Predicting Social Movement Success: Woman Suffrage Successes and Failures in the United States

Brigham Young University, Provo UT

Investigators

Abstract

This project will examine the success of the woman suffrage movement. Supplementing data previously collected for the 22 western states with data from the 26 States located east of the Mississippi River, the project will identify factors associated with suffrage successes in the West and the subsequent diffusion of suffrage initiatives throughout the other states. More specifically, the study will explore the influence on suffrage success of organizational forms and characteristics (e.g., constitutional conventions and territorial founding dates), changing gender norms and access to the public sphere, diffusion and legitimation, and social movement organizing. Data will be collected for the eastern states by visiting state archives, reading legislative journals and proceedings of state constitutional conventions, and collecting secondary histories of the suffrage movement. In addressing this question, the project will contribute to the understanding of social movement resource mobilization and political opportunity, incorporating them within new institutionalist paradigms of political science, economics, and sociology. The study also incorporates current gender theories that view gender as more than an inborn feature of individuals. Gender is a social institution that orders the social processes of everyday life. As such, gender is incorporated into the new institutionalist paradigm as both constraining and providing opportunities for action.