Three decades of women’s history in the United States

California poster) This may seem obvious but inasmuch as the woman suffrage movement was treated as a “single issue movement,” focused “only” on securing the franchise, I don’t think it was. I worked to demonstrate that the right to vote represented a claim to individuality, to independence, to equality and to public stature for the women who demanded it and perhaps even more by those who strenuously opposed it.

[[Woman suffrage scholarship in the U.S. did finally begin to grow in the 1990s during the Clinton years, when both the political prominence of particular women and general American political engagement grew much stronger. This shifting political environment has affected scholarship not only on how women got the vote but what they did with it, a remarkably understudied subject. Women’s historians are just now beginning to investigate the political history of women after they won the vote, beginning to unravel the complex , subtle and slow process by which American women began to make consistent and collective use of this power and linked it to issues of concern to them as a sex. Now that the gender gap is one of the most important aspects of American political life (women vote Democratic at something like 10% higher than men), it is clear that this process must be studied.

Before leaving this brief overview of the first impact of feminist scholarship on U.S. women’s history, I want to speak briefly