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As scholars of women's history, the three guest editors—Cathleen Cahill, Crystal Feimster, and Kimberly Hamlin—have thought about suffrage from a variety of angles, including sexual violence, Native sovereignty, science and medicine, intellectual history, and sex reform. In Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Harvard University Press, 2009), Feimster contends that a conjunction of shifting sexual practices, Black protest, and female political mobilizations provided the conditions for the elaboration of the rape/lynch narrative that sought to disenfranchise Black men and to keep women out of southern politics. Out of this maelstrom, she argues, emerged a powerful anti-rape movement that insisted on the enfranchisement of women. Pairing the lives of two southern suffragists—Ida B. Wells, who fearlessly branded rape and lynching as political tools of white supremacy, and Rebecca Latimer Felton, who urged white men to prove their manhood by lynching Black men accused of raping white women—Feimster makes visible the ways in which Black and white women linked their demands for the vote to a range of women's rights issues, including rape, lynching, domestic violence, age-of-consent laws, temperance, and property rights. Following Wells and Felton's lead, Feimster reveals why southern Black and white women asserted their presence in a sexually charged and violent public sphere and how they marshaled narratives of rape and lynching for their own political empowerment in the New South.

In her new book, Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), Cathleen Cahill follows the lead of feminist scholars of color to explore alternative genealogies of suffrage activism. She suggests that different groups of women came to voting rights for reasons that were specific to their identities, especially their race, class, and citizenship status. In some cases, women of color faced shared challenges such as discrimination and disenfranchisement by white Americans, but their specific identities move the conversation beyond a Black/white binary to reflect a more diverse suffrage history. Their experiences also reveal a much broader range of voting rights activity that was often coupled with complicated claims to citizenship and, for Native women, tribal sovereignty. The challenges they faced and the strategies they chose encourage us to recognize the many suffrage stories as well as the multiple racisms in the United States.

Kimberly Hamlin's book From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women's Rights in Gilded Age America (University of Chicago Press, 2014) charts the shifting intellectual scaffolding for claims about rights and equality—from biblical to scientific—that both thwarted and inspired women's political activism in the nineteenth century. After having been told for centuries that women were designed to be subservient to men, and especially to husbands, because Eve was made from Adam's rib, many women's rights activists—including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman—were drawn to evolutionary accounts of the origins of life on earth and the differences between the sexes. While retaining an emphasis on science, Hamlin's second book centers sex and the sexual double standard in motivating women's political activism. Free Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener (W. W. Norton, 2020) tells the remarkable, true story of the “fallen woman” who reinvented herself, learned politics by working to raise the age of sexual consent for girls (in 1890, it was twelve or younger in thirty-eight states), and became NAWSA's lead negotiator in Washington, D.C. Free Thinker foregrounds both sex and race in the Nineteenth Amendment's long journey through Congress and argues for the continued importance of suffrage biography.

As editors of this special issue, we framed the call for papers with the goals of calling attention to less familiar names in the suffrage movement, increasing our understanding of the scope of women's political activism, and embedding women's suffrage activity in the long history of voting rights. Scholars in this volume broaden the suffrage archive to include patent applications, spiritualist health guides, theatrical performances, photography, and newspaper columns. Throughout, we seek to highlight the ideological, political, and ethnic diversity of women activists, challenging historians to consider the ways in which women's demand for the franchise reverberated far beyond mainstream white suffrage organizations.

