In 1969, the year I selected my dissertation topic, women's history was only an aspiration. Feminism was still a word with which even those of us who would go on to revive it were uncomfortable using. In graduate history programs all over the country, young women like myself were realizing that the history of women in the U.S. was an enormous, unexplored territory, rich with compelling analytical questions. Determined to unify our political and scholarly selves (and protected by a robust economy from too great anxieties about our future careers), my generation wanted to contribute to a historical practice that would be useful, that would not only document social change but help to realize it.     For the most part, however, women's historians of the late 60s and early 70s were directing their energies toward women's private lives -- the history of family, childrearing, sexuality.[1] This was a perspective that was shaped by many factors. First of all, the entire practice of history was in the midst of a tremendous paradigm shift that would eventually go by the term "social history."[2] Itself an intellectual response to the larger politics and culture of "the sixties," social history directed historians' attention away from the designated rulers to the masses of common folk, with whom we believed the real fate of society lay. This new historical practice was called "history from the bottom up" and those of us who adopted it, did so with a crusading fervor.[3] We were as dedicated to a democratic approach to the power to make history in our roles of historians as those of citizens.

    In addition, there was the strong sense that politics was not the place to find women's overlooked and suppressed historical importance, their "agency," to use the word that was coming to symbolize social historians' intent to subvert old-fashioned notions of historical significance. Questions of the relation between "public" and "private" life would soon surface as one of the fundamental conundrums of modern feminist thought, but initially women's historians observed the distinction between public and private even as they began to challenge it. Public life, where women had been the objects of sustained and multifaceted discrimination, did not seem the arena in which women were going to be restored as actors in history at the level to which we aspired.

    A final factor in the lack of interest in politics in women's history was the larger disillusionment and contempt that surrounded formal politics in the 60s and 70s. The rise and fall of hopes for modern liberalism during the Kennedy-Johnson years, the inexorable growth of the war in Vietnam , the electoral corruption and executive criminality of Watergate left many of my generation oppressed by the uselessness of choosing between parties and the impossibility of controlling the arrogance of power at the ballot box. I voted in November, 1968, shortly after my twenty-first birthday, but cannot remember which minor candidate I preferred to Hubert Humphrey and the Democrats.

    From the very beginning of my work on suffrage, therefore, I felt compelled to defend my decision to concentrate on the subject that I had chosen, to explain why the long struggle to win the vote was worth studying, what it could contribute to the new, young field of women's history. The question, as I posed it then, still seems to me to a valid and crucial one: why was woman suffrage the demand around which women's boldest aspirations for emancipation coalesced in the nineteenth century? why was political equality at the core of radical feminism in this period? The women's liberation movement was in the midst of expanding the meaning of the word "political" via its claim that "the personal is the political," that is, that power relationships characterized even the most seemingly private of encounters between men and women, from lovemaking to housekeeping. I embraced this expanded definition, but in looking at the suffrage movement I also wanted to restore something of the more organized, collective and public dimension to politics, and to indicate that ultimately feminist goals had to be won at this level.

  My answer to the question of why suffrage was structured in response to the focus on private life that so characterized both women's history and women's liberation at the time: precisely by bypassing the private sphere and focusing on the male monopoly of the public sphere, pioneering suffragists sent shock waves through the whole set of structures that relegated women to subordination in the family. Because political participation was not based on family life, women's demands for inclusion in politics represented an aspiration for power and place independent of the unequal structures of the family. If I had had access to the terms developed twenty years later, I would have written that women's demands for suffrage uniquely threatened to disrupt and reorganize the relations of gender. Later, I could make this point by suggesting an analogy between the central role that suffrage played in first wave feminism and abortion in the second wave: both were/are simultaneously a concrete reform and a symbol of women's freedom, widely appreciated as such by supporters and opponents alike.

