Aileen S. Kraditor

The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement

"An important contricution to the history of women and the intellectual history of the United States." —Carl N. Degler, Stanford University

What united and moved millions of women to seek a right that their society denied them? What were their beliefs about the nature of the home, marriage, sex, politics, religion, immigrants, blacks, labor, the state? In this book, Aileen S. Kraditor selects a group of suffragist leaders and investigates their thinking—the ideas, and tactics, with which they battled the ideas and institutions impeding what suffragists defined as progress toward the equality of the sexes. She also examines what the American public believed "suffragism" to mean and how the major events of the time affected the movement.

"A first-rate piece of research. The papers of the woman suffrage leaders are a gold mine of social and intellectual history, and . . . Kraditor is the first to make full use of them. . . . As a result of her work, the textbooks will have to be revised, and much of the oversimplification on the subject now in print will quietly fade from sight." —Anne Fior Scott, Duke University