PART TWO

The Personal Is Political

WHILE WOMAN SUFFRAGE is often seen primarily as a political movement devoted to enacting a legislative goal, the suffrage cause was not something that its participants could turn off at the end of the day when the picket signs were put away and the last meeting adjourned. Once a woman became a suffragist, it changed her relationships with her family of origin and with the significant others in her life, especially husbands and partners, but also friends and professional colleagues as well. It potentially affected her political party identification, her livelihood, which organizations she belonged to, and where she lived and traveled. Participating in suffrage events even affected how she dressed. The personal and the political were two sides of the same coin.

Signing on to the woman suffrage campaign often changed how women thought of themselves. In the day-to-day work of this broad and diverse movement, budding suffragists suddenly found themselves doing unexpected and often daring things. It took courage to stand up publicly for the cause, but suffragists did not have to go it alone: they enjoyed the camaraderie of being part of a movement they all knew was bigger than themselves. Oreola Williams Haskell called this “the romance” of the woman suffrage cause.¹ That, as much as the actual goal of winning the vote, was often what made the drudgery and hard work worthwhile.

By virtue of declaring their support for suffrage in the first place, suffragists took themselves outside the bounds of what was considered acceptable behavior for women at the time. The woman suffrage campaign provided a place where it was okay to be different, okay to be an outlier in regard to accepted gender norms and in other ways too. The suffrage movement gave women a space to combine meaningful work with satisfying personal relationships, including a broad range of alternative lifestyles. Suffragists participated in companionate marriages, with both husband and wife signed on to the cause; in deep friendships with other women that turned into lifelong partnerships; as “New Women” experimenting with and claiming sexual prerogatives usually reserved for men; and independently, as single women without the constraints of marriage. Viewed in this way, suffragists turn out to be a much more interesting group than their somewhat dour public reputation gives them credit for.