We called ourselves "radical feminists" then. "Radical feminism" signified a movement that challenged the social order as profoundly as the labor and civil rights movements. This was a complex claim, that both assumed the link between feminism and other radical movements, and insisted on feminism's distinctiveness. The determination in these years to establish what we called the "autonomy" of women's historic struggle for liberation is difficult to recall, inasmuch as feminism is infinitely more legitimate now than it was then, far stronger than the politics of class and race towards which we felt, in the 1970s, so much like junior partners. To insist on the "autonomy" of our questions about women's subordination, our judgment about crucial issues, our methods of social change, was the political expression of women's newly stubborn claims for independence on a personal level which we were more and more confidently calling "feminism".

    But where to begin my own study of woman suffrage? My generation's feminism had been forged in the red hot struggle for civil rights.[4] So locating the origins of the nineteenth century women's rights movement in the 1830s, at the point at which the movement to abolish slavery had led "nominally free" women (to use Angelina Grimke's words) to recognize and protest their own kind of enslavement was so obvious as to be virtually automatic.[5] The impact of abolitionism on the history of American feminism is a theme to which I have returned repeatedly, finding in it clues to many different themes, most recently the enduring, if contradictory, link between race and gender in the American feminist tradition. In the 1970s, however, I was emphasizing the dissenting perspective on gender difference that emerged among abolitionist women, the insistence that male and female, like black and white, faded in the face of human and moral oneness before God.    The narrative line on which I was concentrating at this point, like the political process I was living through, was that of "the emergence of an independent women's movement."[6] Thus, while deeply respectful of the contribution abolitionism had made to the character of early american feminism, my account was decidedly tilted toward the eventual separation of the two movements rather than their attachment to each other. Abolitionist-feminists, read through the lens of my own experience of women's liberation, looked like a junior partner in an extraordinary radical enterprise: while feminists profited from this larger radical conviction that fundamental social relationships could be revolutionized, nonetheless they (we) were also held back by not yet being first and foremost a women's movement.

    Impatient for nineteenth century suffragism to appear in all its boldness, I hurried forward in my historical studies, eager to get through the 1840s and 1850s to the years after the Civil War, when the franchise became the focus of the feminist struggle. I think it is interesting that as a member of a determinedly anti-war generation myself, I virtually ignored the Civil War, leaping over the early 1860s with only a few sentences, so as to concentrate my attention on Radical Reconstruction.[7] Once having arrived in the late 1860s, I concentrated on challenging what I thought was a fundamental mischaracterization of the demand for woman suffrage: that political equality was a "single issue," which ignored all the other dimensions -- sexual, economic -- of women's emancipation. As evidence to the contrary, I demonstrated the dramatic expansion of interest in wage-earning women and in the sexual dimension of women's subordination that accompanied the rise of attention to woman suffrage in the late 1860s.

    Much more difficult than tracing either the abolitionist inheritance or the full feminist flower of nineteenth century suffragism was understanding the terrible moment of political conflict and transition, when the priorities of blacks' and women's emancipation came into conflict and choices between them had to be made. The 1867-1869 crisis that occurred once woman suffragists realized their inability to win inclusion in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments not only led to animosity between suffragists and defenders of freedmen's rights; it also split suffragists into competing camps just at the moment that they launched a serious drive for political equality. This episode is one of those turning points in history that requires, indeed deserves, continuously revised interpretation, so fundamental are the issues involved, so irresolvable the conflicts facing the participants, so painful the choices they faced.

    When first confronting the conflict within the suffrage movement in the late 1860s over the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments, I asserted that this was a necessary, productive, and though painful, positive development in the history of American feminism, because it allowed feminists to break away from abolitionists to start their own movement. I reacted strongly to the condemnation that was heaped at the time upon the renegade wing of woman suffragists and concentrated on defending Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony as its leaders. At this point my emphasis was on what was gained in terms of freedom to express openly feminist themes and goals.

