Abstract
The United States was a suffrage pioneer for eliminating restrictions based on class and race, but not for prohibiting the use of sex classifications as a voting qualification. This contribution focuses on the relationship between the family and the state to explain this discrepancy. In the context of America’s liberal heritage, the family and the state are separated by virtue of being ruled by opposite principles: parental rule versus political rule. I argue that women’s suffrage was delayed in the United States because women’s identification with the family as an institution separated them from formal inclusion in the state. Reformers had to solve, therefore, the relationship between the family and the state in order to achieve women’s political citizenship. Using a new data set that tracks family-state frames used by women’s suffrage and women rights leaders from the founding of the American state to the addition of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, I show how configurations of the family and the state developed over time. It was when the family and the state were eventually conceptualized to be analogous, rather than opposite, institutions that women finally achieved the right to vote.
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Notes
For example, see Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Richard Franklin Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
See work by Theda Skocpol on assessing the maternalist policies established at the state level in the Progressive era in Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).
See work by Karen Orren analyzing how this facilitated the introduction of new precepts legitimizing state intervention in the relationship between employer and employee in Belated Feudalism: Labor, the Law, and Liberal Development in the United States (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Views of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997). See also Judith N. Shklar, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991). Scholars also examine the way sexuality and sexual identity are used by the state to obstruct political inclusion: David Bell and Jon Binnie, The Sexual Citizen: Queer Politics and Beyond (Cambridge, U.K: Polity Press, 2000); Brenda Cossman, Sexual Citizens: The Legal and Cultural Regulation of Sex and Belonging (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007).
Karen Orren clarifies the liberal assumption of equality by noting that the assumption of “no established ranks” does not mean there is social equality, but rather that there are no fixed hierarchical social relations that are “reproduced and enforced by government”; see her Belated Feudalism, 6 (see note 3 above). On the liberal issue of individual rights-bearers, as Rogers Smith puts it, “liberal notions of natural rights as expounded in the Declaration of Independence and writing of philosophers like Locke make a prima facie case that all those capable of developing powers of rational self-guidance should be treated as bearers of fairly robust individual rights”; Civic Ideals, 37 (see previous note).
Orren, Belated Feudalism (see note 3 above); Smith, Civic Ideals (see note 4 above). For an excellent analysis of the relationship between the American liberal tradition and constitutionalism, see Carol Nackenoff, “Groundhog Day Again?: Is the ‘Liberal Tradition’ a Useful Construct for Studying Law, Courts, and American Political Development?” The Good Society 16 (2007): 40–45.
Of course, these gains for African-American men were cut short by state and federal support of state-level legislation that nullified the Fifteenth Amendment by requiring literacy tests and other qualifications that the majority of African-American men and other economically disadvantaged men were not able to meet. See Richard M. Valelly, The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). However, such nullification policies were necessary at all because of the initial success of the Fifteenth Amendment. Until the 1830s, two Southern states, Tennessee and North Carolina, permitted free blacks to vote, and prior to the Civil War, six Northern states did, too. With the end of the Civil War and the addition of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, no state could deny the right to vote to anyone on the basis of a race qualification. The registration of black men surged, reaching 700,000 in the South by 1868. Despite violent and intimidating tactics used by white Southerners, black men voted in surprisingly large numbers until the end of the nineteenth century. Between 1869 and 1901, a total of twenty black men were elected to the House of Representatives and two to the Senate. A majority of these elected black men had been slaves, but approximately half had attended college. In addition, many had previously held a local or state-level elective office. See Michael D. Cobb and Jeffery A. Jenkins, “Race and the Representation of Blacks’ Interests during Reconstruction,” Political Research Quarterly 54 (2001): 181–204; Carol Swain, Black Faces, Black Interests: The Representation of African Americans in Congress (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).
See Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1991).
Henry Maine, Ancient Law, Its Connection with the Early History of Society, and Its Relation to Modern Ideas (New York: Charles Scribner, 1864).
For an excellent analysis of the relationship of marriage to American political development, see Priscilla Yamin, “The Search for Marital Order: Civic Membership and the Politics of Marriage in the Progressive Era,” Polity 42 (2009): 86–112, and American Marriage: A Political Institution (Philadelphia: University of Pennslyvania Press, 2015). For the use of marriage as a political tool in the context of race, see Julie Novkov, “The Miscegenation/Same-Sex Marriage Analogy: What Can We Learn from Legal History?” Polity 33 (2008): 345–86. Also see Linda C. McClain and Daniel Cere, What is Parenthood? Contemporary Debates about the Family (New York: New York University Press, 2013).
Of course, this is a process that takes time. See Orren, Belated Feudalism (see note 3 above).
John Hittinger, “Plato and Aristotle on the Family and the Polis,” The Saint Anselm Journal 8 (2013): 1–22, at 7 (emphasis added).
John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 2nd treatise, ch 6, Sec. 55, 58, 170.
Ibid.
William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1765] 1979), Book 1, 430.
William J. Crotty, Political Reform and the American Experiment (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1977), 20.
Quoted in Phyllis Lee Levin, Abigail Adams (New York: Ballantine Books, 1987), 83.
Claire Tomalin The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: The New American Library, Inc., 1974), 99, 103–04; Virginia Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992).
Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, 102, 107 (see previous note).
Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1980) and No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998). The idea that the family is an important foundation for socializing children to be virtuous citizens remains a powerful perspective; see Linda C. McClain, The Place of Families: Fostering Capacity, Equality and Responsibility (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006).
