Overview of suffrage qualifications in the United States from the colonial period to the eve of the Civil War. The chapter details the progression from property and other requirements for suffrage to universal white male suffrage in the Jacksonian period. It covers the first disfranchisement as African Americans lost voting rights in the antebellum period and the beginning of the women’s rights movement and its demand for suffrage.

African Americans and their white allies insisted that enfranchisement was necessary to reward black men for their loyalty and military service. The vote would allow the freedmen to protect themselves and the Union from white Southerners. Despite arguments that the formerly enslaved were unqualified to vote, that only states could determine who voted, and that race war would ensue, black suffrage gained increasing support. Northerners, shocked at the swift return of former Confederates to power in Presidential Reconstruction and the anti-black riots in Memphis and New Orleans, blamed President Andrew Johnson’s Reconstruction policy and supported Congressional Republicans in the 1866 mid-term elections, setting the stage for Congressional Reconstruction.

This chapter is an overview of the suffrage issues raised by the Civil War. The Confederacy experienced significant anti-democratic impulses. Both North and South expanded absentee voting for soldiers. Border South states still in the Union enacted disfranchisement measures to exclude Confederate sympathizers from the ballot. Black men began to demand the vote as a reward for their service in the Union army. Women suspended their campaign for the vote, believing that working for black men’s rights would advance their own rights.

The woman suffrage movement sought to capture Congressional Reconstruction for its own agenda. Having unsuccessfully opposed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments for creating what Elizabeth Cady Stanton called an “aristocracy of sex,” the woman suffragists now declared that women as well as black men were enfranchised under the Reconstruction amendments. This New Departure did not survive Supreme Court scrutiny. In fact, women who voted were tried under the Enforcement Acts passed to protect black men’s suffrage rights. As the federal government proved unable to protect black male suffrage, woman suffragists argued that Congressional Reconstruction had failed because it had been incomplete. Because Congressional Reconstruction had not enfranchised women, it had betrayed the natural rights tradition on which suffrage rights were based. The failure to include women had doomed universal manhood suffrage.

The woman’s movement used northern women’s loyalty and war service to claim the suffrage. However, their former allies in the abolition movement proclaimed the post-Civil War period “The Negro’s Hour” and feared that woman suffrage would prove an impediment to black male suffrage. In a major setback for women, the Fourteenth Amendment included the word “male.” The equal rights movement splintered in the post-war period, as became apparent in an 1867 campaign in Kansas over black and woman suffrage. White suffragists became increasingly racist and elitist in their rhetoric, alienating many black women. Democrats promoted woman suffrage to show the absurdity of black male suffrage. The woman’s movement proved unable to exploit the Civil War, as black men were doing, to advance their cause.

Congressional Reconstruction enfranchised black men in the former Confederate states. The Fifteenth Amendment made that enfranchisement national, but stopped short of granting suffrage as a positive right. While black men’s enfranchisement had been premised on their loyalty, military service, and ability to use the vote to protect themselves and the Union, anti-black violence made it increasingly impossible to exercise their political rights. The memory of black men’s military service waned and increasingly the federal government was expected to protect black voters. Voting proved not to be self-enforcing, but to need the power of the federal government to protect voters. With diminishing northern support and increasing desire for reconciliation, federal government interference became politically untenable. African Americans and Republicans proved unable to preserve black suffrage.

Having regained political power, white southern Democrats moved to replace their Reconstruction-era state constitutions although they did not yet dare to repeal black suffrage. Republican politicians protested the disfranchisement of black southern Republicans, but they were unable to revive enforcement. The woman’s movement lobbied unsuccessfully for a woman suffrage constitutional amendment and campaigned – with only limited success – for changes to state laws and constitutions. In 1890, Mississippi wrote a new state constitution that imposed literacy and poll taxes to explicitly disfranchise blacks. At the same time, Republicans failed to pass a new Enforcement Bill, effectively ending federal attempts to protect black suffrage. The woman’s movement recovered from its Reconstruction-era division to form a unified movement, but woman suffrage was still a generation in the future. In 1890, with black men and all women largely disfranchised, only former Confederates could claim the suffrage as a right.

Chapter 4 is the first of the four analytical chapters anchored in the qualitative interviews, and focuses on the topic of women’s representation in the MENA at the national level. The chapter presents an overview of women in parliament from independence to the present day, covering the right to vote and stand for office as well as the number of female parliamentarians per country following the most recent elections. The analysis then moves onto barriers to women’s representation, beginning with the pre-nomination stage and the role of factors such as patriarchy and violence against women. The subsequent sections detail different paths to parliament in the pre- and post-Uprisings eras. Among the topics covered are internal party culture and electoral rules, as well as the background characteristics of the women who make it in politics. The final part of chapter 4 is dedicated to the factors behind success at the campaign stage and once in office with particular reference to the importance of extra-party networks, access to finances and qualifications, as well as the issues of discrimination and self-discrimination at the time of portfolio allocation.

Martina Barros Borgoño (1850–1944) was a pioneering Chilean who advanced women’s rights in significant ways, not least in terms of advocating for suffrage, but also in terms of a critical approach to nineteenth-century thinking on gender distinctions. Born in a socially distinguished milieu, Martina Barros encountered John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869) at a young age and embarked on the translation and commentary of the source by 1872. Barros’ prologue celebrated some aspects of Mill’s work, but bemoaned others. She acknowledged the role of her husband, the liberal physician Augusto Orrego Luco, in the writing of the prologue, but affirmed that the ideas were her own in her autobiography. Both had previously read Mill’s On Liberty (1859), and shared his condemnation of the tyranny of customs, challenging gender traditions and participating actively in publications and intellectual circles. Her views, however, were far from radical. As she stated in her autobiography, “my aim in promoting the independence and culture of women was not to make them rivals of men, but rather their dignified companions.”

