One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement

Definitive writings by leading historians that cover the full scope of the woman suffrage movement in the United States. This revised and expanded edition offers new material on the international context, race, and regional issues that affected the suffrage movement and the struggles many women faced trying to vote after ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 that guaranteed them that right.

The first edition of One Woman, One Vote was the Companion book to the PBS American Experience documentary by the same name, and continues to be the most comprehensive collection of writings - contemporary and historical - on the woman suffrage movement in America. It includes essays by the most prominent contemporary historians, many who challenge widely accepted theories and illustrate the diversity and complexity of the fight for the Nineteenth Amendment. The twenty essays in this Second Edition focus on different aspects of the movement and presented in roughly chronological order, together tell the fascinating story of woman's suffrage from the failure of the Constitution to enfranchise women to the political engagement of women after 1920. The authors of the essays are scholars in the fields of History, American Studies, Political Science, and Sociology, and they help readers "rediscover" the suffrage movement through their engaging essays, offering intriguing and often contradictory interpretations. The editor, Marjorie J. Spruill, Ph.D., is a leading authority in women's and southern history, and has authored numerous books and essays.
New material includes an insightful essay by Spruill, "The Inhospitable South and the Struggle for Woman Suffrage." She describes the long and often frustrating effort beginning in the 1890s by northern and southern suffragists to bring the Southern states into the movement-an effort thwarted by widespread ideas about white supremacy and state's rights among white Southerners who viewed the movement as an unwelcome offshoot of the antislavery movement that had "no place in the sunny South." Sadly, aware that the movement had to have some Southern support in order to achieve a national victory, white suffrage leaders developed a Southern strategy to overcome this opposition, presenting woman suffrage as beneficial to white supremacy or at least not a threat to it. Spruill explains why some Southern white women took on this unpopular cause, then describes how they pushed for the vote first through state action and, when that failed, supported the Nineteenth Amendment. Ultimately, four southern states-including Tennessee, which provided the 36th and final ratification-broke ranks with an otherwise Solid South and woman suffrage became part of the U.S. Constitution. Dr. Spruill writes, "In the history of the woman suffrage movement, the South is notorious as the region that afforded the movement the greatest resistance and the least success."

Readers of One Woman, One Vote learn how the suffrage movement-from its beginning in 1848 to its conclusion in 1920-changed over time in response to changes in American society and politics. They are introduced to several generations of suffrage leaders and learn of the supportive relationships as well as tensions that developed among them. They learn of the growing diversity of the suffrage constituency in terms of region, religion, race, class, ethnicity, and even attitude, and that the suffrage story included both a record of harmony and cooperation but also discrimination and betrayal. We also learn that for many women of color the movement did not end in 1920 but continued-and continues today. Above all, Dr. Spruill emphasizes that the vote was not "given" to women when the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920: generations of suffragists labored long and hard to win the right to vote in the United States.