Suffragists in an Imperial Age U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question, 1870-1929

Suffragists in Imperial Age demonstrates how seemingly disparate conversations about the physical boundaries of national territory and the gendered boundaries of political space overlapped and inflected each other during post-Civil War efforts to rebuild the nation in new terms. This book argues that US expansion was crucial to the development of the post-bellum US woman suffrage movement and shows how federal discussions of citizenship and voting rights in the context of creating territorial governments in the continental West and, after the Spanish-American War, in the Caribbean and the Pacific, created space on the Congressional calendar for suffragists to instigate debate on the woman question. In the negotiation of global power relations across the twentieth century and into the present, political rights for women continues to function as a marker of success for experiments in expanding democracy, as well as a bargaining chip for reasserting some degree of political independence for men. This book shows how by 1929, suffragists were on the verge of making women's voting rights an integral part of US colonial policy, and adding votes for women to the list of markers symbolizing the achievement of "civilization" in US colonies.

Allison L. Sneider is Associate Professor of History at Rice University.