The special issue brings together six overarching and overlapping approaches. First and foremost, the essays prioritize research that incorporates new archives and sources. For instance, none of the articles center the records of the two main suffrage organizations: NAWSA and the National Woman's Party (NWP). Second, while only one of the six essays (Thomas Dublin's) is expressly about African American women, it is scholars of African American women who have long encouraged historians to look beyond NAWSA to understand the full scope and chronology of the campaign for women's suffrage and to reconsider the sources and methods we use.Footnote ³ In shaping this special issue, we rely on these insights to expand the cast of suffrage characters—especially with an eye to racial diversity and the myriad genealogies of feminist activism—and acknowledge that doing so changes the stories we tell. Third, we realize that changes in voting rights happen as the result of changes in ideology. Several essays speak to concurrent developments in science, pseudoscience, technology, medicine, political philosophy, and cosmology that enabled new thinking about the capabilities of women. Fourth, using new sources and considering often-overlooked groups leads to a focus on new spaces, such as the American West and South as well as transnational suffrage conversations. Suffrage victories happened in a variety of places before 1920, suggesting that we look more carefully at how those campaigns shaped advocacy for and against the national amendment as well as how it was implemented. Fifth, looking at suffrage activism beyond the federal amendment necessarily shifts the chronology. While exploring successes before the Nineteenth Amendment's ratification decenters 1920 as the date of victory, addressing the question of ongoing disenfranchisement extends our conversations forward in time. Finally, these contributions consider, both implicitly and explicitly, questions of memory and commemoration—whose stories do we tell, whose names are forgotten, what national narratives shape our understanding of the present?

The first intervention made by the special issue is archival. The essays widen the scope of what has historically been considered the suffrage archive by revealing the variety of organizations, publications, venues, and events in which women advanced claims for full citizenship. Drawing on sources from patent files to family archives to local newspapers, these essays demonstrate that suffrage debates were happening in myriad places. Kara Swanson highlights the strategic ways in which activists drew on patent records—the rare government office that did not discriminate by race or sex—to advance claims for female citizenship. And by tracing the history of women's demands for “self ownership,” from antebellum health guides, to spiritualist publications, to early women's rights tracts, to formal demands for birth control in the twentieth century, Heather Munro Prescott and Lauren MacIvor Thompson document the personal and ideological connections and symbiotic relationship between the twinned movements for political and bodily autonomy. Margie Brown-Coronel's biography of Lucretia del Valle focuses on her political evolution to remind us that there is still no substitute for painstaking detective work in a variety of archives: family papers, oral histories with descendants, correspondence, and newspapers. Thomas Dublin draws on letters written by Black suffragists to W. E. B. Du Bois as well as Black newspapers and magazines to demonstrate the vibrant conversations happening among Black suffragists and their allies. At the same time, returning to more traditional suffrage sources from new perspectives allows us to ask innovative questions. Cathleen Cahill's photo essay uses images to demonstrate how national suffrage leaders were influenced by Chinese suffragists, while Rachel Gunter reveals how concurrent conversations about immigration, citizenship, and state voting laws shaped suffragist strategies.

This new research on suffrage has benefitted from a growing number of digital databases, such as the Colored Conventions Project, Documenting the American South, and Women and Social Movements, that have expanded the archive of suffrage. As described in Thomas Dublin's and Margie Brown-Coronel's essays, crowdsourcing and biographical research have vastly expanded our awareness of the sheer number of suffrage activists, especially African American women, and the sources that reveal their stories. Transcription projects like the recent Douglass Day transcription marathon of Anna Julia Cooper's papers or the ongoing transcription of Mary Church Terrell's archive in the Library of Congress raise awareness and access. Such projects also change the shape of suffrage scholarship by allowing scholars to access data in new ways. Text-searchable tools help scholars follow individuals across vast reams of newspaper and manuscript sources, facilitating the telling of stories not found in traditional archives alone. Moreover, the digitization of publications such as The Crisis, The Chinese Students’ Monthly, and Woman's Journal has revealed vibrant debates in many communities. The essays in this issue challenge us to look for sources beyond those found in mainstream white suffrage organizations (namely, NAWSA and NWP), to experiment with crowdsourcing and digital archives in creative ways, and to put to rest the idea that suffragists of color were on the margins of the movement and lost to archives.

