a city that had been virtually destroyed in 1871 (Smith 1984: 911).
Regardless of the particular interactions between these changes and the suffragists, such transformations constituted an undeniable aspect of the social conditions that fostered the movement into the twentieth century.
Though arguably an ideal since the Revolution, "only a minority of American children before 1850 ever saw the inside of a school for any useful period of time" (Morgan 1972: 47). Even as public education grew rapidly, private education facilities still outnumbered public ones until 1880. This was particularly significant since private (often single sex) institutions tended to treat women quite differently than similar but co-ed public schools. The situation in higher education was similar. Women were typically educated to better fulfill their traditional, secondary places in society. "It was still limited to the well-to-do few, and consisted largely of such pursuits as embroidery, painting, French, singing, and playing the harpsichord" (Flexner 1975: 23). But the intellectually superfluous nature of much of the curriculum was gradually subverted. Though advanced as a means to better prepare women for their domestic roles, the curriculum had unintended consequences:
One was to subvert the status quo with respect to women's breadth of interests. As opponents had correctly feared, education led many women to look beyond their domestic duties. Once guided to serious study and reasoning, some turned to books outside their own curriculum, including works in law, medicine, and philosophy. A few even looked critically and analytically at the Bible. Aware of wider perspectives, some women put their minds to work at other purposes than refining their subordination to men. (Elizabeth Cady's attendance at the Troy Seminary in 1830-31, for instance-in time to hear Almira Phelp's stirring lectures-did not lead her to complacency in marriage to Henry Stanton.) Educated women predominated among the feminists of the mid-nineteenth century who are remembered today. Not only the intellectual exercise but likely the awareness of the justification for their education contributed to their rebellion (Cott 1977: 125).
The period directly following the Civil War saw a marked increase in both general educational levels and in the co-ed (equality suggesting) kind of education women received. (Flexner 1975; Morgan 1972: 47ff). This was not an inherently one-sided process however, since most active suffragists were educated in private institutions (Harris, 1988).
Literacy in the United States increased from seventy-five to greater than ninety-five percent from 1850 to 1930. As Figure 4.4 shows, this increase was fairly consistent, without any particularly notable fluctuations in the rate of growth. This increase was partly facilitated by increasingly available reading materials. But the impact of society was largely a combination of rising literacy coupled (as Tarrow [1994] suggests) with increasing access to printed materials. Walters describes this "increasing access":
Innovations in printing reduced the cost of producing propaganda to the point where a person could make a living editing a reform newspaper or writing books and pamphlets for a limited, but national, readership. By [as early as] the 1830s, it was simpler in every respect to cater to scattered groups of like-minded Americans, and to support one's self while doing it (Walters 1978: 6).
Walters probably paints too placid a picture of increasing literacy and education. In terms of increasing literacy (and even increasing access to the press), many publications were unreceptive to discussion about suffrage. For example, in her analysis of the state's leading newspaper's (The Oregonian's) treatment of the Oregon State Woman's Suffrage Association (from June 1, 1869 to October 31, 1905), Kessler found that the suffragette group received little serious consideration until its issues were already perceived as a legitimate part of social discourse (Kessler 1980). This is not to suggest that there were not publications produced about suffrage. Though most newspaper editors did not deem the movement worthy of column space, suffragist journals were published (for example, The Revolution) albeit with great effort. This situation persisted until around 1900, when a series of wealthy women underwrote various publishing projects (Masel-Walters, 1980).
In the context of increasing access to education, generalizing about the liberating effects of this trend is complicated. One of the primary functions of educational institutions at this time was to learn obedience and the proper submission to authority. As Spring (1973) notes, "The development of a factory-like system in the nineteenth-century schoolroom was not accidental" (Spring 1973, quoted in Zinn 1980: 257). Or, as one journalist observing teaching in the 1890s noted, "The unkindly spirit of the teacher is strikingly apparent; the pupils, being completely subjugated to her will, are silent and motionless, the spiritual atmosphere of the classroom is damp and chilly" (Zinn 1980: 257).
At the same time, however, dissent seeped through the cracks of this oppressive educational system, principally facilitated by the access to critical tracts that literacy afforded. For example, Henry George's Progress and Poverty (reprinted 1937 [orig. 1879]) and Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (reprinted 1967) were each sharply critical of the existing social order-and each offered radical alternatives to the present state of things. Each of these books sold millions of copies (Zinn 1980: 258). There were more than one thousand Populist journals in the 1890s-including the National Economist with 100,000 readers (Goodwyn 1976).
