American women won the constitutional right to vote in 1920, and for years afterward chroniclers portrayed the victory as something of a dud, with women’s collective civic energies reportedly dissipating. Holly McCammon’s splendid new book joins a growing body of work giving lie to that narrative. In fact, as she demonstrates, post-suffrage women launched entirely new movements across the states to secure another right and privilege of citizenship—jury service. In a work with great relevance to modern reform efforts, McCammon asks why some state jury-service movements succeeded relatively swiftly while others floundered.

To tell the story, long overlooked by scholars, McCammon scoured women’s organization archives and public records in 15 culturally diverse states and assembled case studies of the movements and how they evolved over time. In the year in which suffrage was enacted, three-quarters of states barred women’s jury service or effectively precluded it, and so women’s advocates had a lot of work to do. The author analyzes the key players, their tactics, and their legislative journeys. Using the case studies and a method known as qualitative comparative analysis, she systematically isolates combinations of elements that seemed to distinguish the relatively “swift” states (those that secured jury-service law in faster than average time) from the “slow” states. She also analyzes the introduction of those same elements to see how it might explain the eventual success of slow-state movements.

The key difference between the leaders and laggards, according to McCammon, is strategic adaptation. Movements that obtained jury laws relatively quickly were better than their sister organizations in slow states at reading signals in the political environment, assessing movement tactics in light of those signals, and adjusting the tactics accordingly. If hostile lawmakers asserted that women did not want to serve on juries, adaptive movements conducted surveys and letter-writing campaigns to prove the men wrong. If rank-and-file women seemed indifferent, leaders distributed flyers and dispatched speakers to explain the stakes involved. If certain women were not swayed by appeals to equal citizenship rights, advocates switched gears and emphasized the distinctive womanly perspective that mothers and wives could bring to legal disputes, especially those involving children.

The swift-state movements were also more persistent. If they failed to get a jury bill introduced, they tried again the next year. If they lost a legislative vote or popular referendum, they resisted the urge to put jury service on the back burner to focus on more feasible priorities. The persistence enabled perpetual learning. In lay terms, strategic adaptation amounts to a philosophy of “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again—but this time try something different.” Advocates in the laggard states either gave up or tried the same thing over and over again.

Being able to adapt strategically made a signficant difference in the pace of women’s inclusion: Wisconsin, California, and Vermont were able to secure jury laws in less than a decade, whereas movements in Colorado, Georgia, and Texas took more than three decades. (The average time was about 22 years, proving that even relatively swift change can be pretty slow.)

So what made a movement strategically adaptive? McCammon identifies a number of characteristics that combined in different bundles in different states. Beyond persistence, these strategic movements often encountered internal tensions. Although disagreements could threaten movement coherence, the author finds that they proved a net benefit by forcing leaders to look critically at existing strategies in order to identify weaknesses.

Another common factor was diversity of membership in the movement. To be sure, jury movements were largely led by relatively privileged (mostly white) homemakers and professional women belonging to the League of Women Voters, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, the Business and Professional Women’s Clubs, and state associations of female lawyers. But these groups had different comparative advantages. When they were united in coalitions, and when one or two common members served as “bridges” among the different groups, the movement as a whole benefited. Linking to insiders, namely female lawmakers, served as a critical advantage in several states.

The U.S. Women’s Jury Movement and Strategic Adaptations makes important contributions to a variety of literatures. To women’s history, the book provides yet more evidence that the decades after suffrage were busy and politically consequential. States served as active arenas for female organizing, and the book instructs historians and policy-change scholars to place more attention on the dynamics there. It also adds to an underdeveloped body of work on the ways in which female leaders have nimbly activated and switched between different understandings of women’s identity—different from or the same as men—to appeal to different audiences. McCammon shows that such framing exercises were important manifestations of strategic adaptation.

To social movement studies, the book contributes an understanding of not just why movements arise but also why they last, why they succeed, and why they flounder. In some respects, the most interesting findings involved the laggard states; McCammon is able to document how uninspired leadership and missed cues slowed women’s quest for full citizenship. To anyone who has ever worked for social change, the importance of human agency would seem to be obvious, but these variables are hard to capture in large-n data sets. Rich case studies, such as those the author has assembled, enable us to uncover the role of leadership and strategy in movement adaptability and success.

The women’s jury movements hit their heyday in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. When Mississippi became the last state to allow women to serve, in 1968, the movements all but ended. Seven years later, the Supreme Court struck the final blow to unequal inclusion by ruling unconstitutional a Louisiana provision that had required women (but not men) to volunteer for service. All these years later, however, McCammon’s analysis and findings are exceedingly timely, both in highlighting enduring lessons about political resiliency and in calling our attention to what has changed across America’s civic landscape.

In terms of resiliency, the book is narrowly about how movements succeed, but it is really about how groups of people, even individual activists, rebound from defeat and overcome apathy. Up against a system rigged to defeat bold reformers, the women’s jury movement offers generalizable lessons and perhaps inspiration to advocates working on tough issues today, from gun violence to climate change. Less obviously, the book offers lessons in how to build on success—in this case, the suffrage amendment—rather than yielding to postvictory let down.

McCammon also calls our attention to changed circumstances. Most of the nation-spanning, internally democratic, mass-membership associations that won jury rights for women have long since faded from view. In their place, as Theda Skocpol and others have shown, sit hierarchical, professionalized, often memberless interest groups headquartered in Washington. A great deal of collective civic energy today is also deployed through social media sites that require little time or commitment of the typical “member.”

How well might strategic adaptation—picking up cues, debating them, adjusting tactics accordingly—work in this reordered civic world? Perhaps strategic adaptation will flourish, as top-down organizations deploy sophisticated communications technologies to efficiently frame and disseminate mobilizing messages from movement leaders to foot soldiers. In a world of 24/7 political media, nonstop surveys and focus groups, and microdata taking the pulse of swing constituencies, advocates cannot help but come face to face with relevant political cues, as strategic adaptation requires.

On the other hand, this information-rich but hollowed-out civic world could work against strategic adaptation. Bombarded with messages, advocates might be forgiven for tuning into information sources that provide reassurance, thereby missing obvious cues. With the decline of mass-membership associations, opportunities have declined for face-to-face meetings featuring constructive tension. Likewise, bridging leaders—those who occupy a trusted place in more than one organization—are few and far between. Movements today look different from those at midcentury. The importance of strategic adaptation may still hold, but it may be more challenging in practice.

In the end, the book asks us to think about the meaning of participatory citizenship. We have become accustomed to viewing participation as motivated by self-interest: Lawmakers prioritize reelection over good policy; interest groups seek state-sponsored benefits for narrow constituencies; voters minimize their contributions to public goods. Women in the post-suffrage era thought about citizenship differently. They asked the state to burden them with additional responsibilities that carried significant opportunity costs. To serve on juries, mothers had to arrange accommodations for young children; rural women had to drive many miles and perhaps stay overnight; and female professionals had to beg off from work in an era when women had few job protections. Yes, jury service conferred the status of full civic inclusion, but such intangible benefits seemed a lesser motive in those movements. In an era of political disillusionment, the participatory enthusiasm of these women is worthy of renewed attention.