    I returned to these questions a decade later, in connection with the Constitutional Bicentennial of the 1980s and the new attention it was directing to the history of citizenship.[8] By the mid 1980s, the feminist movement was no longer a junior partner, and was being called on to look seriously into its own racial politics.[9] My original argument about woman suffrage had always been vulnerable to charges that I had underplayed the racism unleashed among white suffragists by their break with abolitionists, and now I began to hear these criticisms more deeply.[10] By the 1980s, black feminism had reached a sort of critical mass in terms of visibility and distinctiveness of political message.[11] Now I could see, as I hadn't before, how the shift away from universal suffragism and towards an exclusive focus on (to use Stanton's words) "an aristocracy of sex" worked in rectionary ways to constrict the women's movement's reach. In the place of their original high minded universality, suffragists increasingly focused exclusively on the need for the vote among white, middle class, educated women; they more and more counterposed their own disfranchisement against what they regarded as the unwarranted political power of men who were their natural inferiors, freedmen and immigrants. Political conditions around me were now alerting me to the importance, no longer merely of making sure that the history I wrote legitimated feminism, but insuring that its reach was broad and its impact democratic.

    My rereading of reconstruction suffragism was also a reaction to an all-encompassing, paradigm-rattling debate within feminist circles in the early 1980s about whether "equality" was an adequate theoretical basis for challenging women's subordination or whether it just led to minor integrations of women into a still male-defined world. A wing of feminism had begun to develop instead around the celebration and elaboration of women's "difference" from men as a means to deeper sorts of change that the call for equality would bring.

   The debate over equality and feminism was crucially shaped by the larger atmosphere of Reagan-era politics, notably the collapse of progressive politics and the demonization of liberal ideas. The further we get from the Reagan years, the more obvious it seems to me that feminists and progressives of all sorts were under a terrible cloud of political impossibility then. Insurgent conservativism rode all too easily over what little there was of an openly leftwing opposition and went on to drive liberalism itself into full-fledged retreat. Feminists really had only two alternatives: to pull back our forces and defend liberal premises we had once sought to transcend, or to change direction and question our liberal roots altogether.

    A crucial event that illuminates the political context of the feminist debate over "equality" in particular and liberalism in general was the "Sears case," an episode of great significance for feminist scholarship in the early 1980s.[12] The case began in 1978 when the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission charged the Sears Company with sexual discrimination. The case had been filed in the final months of the Carter administration, but it was heard in 1982, before a conservative Republican judge appointed by President Reagan, and Sears shaped its defense accordingly. Sears' lawyers reasoned that arguments about the historically traceable "difference" in women's values, choices and lifestyles could be used to attribute women's current absence from high-paying sales positions to their own women's choices rather than to the corporation's discriminatory employment policies. The defense located -- after several tries -- a reputable women's historian willing to so testify.[13] This was a painful irony for many women's historians. The notion of women's agency was here being marshalled against the commitment to social change in women's lives with which it had originally been paired. What had once been called inequality was now being tamed into mere difference.

    Nowhere was the intersection of the right wing insurgencies of the 1980s and the path of women's history more dramatic than with respect to the family and sexuality, the history and political significance of which modern feminists had been the first to explore. In these years, a "new" right, like the "new" left and the "new" feminism before it, was learning to focus on the frustrations and yearnings fostered within modern private life and to exploit the political possibilities these offered. In this rapidly changing atmosphere, where simply to speak of family concerns or to claim to speak in women's voice was no longer the distinguishing mark of feminism, positions on the relation of home and work in modern women's lives and on the possibilities of sexual freedom became clouded and confused.

    This is the context in which a feminist attack on pornography began to grow in influence.[14] A decade or so earlier, women's liberation had done important work in opening up and politicizing the issue of rape, which so many women had suffered in shame and isolation. The anti-rape movement metamorphasized into the anti-pornography movement, a development which was very much encouraged by the growing power of the right wing, which found the campaign against pornography much more useful and malleable for its purposes than the campaign to eliminate rape. Anti-pornography ordinances drawn up by feminists were enacted in several midwestern cities In 1985, President Reagan appointed a high-level commission, chaired by his Attorney General Edwin Meese, to study the issue and come up with recommendations. So promising was distaste for pornography as a concern which could draw women into politics that feminists had a difficult time maintaining control over it. In my judgement, the right-wing won this struggle and made the issue its own.

