Academic literature on the topic 'Women's suffrage'

This examination of the southern suffrage campaign focuses the movement through the eyes of three prominent southern women within the political movement: Kate Gordon, Sue Shelton White, and Josephine Pearson. The merged National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) planned and organized a focus on the South during the second half of the suffrage campaign, which presented new challenges. The Nineteenth Amendment passed through Congress in 1918 and consequently set the stage for a raging political battle between suffragists and anti-suffragists. The suffrage campaign prompted women to question how the political platform of suffrage should be addressed. Women argued over the issue of suffrage and its application; a universal amendment, state legislation, or no suffrage rights at all. The question over appropriate political tactics often revealed the social and cultural prejudices of the campaign leaders. The cornerstone of my research focuses on the history of the southern campaign and incorporates three southern women who shared distinct political views of woman suffrage. The bulk of my research focused on the primary documents from the Josephine Pearson Collection at the Tennessee State Library and Archives and the loaned papers of Sue Shelton White from Knoxville, Tennessee. I also used the Louisiana newspaper, the Daily Picayune, for information about Kate Gordon as well as her correspondence with Laura Clay. Through this examination, a more direct focus is applied to the southern suffrage movement, which further complicates separate accounts of racial prejudice and exclusion in southern women’s politics. Furthermore, my thesis will create a framework of southern culture by incorporating the national issue of suffrage from a regional perspective to expose commonalities and themes that muddles southern women’s history and patriarchal loyalty in the South. Carefully analyzing the suffrage and anti-suffrage leadership in the South, particularly Tennessee, helps develop a well-defined understanding of the cultural and political factors influencing southern politics as well as assist in constructing a scholarly historiographic perspective on social and cultural influences of the southern campaign within the separate groups of suffragists and anti-suffragists.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of California, San Diego, 2008.<br>Title from first page of PDF file (viewed July 25, 2008). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Includes bibliographical references (p. 86-88).

This thesis is a study of the attitudes towards women's enfranchisement, and involvement within the British women's suffrage movement, of the male members of the Independent Labour Party, a mixed sex socialist organisation. The period covered ranges from 1893, the year of the party's foundation, to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. The aim of this study is to contribute to our understanding of a hitherto neglected aspect of suffrage history: the male supporters. Suffrage historians have generally considered Independent Labour Party men's attitudes towards women's enfranchisement to have been positive: their ideas and activities are now placed under careful scrutiny. The theoretical underpinnings of the thesis lie in gender history, most especially in the field of historical studies of masculinities, which in themselves have been informed by the ideas and writings of women's history. Independent Labour Party men are viewed not as a group of individuals with certain physical characteristics in common, but as sharing gendered identities as socialists and as men, which influenced their attitudes towards the roles deemed appropriate for men and women within society, and towards women's emancipation in particular. Furthermore, the thesis assesses how their ideas and identities were themselves challenged by developments within the suffrage movement. Chapter 1 considers the years between 1893-5, a period characterised by few formal links between Independent Labour Party men and the suffrage movement, and assesses how supportive attitudes towards women's enfranchisement fitted into prevailing understandings of socialism and independent labour representation. Chapters 2 and 3, focusing respectively on the periods between 1895-1905, and 1905-1911, consider the impact of a burgeoning suffrage movement, active within the ranks of the labour movement itself, and characterised by its own priorities, objectives and tactics. Chapter 4, dealing with the years between 1911-1914, concludes by assessing Independent Labour Party men's responses to a shift in the suffrage debate, as the introduction in Parliament of adult suffrage became a practical proposition.