Before Equal Suffrage: Women in Partisan Politics from Colonial Times to 1920

This book took a long time from start to finish. The idea for it came to me during an NEH summer seminar on teaching women's history at Princeton University in 1980. It became a serious project over the next decade while I was doing research for another book, Campaigning in America ( Greenwood Press, 1989), and noticed in the source material that women played a greater part in partisan politics than scholars have previously believed. Several persons have read parts or all of the manuscript and offered valuable criticism, including Lori Ginzberg of Pennsylvania State University, and Paula Baker of the University of Pittsburgh. I would also like to acknowledge the efforts of the staff at Greenwood Publishing Group, especially Cynthia Harris, Reference Editor, Desirée Bermani, Production Editor, and Betty Pessagno, Copyeditor, in enhancing the overall quality of the work. My wife, Roxane Head Dinkin, took time from her busy schedule to help improve the style of the final draft. Lastly, I must mention my daughter, Leslie Dinkin, who, during breaks from her studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, put the entire manuscript on the word processor and subsequently inserted hundreds of additions and corrections at the request of her less than computer-literate father.

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