The numbers speak loudly. Regardless of exactly what was going on in educational institutions, more and more people (especially women) were gaining new skills. This is most readily reflected in the changes in public school enrollment.
The enrollment of pupils in public elementary schools increased from 8,869,000 in 1876 to 14,984,000 in 1900, but only 519,000 pupils attended high school. In 1876 only 20,000 high school students were graduated--11,000 women and 9,000 men. By 1900 the number has more than quadrupled--to 95,000--and the ratio of women graduates had increased substantially; almost two-thirds were women (Smith 1984: 589).
But if one looks at the trends in college-level faculty, the figures do not look as promising for women. The "proportion of male to college faculty members to female in 1880 [was] 7,358 men and 4,194 women. Twenty years later--1900--the census listed 19,151 men as opposed to 4,717 women" (Smith 1984: 590).
On the whole, however, though the spread of educational opportunities and benefits were unequal, it had a beneficial effect. This is reflected in Ryan's statement that "the most common feature women activists shared was an educated background" (Ryan 1992: 13).
The lobbying for women to be better educated could even be considered an ancillary movement, since, "Before an organized women's movement began, middle class women were agitating for the right to higher education" (Ryan 1992: 13). The results of female education certainly support this idea insomuch as
some of the first of the [female] Oberlin graduates, instead of being cultured appendages of their husbands, began breaking down gender barriers. Early graduates included Lucy stone, soon to become a leader in the women's suffrage movement, and her sister-in-law Antoinette Brown, first woman to become an ordained minister.
For activist women, education was seen as a chance for women to improve their own lives, as well as a vehicle for changing traditional views of women held by the rest of society (Ryan 1992: 13-14).
In sum, increasing access to education appears to have contributed
to the context in which the suffrage movement occurred and the
movement (as Meyer, et al.,
[1979] note) appears to have hastened the increasingly wide-spread
access to education.
Great Britain was the global hegemon during the nineteenth century. The peak of its influence appears to have occurred during the middle portion of that century. As the century waned, so too did British control of global affairs. The early twentieth century was marked as a period of relative international instability (hegemonic rivalry) during which neither the previous hegemon (Britain) nor the successive hegemon (the US) held acute sway in the activities of the world-system. By the middle of the twentieth century, the US was the new global hegemon. Towards the end of the twentieth century, US influence appears to be waning.
The "mantle of hegemony" was arguably passed from Britain to the U.S. during the international crisis of the First World War. Morgan (1972) has noted that this war was of crucial importance to the suffrage movement. This implication is that increased participation in public affairs and in the work force made the contributions and abilities of women more salient. But it is easy to overstate the wars influence. "The shortage of labor did not become acute, and the female work force was enlarged only slightly... if the emancipation of women had depended on their playing a large role in heavy industry it would never have come about. They were hired in increasing numbers during the war, but not on the scale that feminists expected" (O'Neill 1989: 194-5). The role of women in public affairs was less disheartening (but still not ideal). "The women who found places for themselves within the government, no matter how frustrated or misused they felt, had it easier than their sisters on the outside" (O'Neill 1989: 198). In sum, as O'Neill relates,
Although the war provided a few new strings to the suffrage bow, it did not automatically guarantee final victory... In fact, the war produced nothing like the great leap forward which feminists had expected. Women did not move into industry in anything like the numbers required for a fundamental change in status, and the new occupations opened up to them by reason of the manpower shortage did not usually outlast the emergency. In a general way the condition of women improved during the 1920's, but this was the result of tendencies that had been long at work (O'Neill 1989: 201, 222).
Still, the international evidence suggests that the First World War was a major turning point for suffrage efforts in many locales. As Campillo notes, the global shift coincided with Australia, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Germany, Great Britain, Poland, Sweden, the United States, and the Soviet Union all granting women the right to vote (Campillo 1978).
As Buechler explains, the First World War was, arguably, the main structural opportunity that aided the suffrage movement (which, he reminds us, was also aided by important factors within the movement).
The right to vote was won only when a cross-class, multiconstituency alliance of women generated an organizationally and ideologically diverse mass movement that was strategically directed to important political pressure points within a larger wartime context that created new political opportunities for victory (Buechler 1990: 208 [emphasis added]).
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