Three decades of women’s history in the United States

Eleanor .

My own contribution to this scholarship was focused on the history of the US woman suffrage movement1. In the work done on women’s history, up to and through the 1930s, woman suffrage was the centerpiece of all efforts to insert women into the flow of history. Most of what was written, however, was not so much history as participant autobiography. Women’s suffrage movements in the U.S and elsewhere were among s the most important popular campaigns ever waged for political democracy. Nonetheless, when women’s history revived in the 1970s I was almost alone in my interest in the subject. In the context of American society then, several factors coincided to weaken historians’ interest in the woman suffrage movement. First, the women’s liberation generation of women’s historians felt that all that was necessary to know about the had already been researched. Second, in the wake of the Vietnam war and Watergate episodes, Americans were generally alienated from active political life and expected nothing from electoral methods. Feminists were particularly alienated from politics because they considered the winning of the vote to have made no contribution to women’s liberation. Feminists of the 1970s and 1980s made great strides in expanding the definition of the political to include all sorts of power relations in daily life, but they largely ignored the classic stuff of formal, electoral politics.

My approach was to try and revive interest in the history of woman suffrage movement by connecting it to the growth in the United States of feminist consciousness. (