Reflections on Aileen Kraditor's Legacy: Fifty Years of Woman Suffrage Historiography, 1965–2014

Abstract

This article assesses the impact that Aileen Kraditor's classic monograph, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement (1965) has had on fifty years of suffrage historiography. Kraditor is best known among scholars for offering the terms “justice” and “expediency” to distinguish between two strains of suffragist argumentation, the former of which she associated with the nineteenth century and the latter with the Progressive Era. Although specialists no longer believe in a firm divide between the two periods, many continue to differentiate between principled (egalitarian) arguments that called for suffrage as a universal right of citizenship and instrumental (expedient) claims that often contained racist assumptions about white women's superiority. The majority of scholars now accept Kraditor's fundamental insight that a political movement devoted to the extension of democracy contained within it antidemocratic and racist elements, but they have challenged other key aspects of Kraditor's work, including her characterization of white southern women's advocacy of suffrage and her Turnerian assumptions about why statewide suffrage referenda succeeded first (and primarily) in the West. In addition, scholars have expanded the terrain of women's political activism to include analyses of black women's suffrage activities and understandings of citizenship; in so doing they have connected the regional histories of the South and the Midwest, displacing Kraditor's national narrative. Collectively the field has moved far beyond Kraditor's focus on the National American Woman Suffrage Association to emphasize the enormous range of suffrage activities that took place before the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, demonstrating how woman suffrage encompassed new understandings of citizenship that were inseparable from the histories of Reconstruction, U.S. expansion, and western imperialism.

“Kneading Politics”: Cookery and the American Woman Suffrage Movement

“…10 In contrast to more egalitarian right-based arguments, suffragists' expediency arguments typically reinforced race and class hierarchies by arguing that only morally superior middle-and upper-class white women could effectively wield the ballot alongside white men. 11 Although "rights based" and "expediency" remain useful categories of pro-suffrage arguments, historians have overturned Kraditor's chronological shift from one tactic to another beginning in the 1890s. Scholars instead acknowledge that both arguments coexisted and that white leaders often bolstered class and race hierarchies throughout the course of the movement.…”