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Suffrage Petitioning as Formative Practice: American Women Presage and Prepare for the Vote, 1840–1940

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2018

Daniel Carpenter*
Affiliation:
Department of Government and Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University
Zachary Popp
Affiliation:
KOA Corporation; Harvard University
Tobias Resch
Affiliation:
Department of Government, Harvard University
Benjamin Schneer
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Florida State University
Nicole Topich
Affiliation:
Archives and Historical Collections, SUNY Upstate Medical University

Abstract

The American woman suffrage movement remade the U.S. Constitution and effected the broadest expansion of voting eligibility in the nation's history. Yet it did more than change laws and citizenship. It also plausibly shaped participatory patterns before and after the winning of voting rights for women. Drawing upon the idea of formative practice and reporting on a range of historical materials—including an original data set of 2,157 petitions sent to the U.S. Congress from 1874 to 1920 concerning women's voting rights—we focus on woman suffrage petitioning as both presaging the practice of voting and, in a sense, preparing tens of thousands of women for that activity. Our analyses reveal that, before 1920, suffrage petitioning activity was heightened in general and midterm election years (especially among Republican-leaning constituencies), suffrage petitioning both enabled and reflected organization in critical western states, and that post-suffrage women's turnout was immediately and significantly higher in states with greater pre-suffrage petitioning (controlling for a range of political, organizational, and demographic variables). In its claims, symbolism, habits, and temporality, suffrage petitioning differed from other petitioning in American political development and marked a formative practice for women on their way to voting.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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Footnotes

Acknowledgments: All of the authors of this article made proportionate contributions to the work; author order is alphabetical. We thank Elisabeth Clemens, Alana Jeydel, Alice Kang, the audiences at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in 2015, and the editors and anonymous reviewers for comments. We thank Holly McCammon for sharing data on suffrage movement organizations, and Kevin Corder and Christina Wolbrecht for sharing data on early women's turnout aggregates after the Nineteenth Amendment.

For research support, we acknowledge the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the Behavioral Laboratory in the Social Sciences Program (BLISS) of the Division of Social Sciences at Harvard University. For helpful data from Massachusetts, we acknowledge the National Endowment for the Humanities (PW-5105612). We remain responsible for all errors and omissions.

References

Primary Sources

Petitions to the Massachusetts General Court, Massachusetts State Archives, Boston, MA.Google Scholar
Petitions to the U.S. House of Representatives, Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, Record Group 233, National Archives, Washington, DC.Google Scholar
Petitions to the U.S. Senate, Records of the U.S. Senate, Record Group 46, National Archives, Washington, DC.Google Scholar