    These sexuality and family issues were played out all over the political spectrum through the 1980s. While feminists raged against the ACLU for defending "the rights of pornographers," right-wing women claimed the legacy of Martin Luther King to defend the civil rights of "our unborn brothers and sisters."[15] I participated in a series of conferences and articles in these years, nicknamed "the feminist sex wars," at which feminists who were determined to challenge the conservative drift of contemporary sexual politics and especially the claims of the anti-pornography movement to be the sole legitimate feminist perspective, presented our case. Those of us who were historians argued that women's sense of sexual endangerment had to be understood both in terms of changing historical conditions and different ideological formulations -- in other words, politics -- available to mobilize women's sexual fears. We offered a complex portrait of the past in order to show that feminism had more than one tradition of sexual politics on which to draw, and that, as the conditions of women's lives have changed, a sexual politics that pursues pleasure as well as guards against danger is now much more feasible than in the past.

   The impact of both the feminist sex wars and the Reagan-era political atmosphere influenced me as I continued to work forward in the history of the suffrage movement; by now I had made my way into the late nineteenth century. I had always shied away from this period because I found the politics of suffragists in the 1880s and 1890s less personally congenial than the democratic radicalism of the Reconstruction years, but now I felt obligated to try to grasp Gilded Age suffragism's conservative turn. Influenced by the rise around me of the Moral Majority and other fundamentalist-based conservative politics in the 1980s, I linked sexual conservatism and the Protestant Christian revival in the late 19th century. I especially concentrated on the success of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union in joining suffragism and a deeply domestic understanding of womanhood.

    As always, I worked my way through suffrage history on the arm of and through the writings of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, whose own religious and sexual dissent helped me to expand my sense of feminist possibilities. But despite the incredibly enduring nature of her thought, Stanton was not herself immortal and died in 1902, well before woman suffrage finally found its place in the Constitution. If I was going to follow the woman suffrage movement through to its conclusion, as it seemed to me I was obliged to do given my claims about how radical it had been at its inception, I would have to find another figure as my guide. The woman I chose was Harriot Stanton Blatch, Elizabeth STanton's second daughter and herself a major suffrage leader in the early 20th century. [[A great deal has been written by feminist biographers about the intensity of identification between themselves and their subjects, but it was precisely because of my enormous reverence for Elizabeth Cady Stanton that I deciddd not to write her biography.[16] By writing a life of the daughter instead of the mother, I found a much better vehicle, one which allowed me the emotional and historical distance necessary to put my subject's contributions in their proper place.

Harriot Stanton Blatch led me through the revival of suffrage militancy and feminist vision that reappeared in the early twentieth century and -- atl ast -- carried women's drive for the vote to a succesful conclusion. Blatch's approach to women's emancipation was sufficiently connected to and yet separated from her mother to serve as a perfect vehicle into the American suffrage movement's final decades. Her leadership helped suffragism to go from being a nineteenth century women's rights ideology, born of natural rights ideas and focused on political notions of independence and power, to a twentieth century feminist version, reflecting social democratic ideas, and concentrating on economics. In the hands of leaders such as her, the image of woman as worker was coming to replace that of woman as mother as the emblem of modernizing womanhood.[17]

    By the time the ninteenth amendment was ratified, the twentieth century woman suffrage moveemnt -- renaming itself "votes for women" so as to seem more fresh and modern -- was, like its nineteenth century predecessor, situated within a larger politics of jsutice and equality that gave it meaning. In the nieteenth century, this politics, Elizabeth's movement, had been abolitionism; for Harriot and her generation, it was democratic socialism.

