Why read The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement?

Book cover of The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement: 1890-1920

Book description

What united and moved millions of women to seek a right that their society denied them? What were their beliefs about the nature of the home, marriage, sex, politics, religion, immigrants, blacks, labor, the state? In this book, Aileen S. Kraditor selects a group of suffragist leaders and investigates their…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Jennifer Frost

Author

This book, published first in 1965 and then revised and reissued, was required reading when I was in graduate school. With this intellectual history of women’s suffrage, Kraditor sparked my interest in how ideas spur and shape political and social movements. Arguments, tactics, and strategies originate in the ideas of participants, and these ideas have consequences for how and what is eventually achieved. My favorite chapter explained the two kinds of arguments suffragists used. The argument from “justice” asserted women’s equal humanity with men, while the argument from “expediency” affirmed the benefits of extending women’s domestic caretaking into politics.

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From Jennifer's list on The best books on the history of voting rights in the United States.