Secondly, building on the insights of African American women scholars, this special issue foregrounds the varied genealogies of voting rights activism. Many of the new directions in suffrage scholarship have resulted from centering women of color and demonstrating how their activism changes and challenges the standard narrative (which focuses on white women's activism within mainstream suffrage organizations, from the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention to the 1920 ratification). For example, African American women understood the vote as one of the many tools needed to redefine the racial and gendered meaning of citizenship. Even though leading white suffragists tended to exclude women of color from their national campaigns and commemorations, African American women challenged white racism and organized a movement for civil rights rooted in the particular realities of Black women's lives. As early as 1831, Maria Stewart, a pioneer Black abolitionist and women's rights activist, challenged long-held notions that denied both women and Black people their natural rights as citizens, calling on Black women to “sue for your rights and privileges.”Footnote ⁴ Indeed, Black women championed women's rights long before activists met in Seneca Falls, and continued to do so long after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. The emergence of the Black women's club movement in the 1880s sharpened the point, and the new generation of Black women that emerged after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment continued the fight. Committed to both women's suffrage and the struggle for racial equality, Black women such as Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells Barnett, Carrie Williams Clifford, Mary Church Terrell, Septima Clark, Pauli Murray, and Fannie Lou Hamer (to name only a few) embraced and defined suffrage not as merely a woman's issue but as part of a larger campaign for racial justice and human rights.

In this issue, “A Crowdsourcing Approach to Revitalizing Scholarship on Black Women Suffragists” follows in the intellectual footsteps of Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, the leading scholar on Black women's struggle for the vote between 1850 and 1920.Footnote ⁵ Drawing from a crowdsourced database of over 3,000 suffrage activists that he coedited, Thomas Dublin highlights the biographies of “famous” and “relatively unknown” Black suffragists to explore how and why they advocated for women's suffrage. Dublin maps Black women's education levels, occupations, ages, places of birth and activism, organizational affiliations, and ideas about the intersection of race and gender. Moreover, Dublin reminds us of the diverse ways in which Black suffragists mobilized simultaneously for racial and gender equality.

Similarly, Margie Brown-Coronel's spotlight essay on Lucretia del Valle and Cathleen Cahill's photo essay on Chinese and Chinese-American women reveal alternative paths to suffrage activism among women of color. Del Valle's political awareness arose from her position as a California of Mexican-descent. Her family's roots in Alta California, their experiences as “treaty citizens” under the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, their Hispanic gender traditions, and their class status all shaped del Valle's relationship to political power and opportunities in ways that were different from her white counterparts.Footnote ⁶ Chinese and Chinese-American women in the United States were active participants in the transnational conversations arising from the Chinese Revolution of 1911. Their experiences and arguments also influenced U.S. suffrage debates by introducing novel arguments and models.

Third, looking beyond traditional suffrage sources also reveals an expanded intellectual framework for debates about women's rights, including the connections between scientific thinking about women's physiology and mainstream beliefs about women's political capacity. Lauren MacIvor Thompson and Heather Munro Prescott explore the important links between the early birth control movement in the United States and the campaign for suffrage. Although antebellum women's rights activists who expressly advocated free love, such as Frances “Fanny” Wright and Mary Grove Nichols, remained at the fringes of the women's rights movement, their bold articulation of women's “self ownership” keep the ideal alive within more mainstream women's rights circles throughout the nineteenth century. Elizabeth Cady Stanton's views on marriage as “legalized prostitution” are well known to historians, but Thompson and Prescott reveal the extent to which this idea percolated in women's rights meetings and periodicals more broadly. Another key link between the suffrage movement and birth control is Mary Ware Dennett—the NAWSA corresponding secretary who resigned in 1914 to become, next to Margaret Sanger, the nation's leading birth control pioneer. (The rivalry between Dennett and Sanger is the subject of Thompson's forthcoming book.) Even though suffrage leaders, and indeed the majority of suffragists, did not openly endorse birth control, Thompson and Prescott convincingly argue that demands for female citizenship have always rested on the foundation of bodily autonomy.