Kerber, Women of the Republic (see previous note).
Ibid., 283.
Ibid., 200.
Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers (see note 2 above).
History of Woman Suffrage, Volume 1: 1848–1861, ed. Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Ida Husted Harper (London: Charles Mann, 1881), chapter 9, emphasis added; accessed on internet research archives at http://www.gutenbegrg.org/ebooks/28020.
Ibid., Chapter 4, emphasis added.
History of Woman Suffrage, Volume 5, ed. Ida Husted Harper, chapter 16 (see note 25 above).
Ibid., Chapter 11: The National American Convention of 1911, emphasis added.
My thanks to Sparsha Saha.
History of Woman Suffrage, Volumes I-VI, ed. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Ida Husted Harper (see note 25 above).
The editors of these six volumes did not engage in this work expecting a financial profit. Rather, they funded the completion of their work with a gift of $24,000 from Eliza Jackson Eddy in 1885. Stanton paid Anthony and Gage for their shares of the rights to the books, and, in 1886, she issued Volume 3, listing herself as the publisher. At her own expense, Stanton gave away over one thousand copies of Volume 3 to political leaders and to libraries in Europe and America, bearing the burden of a $20,000 expense. Notably, Harvard University refused to accept from Stanton the gift of the first three volumes, and returned them to her. Twenty years later, Harvard ordered Volume 4.
Lisa Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792), at http://www.bartleby.com/144; Mary Wollstonecraft, “Original Stories from Real Life (1791), at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/36507/36507-h/36507-h.htm; Mary Wollstonecraft, “An Historical and Moral View of the Origins and Progress of the French Revolution,” (1795), at http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/226; William Godwin, ‘Memories of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman” (1798), at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/16199. The documents analyzed for this project are digitalized, but the unit of analysis is not based on a word count. For a word count, see Michelle Moravec, “‘Under this name she is fitly described’: A Digital History of Gender in The History of Woman Suffrage,” at http://womhist.alexanderstreet.com/moravec-full.html. In this project, the unit of analysis was the frame itself. That is, I conceptually interpreted frames rather than counting words. I made a distinction between the introduction of a frame and its continuation. If information about a frame was continued for continuous paragraphs, we coded it once in its first appearance. However, each time a frame was introduced that is different from a preceding frame, we coded it as occurring (again). If two or more frames occurred in conjunction with one another, we coded each frame as an appearance of that frame. The data set includes a total of 479 references to frames, of which 21.3% occurred in the eighteenth century, 34.9% in the nineteenth century, and 42.8% in the twentieth century.
For an excellent analysis of Jane Addams’s contribution to the views about the relationship between the family and the state in the Progressive era, Marilyn Fischer, Carol Nackenoff, and Wendy Chmielewski, eds., Jane Addams and the Practice of Democracy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009).
Julia Adams, “The Rule of the Father: Patriarchy and Patrimonialism in Early Modern Europe,” in Max Weber’s “Economy and Society,” ed. Charles Camick, Philip S. Gorski, and David M. Trubek (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005).
Ibid.
Blackstone, Commentaries, Book One, Chapter 4 (see note 15 above).
John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women, ed. Alan Ryan, (New York: Penguin Classics, [1869] 2007), accessed at http://www.constitution.org/jsm/women.htm.
See Eileen McDonagh, The Motherless State: American Democracy and Women’s Political Leadership (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
For example, see Adams, “The Rule of the Father,” 237 (see note 35 above).
Catharine A. MacKinnon Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).
Eileen McDonagh, “Ripples from the First Wave: The Monarchial Origins of the Welfare State,” Perspectives on Politics 13 (2015), 992–1016.
Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, “Institutions and Intercurrence; Theory Building in the Fullness of Time,” Nomos 38: Political Order, ed. Ian Shapiro and Russell Hardin (New York: New York University Press, 1996): 111–46; Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, The Search for American Political Development (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Giovanna Benadusi, “Rethinking the State: Family Strategies in Early Modern Tuscany,” Social History 20 (1995): 157–78; Paul Ginsborg, “Family, Civil Society and the State in Contemporary European History: Some Methodological Considerations,” Contemporary European History 4 (1995): 249–73.
Carol Nackenoff, “The Private Roots of American Political Development: The Immigrants’ Protective League’s ‘Friendly and Sympathetic Touch,’ 1908–1924,” Studies in American Political Development, 28 (2014): 129–60. For an excellent set of perspectives analyzing the relationship between the family and the state, see Carol Nackenoff and Julie Novkov, ed., Statebuilding from the Margins: Between Reconstruction and the New Deal (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). For an excellent analysis of how political heritage affects the development of feminist perspectives, see Lee Ann Banaszak and Eric Plutzer, “Contextual Determinants of Feminist Attitudes: National and Subnational Influences in Western Europe,” American Political Science Review 87 (1993):147–57. For an analysis of the impact of culture on political frames, see Susan Burgess, “Gender and Sexuality Politics in the James Bond Film Series: Cultural Origins of Gay Inclusion in the U.S. Military,” Polity 47 (2015): 225–48.
Eileen McDonagh, Parents of the People: The Monarchical Origins of the Welfare State (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, forthcoming, 2017).
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The author thanks Carol Nackenoff for her invaluable advice and Sparsha Saha and Alla Baranovsky for their excellent research assistance. This research was supported by a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University.
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McDonagh, E. The Family-State Nexus in American Political Development: Explaining Women’s Political Citizenship. Polity 48, 186–204 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2016.8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2016.8