PART ONE

Claiming Citizenship

HOW CAN SOMEONE demand the vote without having that basic political right in the first place? That was the conundrum suffrage activists faced as they tried to convince men, especially male elected officials, to share the vote with them—without being able to use the vote as leverage. Suffragists intuitively knew that politics and political influence were about more than casting a ballot, and they devised creative ways to insert themselves directly into the political realm. Even if they could not vote, they could still perform the rituals of citizenship and civic participation that men enjoyed. All they had to do was present themselves as legitimate participants in the political process and act as if they were the fully vested citizens they aspired to become.

That task was made both harder and easier by the nation’s experience after the Civil War. Reconstruction is fundamental to understanding the history of woman suffrage. The unimaginable had happened: a costly civil war ended slavery, and a new political order was in the making. What would be the relation between federal power and the role of the states? Who was an American citizen? What responsibilities went along with citizenship? The rights of newly freed slaves were central to the discussion about how to reconstitute the national state. In this fraught but pregnant political moment, women activists believed they might have a fighting chance to win those rights for women as well. In effect, they tried to insert gender alongside race in the national debate about citizenship.

When the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified in 1870, guaranteeing African American men—but not women of any race—the right to vote, that effort stalled, at least temporarily. Soon afterward, the political and moral imperatives that had provided support for a radical rethinking of the democratic promise in the wake of the Civil War weakened, then disappeared. But the unfinished business of Reconstruction continued to set the agendas for civil rights and women’s rights for decades to come. The Civil War and its aftermath put questions of citizenship and human rights firmly on the national agenda, where they have remained ever since.