    My timing on this subject has been impeccably good (or bad) depending on your persepctive. Just as I finished the book that, as it were, got me to "the end" of this movement, the result of the world seemed to wake up to this subject. For most of the time that I have been working on the history of woman suffrage, few have shared my interest. The word "suffrage" remained as antiquated (and regularly misspelled) as it had been when I wrote my first graduate paper on the subject. But in the 1990s, women and politics has become a popular issue. On the coattails of Bill Clinton's presidency, many more women were elected to public office, constituting the famous "year of the woman" in 1992 (and creating, as its necessary conseuqnce, the year of the man in 1994). Clinton's appointment of Madeline Albright as Secretary of STate has made her the most higly placed owmen in two hundred years of American poltiics, the only woman ever in the chain of succession to the presidency. Women's greater liberalism (pacificism, Democrat preference, inclination to social spending) was taken for granted as fundamentally female, rather than as the widespread impact of twenty years of liberal feminism. All around us, politics turns increasingly on "women's issues," whether they be abortion rights or sexual harassment or welfare reform. A gender gap in voting, which had been a factor at least since 1980, now draws pundits' attention.

    In the last half decade, the scholarship on suffrage has blossomed. By a very rough estimate, already in the 1990s there have been more monographs and collections of articles published on the woman suffrage movement in the United States than in the entire period between 1960 and 1990.[18] Even more remarkable is a renascence of interest in the subject outside the academy. In 1995, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment was marked by widespread, grass-roots celebration; by contrast, the fiftieth anniversary, occurring in 1970 during the infancy of the modern feminist revival, went virtually unobserved. Last year, a statue commemorating the seventy-five years it took to win votes for women, which had being gathering dust in the "crypt" of the Capitol building, was finally moved up to the Rotunda, even so still the only representation of historical women in that gallery of historical patriots. The sesquicentennial of the Seneca Falls Convention this year is being marked even more widely, by national and local celebrations. (Though the post office, too busy it seems with Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, has refused to issue a commemorative stamp).

I do not want to end this by leaving you with the mistaken impression that historians have now been "finished" with woman suffrage. This was the mistake made years before; when I first tackled this subject, I was led to believe that everything necessary to know about votes for women had already been discovered; time to move on. That wasn't true then and it isn't true now. The woman suffrage movement lasted, minimally, seventy-five years, thus covering one-third the length of our national history. (I say minimally because in many ways the struggle for votes for American women did not end in 1920: Puerto Rican women were not enfranchised until 1928 and African American women battled de facto disfranchisement for another forty years after that.) This makes woman suffrage arguably the most varied, complex and multifaceted social and political movement in American history. As such, it will be a long time before we exhaust its many twists and turns, ups and downs, forward and backward moves over Ameican history. There is much work for me -- and for you -- to do before we understand what the totality of woman suffrage tells us, about American women and about American history.    

    Since I was coming to West Virginia, I pulled down a few books to find out a little about what had happened in your state with respect to woman suffrage. All of this is from primary sources: no one has yet written a modern history of woman suffrage in West Virginia -- yet. The origins of your state are, of course, unique, as West Virginia was brought into the union in 1863, the last state formed east of the Mississippi, because of its anti-secession sympathies. In the reconstruction era, a proposal to give the vote to women who could read the declaration of independence intelligently, who had paid taxes in the previous year, and who had a legible hand, secured the votes of one third of the necessary legislative votes, impressive but not enough.[19] In the 1890s, midwestern Populist women organizers came to the state to try to win woman suffrage (as they had done in Colorado and almost in Kansas), but failed; as of 1897 West Virignia laws were still quite antiquated when it came to women: the age of sexual consent was twelve and mothers had no rights to their children upon divorce or widowhood.[20]

    In the early twentieth century, West Virginia was twice the site of drmatic woman suffrage episodes. By 1916, more than a dozen states had amended their constitutions to give votes to women. (Very importantly, this could be done at the state level, as well as through the federal constitution; and because of the enfranchising actions of Colorado, California, Oregon, Kansas, adn other states, there were already lots of women voters in the United STates, who could vote parties in and out of national office.

