Doctoral Dissertation Research: Expansion of Voting Rights for Women in the United States: Institutional Openness, State-building, and Gender

Northwestern University, Evanston IL

Investigators

Abstract

This study seeks to bring a new understanding to the history of the American woman suffrage movement by examining the adoption of suffrage legislation throughout the western states prior to World War I and documenting how western suffrage successes influenced adoption nationally. In this project I address the following questions. First, why were the western states so much more successful in adopting woman suffrage at a much earlier time than other states with fewer legislative attempts? Second, why did the northeastern and Midwestern states have so much more difficulty passing woman suffrage legislation despite social movement mobilization and continuous and increasing legislative activity? And finally, why did most southern state legislatures fail to adopt woman suffrage at all? I use data that includes all legislative activity for woman suffrage in 48 states and documents regional patterns of suffrage success and failure from 1848 to 1920, and I analyze these patterns in the context of changing voting rights in the United States, variations in state governments and state legislative processes, state party politics, social movement organization, and changing gender expectations and arrangements in order to explain the variable outcomes in state full suffrage adoption prior to the ratification of the national suffrage amendment. I will use quantitative, 48-state event history analysis to test the effects of independent variables on the timing of full suffrage adoption of each state. To provide a rich contextual description of social movement as well as state institutional and political processes affecting variation of the timing of state suffrage adoption, I will conduct a qualitative, comparative analysis of eight individual state cases in order to explain patterns and outcomes that are inconsistent with the quantitative analyses. This study contributes to social science in three areas: This study contributes to understanding how historical change in the United States occurred and how we can improve the methodology we use to explain these transformations by using quantitative analysis alongside comparative case studies. This study contributes to understanding the process of state-level legislative change in the United States. The theoretical ideas and methodological approach can be applied to other contemporary state-level policy change for which groups and organizations have mobilized such as welfare reform, gay marriage legislation, and adoption of Defense of Marriage Acts.