The response describes initiatives at the University of Cambridge Primary School (UCPS) and Laborschule Bielefeld in Germany that promote democracy education and provide children with the tools and opportunities to engage meaningfully in democratic processes. At UCPS, a Children’s Congress allows students to participate in school decision-making processes, a collaboration with academic researchers sought to understand how children think and feel about their disenfranchisement and a democracy curriculum teaches children key concepts and empowers them to form their own opinions and articulate them effectively. Laborschule Bielefeld focuses on peaceful conflict resolution as a foundation for democratic education. It uses the concept of ‘nonviolent communication’ to teach children how to express their feelings and needs constructively.

This manifesto advocates for granting voting rights to children, emphasising that voting is a right of citizenship, not a privilege of competence, and should be extended to all, regardless of age. It asserts that excluding children from the democratic process is unjust and impractical. It challenges common arguments against child enfranchisement, arguing that concerns about children’s competence, potential policy chaos and the sequencing of rights are flawed. It underscores the principle of political equality, highlighting that children, like adults, possess inherent moral value and unique perspectives deserving of respect and representation. Furthermore, it contends that enfranchising children would offer them much-needed political protection, ensuring their needs and concerns are considered in policy decisions.

This chapter considers the deployment of radical Orientalism as a mode of political critique in the popular fiction of the bestselling Chartist leader and author George W. M. Reynolds. It focuses on the structural congruences between the depictions of aristocratic debauchery in his two Mysteries series (1844–8; 1848–56) and the figuration of Old Corruption as in league with the Jewish sweater in ‘The Seamstress’ in Reynolds’s Miscellany (1850). Examination of this alignment permits a discussion of the mutable hierarchies within the category of the People at mid-nineteenth century, focused specifically on those groups excluded from full political rights: the working-class man, women, and Jews. It considers how Reynolds’s use of radical literary-political tropes positions Jews as Occidental in matters of parliamentary democracy, but designates them Oriental when the sweating system that they are understood to represent is figured as an atavistic, foreign, and unchristian form of economics.

Drawing together emerging domestic and regional reform struggles with wider geopolitical developments, this chapter explores a new way to think about the unfolding of rights history. Starting in the later nineteenth century, the forces encouraging growing intergovernmental contact and cooperation through multilateral agreements and codified law – technological and industrial changes, including the spread of ever more deadly weapons, the easing of transport and communications, expanding educational opportunities, and a growing reading public – drew likeminded female and male reformers together in spaces beyond borders through new patterns of transnational mobilizations and formal international organizations. Many local advocates pushing against the limitations of the natural rights traditions of liberal citizenship increasingly drew strength in numbers by transcending existing political arrangements and combining national, regional, and international advocacy.

This chapter has several major themes. It begins by documenting how historians are rethinking the origins of the United States, emphasizing its contingent nature as a union of sovereign states rather than a nation, and the roots of that novel confederation in the complexities of the British imperial system. In that context, it then traces the fluidity and contingency of rights available to the citizens of the United States after the Revolution. Finally, it examines how, following the victory of the Jeffersonian coalition in 1800, those rights became structured and limited along racial lines, creating a “patchwork nation” of distinct racial orders.

This chapter reflects on Sean O’Casey’s work from a postcolonial critical perspective. The focus is firstly upon his early Abbey plays, especially The Plough and the Stars, which are shown to be significant for postcolonial criticism because of their content, the contexts of their initial Abbey productions, and the ways that key aspects of their critical history play outsized roles in framing understandings of the postcolonial critical endeavour. The chapter shows how O’Casey responded to the political complexities of Ireland’s revolutionary era of the 1910s and 1920s. The chapter then examines O’Casey’s later plays, showing how his responses to the revolutionary era evolved as he dealt directly with postcolonial Ireland and the fascism of the 1930s–1960s.

Chapter 5 studies memory work in the international movement for women’s suffrage at the turn of the century. The 1880s saw the rise of official international women’s rights advocacy organisations, which became increasingly focused on the campaign for women’s suffrage. The chapter explores how, in the quest to legitimate their movement, feminist internationalists produced a body of comparative histories which narrated the rise of the feminist movement as a transnational phenomenon. Movement leaders formulated a powerful concept of international ‘sisterhood’ which implicitly relied on a narrow conception of the nature of the struggle for women’s rights and its advocates. Focusing on retellings of the ‘antislavery origin myth’ of organised feminism, this chapter shows how the memory work performed in these ‘movement histories’ contributed to this process and gives a sense of the life of these histories, tracing their reception in different popular media of the time, including national exhibitions.

This chapter explores the oscillations of political power and the “revolutions” – both violent and subtle – that appeared on the US stage throughout the nineteenth century. While many dramatists sought to avoid political debate, all too aware of the potential consequences (from boycotts to riots), timely issues of the day, including the abolition of slavery, the eradication of Indigenous populations, temperance, and women’s suffrage, inevitably made their way onto the stage. Some playwrights struck out boldly, naming issues of substance misuse and miscegenation in dramas such as The Drunkard or The Octoroon. Others infused politics into their depictions of everyday life, including Ossawattomie Brown (which retells John Brown’s history as a romantic family plot) and the labor melodrama Bertha, the Sewing Machine Girl. These homely narratives reminded viewers of how inescapable these issues had become. But whether starkly challenging or subtly questioning, nineteenth-century US theater never escaped the pressing political issues of the day.