Not only were women's reproductive capacities at the forefront of debates about suffrage, so too were their brains. Women's supposed lack of inventiveness in particular buttressed the Enlightenment conviction that they lacked the rational capacity required of citizens. Voltaire, for example, claimed that women were inferior to men because “they are seldom or ever inventors.” As philosophers, physicians, and scientists regularly published thin research proclaiming that women's bodies could not withstand the rigors of higher education and that women's brains fundamentally differed from men's, women turned to science to make counterclaims for equality. Kara Swanson's essay, “Inventing the Woman Voter: Suffrage, Ability, and Patents,” incorporates the history of technology within the history of women's rights to show how women, along with African Americans, used the patent office to substantiate their claims for citizenship. In 1870, Matilda Joslyn Gage spent scant resources to publish a pamphlet chronicling women's contributions to the history of invention—a tactic suffragists drew on for the remainder of the century, even exhibiting female patents at world's fairs and expositions in Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Chicago. As Swanson demonstrates, this strategy was twofold. First, the United States had long promoted (white male) inventiveness as a key aspect of national character and as evidence of the rational capacity required of voters; women and people of color effectively highlighted their own inventions to advance claims for full citizenship. And, secondly, it was practical—anyone regardless of race or sex could apply for a patent.

Fourth, a growing body of scholarship, along with state-level centennial celebrations, highlights the importance of region in the suffrage story and suggests the need for a more nuanced chronology.Footnote ⁷ The essays in this issue by Rachel Michelle Gunter, Sunu Kodumthara, Thomas Dublin, and Margie Brown-Coronel highlight how activists from the West and South influenced national debates and strategies of both suffragists and anti-suffragists. Dublin's focus on African American women not only complicates the North/South regional divide by drawing attention to southern Black women who moved to northern cities, but also challenges the assumption that all southern suffragists were white and opposed to Black suffrage. For many women in the West, voting was familiar for years before 1920. For example, Lucretia del Valle came of age in 1911 when women won the right to vote in California. It was a right she somewhat took for granted until she lost it upon moving to New York state. It was there that she most vocally advocated for suffrage, using her experiences at the California polls to support enfranchising the women of the Empire state.

In “‘The Right of Suffrage has been Thrust on Me:’ The Reluctant Suffragists of the American West,” Kodumthara reveals that western suffrage successes held the opposite message for national anti-suffragists. Although most scholarship on the antis has focused on activism in eastern states, that action was often motivated by successful western campaigns. In New York, for example, women created the New York State Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage soon after Colorado's 1893 victory, and later founded the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage after California's 1911 suffrage success.

As Kodumthara demonstrates, it was also western anti-suffragists who first agonized over whether or not to participate at the ballot box after their state-level campaigns failed. Many of them ultimately chose to cast their ballots in order to counter the votes of “bad” women—political radicals, prostitutes, and/or women of color—who had also been enfranchised. Moreover, they articulated their theories of voting while continuing to denounce women suffrage. As women who had voted, they used their experience to serve as authorities for anti-suffrage. Indeed, western suffrage states, especially Colorado, served as “laboratories of democracy” in national suffrage debates, offering evidence for both pro- and anti-suffrage advocates. The authors of several early and influential anti-suffrage tracts had either voted in western states themselves or cited women who had. After 1920, anti-suffragists across the nation faced the same choice about voting that western women had years earlier, and western justifications for casting a ballot gave the national anti-suffragists a rationale not only for voting, but also running for office. In her 1921 congressional campaign, anti-suffragist Alice Roberts of Oklahoma made deliberate choices about self-presentation and her refusal to vote for the Sheppard-Towner Act that were celebrated by former anti-suffragists turned anti-feminists as an example for others to follow. Not only does Kodumthara's article remind us of the importance of looking beyond the northeast in our research, it also demonstrates how western anti-suffragists set patterns that influenced subsequent generations of conservative women. The rise of the new right in Sunbelt states like California comes as less of a surprise when seen as part of a legacy of western anti-suffrage activism.

