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History 99 
Fall 1998
Ellen DuBois
Mon 2 - 4:30
 

VOTES FOR WOMEN:  HISTORY OF A FEMINIST MOVEMENT

     The subject of woman suffrage has drawn alot of attention lately -- because of historical anniversaries, because of revived
attention to women in politics.  I trust you will find its history inherently interesting:  through it we can trace the historical
activities of women, the complexities and conflicts among women, and the impact of changing historical forces on women's activism.

     However, because this course is an introduction to historical practice, we will be looking beyond (or within) the particular
story of woman suffrage to consider the basic elements of thinking and learning historically, that can be applied to any subject.

     1)  We will learn how to read the work of historians to learn how to understand how they interpret the past.  Each time we read
a book or set of essays by an historian, our first task will be understand what the analytic framework, the interpretation that the
author is generating, to make sense of the historical information s/he has.  All historians, even those who just seem to be "telling
a story," develop and employ an analytic framework, and we will learn to clarify what that is.

     2)  At the same time, we will be learning to distinguish between the raw material of history and the way that historians
shape and give meaning to their data.  For this reason, each week we will read both secondary (interpretive) historical writing and
primary (raw material) sources, examine how the interpretations grow out of the data, and consider some of the different directions
that we, as budding historians, might take the same primary sources.

     3)  Finally, we will try and make historiographic sense of our readings.   What this means is that we will try and understand each
of our historians -- and their relations to each other -- in historical context.   In this way, we will trace the evolution of
historical interpretation about woman suffrage, starting with Eleanor Flexner's Century of Struggle, written in 1957, and ending
with Rosalyn Terborg-Penn's African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, published just this year.

Books to be purchased at Sisterhood Bookstore, Westwood and Rochester:

Course requirements: October 5:  Introduction

October 12:  Flexner, Part I; DuBois chapter 12; documents:

October 19:  Flexner, Part II:  documents: October 26:  Flexner, Part III:   documents: November 2:  Kraditor, chapters 3, 6-7, 9; documents: November 9:  DuBois, chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;   documents: November 15:  Interpreting the Reconstruction Amendments:  DuBois 6, 7,; Terborg-Penn, 1, 2;  documents: November 23:  Terborg-Penn, chapters 3-8;  documents: November 30:  Deradicalizing Suffrage:  Kraditor 4, 5; DuBois 8, 9;  documents: December 8:   Politicizing Votes for Women:  Kraditor 8, DuBois, 10, Links:
Class Bulletin Board
(The bulletin board is password protected; please see your instructore for more information.)
ATTENTION:  NEW FINAL ASSIGNMENT, TO REPLACE THIRD PAPER
 

1)  Trace the "historiography" of woman suffrage, that are the different phases of historical interpretation:  what are the basic assumptions, questions and answers, who is doing the asking, what isn't being considered, etc.  In order to use primary sources for this question, consider the History of Woman Suffrage as the first historical interpretation of the history of woman suffrage.  And, in order to avoid the "enormous condescension of the living to the dead," remember that there will be historians that come after us, that ask questions we can't conceive, so don't imagine that the current state of historical analysis is the end of the line.

2)  We know that, by the end of the long struggle for woman suffrage, lots of different sorts of women understood and shared a conviction in the necessity of political rights for women.  Write an essay examining and comparing some of the differences among women within this larger pro-suffrage consensus.  You needn't cover every single type of woman, but make sure that the ones you do choose to discuss are diverse with respect to class, race and historical period.

3)  Running as it does across seventy five years (minimally) of American history, the woman suffrage movement has been transformed by --and had an impact on -- major changes in American history. Outline a history of the woman suffrage movement that emphasizes these shifting, large historical contexts:  in particular, antebellum abolition and reform; Reconstruction; turn of the
century industrialization, immigration and class relations; and the Progressive period.