    In 1916, West Virginia was chosen as the site for a major campaign for state constitutional amendment. Suffrage speakers came from all over the country, even from Canada, to join in this campaign, which cost over $25,000; the largest single donation was $1000 from Mrs. Helen Brandenburg of Huntington. The Wset Virginia campaign used all the most modern techniques, including a professional publicity bureau, automobile parades, and dozens of paid organizers sent all around the state. When the vote was counted, however, the amendment went down to the worst defeat in the history of woman suffrage state campaigns: 63,000 for; 160,000 against. Why? On the one hand, the issue of race was crucial. White voters were told that negro women would outnumber white and black voters, of whom there were still quite a number in West Virginia, were told the opposite. And, as if this weren't enough, women were made to pay the price of a prohibition amendment passed the year before; what was called the "wet vote" came out in droves against woman suffrage. Knowing more about this very important 1916 West Virginia campaign can tell us a great deal about the forces arrayed against woman suffrage in its final years.

    West Virginia shows up once more in the suffrage story, as the 34th state to ratify the nineteenth amendment (36 were necessary). The story here is also dramatic and invites further research. The Democratic Governor called the Republican controlled legislature into special session to ratify the amendment. Both parties were eager to get the credit for the ratification and thus, they hoped, the loyalty of the new women voters. Ratification passed in the House but was a draw in the Senate, at which point a handful of anti-suffrage legisaltors went into high gear to dry to keep West Virginia out of the ratificaiton column. The crucial vote belonged to a State Senator named Jesse Bloch who was out of the state, indeed in California, at the time. Bloch wired that he would rush back home to cast the crucial vote and he did, in a record-setting cross country trip that took a mere eleven days. When he got to Chicago, an airship was waiting for him but he elected the safer method and returned just as "antis" were about to call a vote without him; but he voted for ratification and put WEst Virginia in the pro column.[21]

    Nor will unearthing the names and stories of numerous local activists and opponents, the actions and consequences of politicians and voters exhaust the historians' obligation to study woman suffrage. Like all great historical subjects, the story of woman suffrage is constantly and necessarily being revisited, reevaluated and reinterpreted. What to one group of historians appears to be late nineteenth century suffragism's successful and admirable move into respectability (and therefore wide popular support) will, to another, look like a disastrously conservative turn, that deprived suffragism of all its feminist content. The racial exclusionism that characterized suffragists as much as their opponetns in the early twentieth century will cease to appear to the historians' eye a necessary concession and will come in for harsh critical judgment; even as we learn about all the work that African American women did for the suffrage cause nonetheless. WE will want to know about the arguments against suffrage and why they held back victory for so very long. And we will realize that the story of women's political equality doesn't stop in 1920 but only starts there; we will know better than to answer the question of how and why women used their votes upon enfranchisement with a dismissive adn incurious, "woman suffrage made no difference."

    It has become a commonplace to say that how we approach the past has everything to do with where we are located in the present. The historian has to stand someplace to generate her questions of the past. But investigating the past is also connected to what we want from the future, for the the historian is also trying to understand the trajectory of change of which she is a part. And if committed to intervening through political action to affect the contemporary trajectory, that is to being an active citizen, the historian's perspective must be part of that effort, intended to affect or alter what the future brings. I have insisted on the intimate relationship between the practice of women's history and the possibilities of modern feminist politics. Given how diffuse and compromised feminism has become, certainly as compared to the determined, focused movement of twenty years ago, the rhetorical character of some of these claims now causes me some embarrassment. And yet, I am unwilling to give up my own personal "metanarrative," which is a sort of wishful progressivism seeking to recruit adherents, an insistence that things might get better, if only people refuse to be discouraged about making them so.