Rachel Michelle Gunter's “Immigrant Declarants and Loyal American Women: How Suffragists Helped Redefine the Rights of Citizens” likewise speaks to the importance of considering regional influences on national strategy. National suffrage leaders such as Carrie Chapman Catt learned from state campaigns. The anti-immigrant rhetoric in South Dakota's 1917 referendum, for example, revealed a strategy to Catt that she urged Texas suffrage leaders to deploy against different groups of immigrants (Mexicans and Germans), but to similar effect. This nativist strategy, especially effective during and after World War I, pitted the voting rights of immigrant and nonwhite male voters against those of native-born white women. Gunter's essay also reminds us that citizenship and voting rights were not always understood as mutual—a linkage that has primarily developed over the course of the twentieth century. As she suggests, it might come as a surprise to modern readers to know that in the 1870s, twenty-two states or territories enfranchised noncitizen immigrant men who declared their intention to become citizens. Seizing on political divisions and party reconfigurations, white women suffragists participated in the process by which voting rights became increasingly connected to citizenship, but also to whiteness. Gunter's work concludes by suggesting that in further exploring those connections and considering how those conversations bridged 1920, we reconsider the Cable Act of 1922 as part of a longer discussion about citizenship and rights.

Fifth, shifting the regional locus of suffrage debates from East to West and from North to South also inherently shifts the chronology. Taken together, these essays emphasize that the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment might be considered a pivot point rather than a conclusion. In particular, many women continued to be disenfranchised after 1920, and their struggle for the right to vote continued well into the future. Women from groups who were disenfranchised primarily based on racial or citizenship status continued to fight for their right to vote—a struggle that persists into the present day. White activists who were enfranchised engaged in a variety of projects ranging from continued emphasis on the vote to encouraging women's rights overseas and educating voters in the United States to a broader array of women's bodily and economic rights. Both before and after 1920, women also resisted the changes advocated by feminists, however, suggesting how women's conservative activism was also shaped by the fight against women's voting rights.

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This special issue offers a renewed sense of what's possible in suffrage scholarship. Introduced to unfamiliar but impressive activists and political activity, we anticipate that readers will be inspired to look for new sources and reimagine familiar ones. Such a reassessment will reveal that political activism around voting rights was even broader than we have generally perceived it to be. As these articles suggest, women took advantage of new technologies and old bureaucracies, deployed incisive arguments and compelling symbolism, and built vibrant organizations and engaged in conversations that stretched around the globe.

These articles also require scholars to make women's history more central to the histories of the Progressive Era and democracy. It has been fifteen years since SHGAPE President Jean Baker urged us in her presidential address to “get right” with women's suffrage, and we still have a long way to go.Footnote ⁸ National debates over women's suffrage both influenced and were bound up in the central questions of the era. The issue of woman's suffrage directly engaged questions of democratic governance, including citizenship, universal franchise, and constitutional change. Nor can those ideas about women be disentangled from debates over immigration policy, medicine and health, race relations, religion, the nation's history, the role of the state, social reform, and imperialism, as well as labor activism and property rights; all have included discussions of women's roles and place in society.

This centennial offers us a propitious moment to reassess the fight for women's suffrage and disrupt the narrative that has tended to run, from Seneca Falls to 1920, leaving everything else in the shadows. Together with a growing body of recent scholarship, this volume extends the standard terminus of the movement beyond the ratification year to expand the suffrage archive and to greatly increase the number of suffragists whose names we know and whose contributions we study.Footnote ⁹ The essays contained within document the tireless struggle over franchise and the ongoing persistence of myriad suffragists (and their chroniclers) to secure full citizenship rights and autonomy for women. Just as the global pandemic of 1918 hampered congressional passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, the current COVID-19 pandemic reveals how tenuous voting rights remain and how easily politicians can disenfranchise citizens. The cancellation and postponement of many of the 2020 centennial celebrations are certainly disappointing, but the delays demand that we keep the conversation about voting rights at the forefront of our scholarship and our public work. Overall, the suffrage centennial offers a necessary reminder of how much work remains to be done. Moving forward, we must continue to engage the legacy of the generations of women who fought for the vote and full citizenship by recommitting our scholarship and our activism to the goal of universal voting rights and unrestricted access to the polls.