Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited

Catherine Clinton had the original idea for this book. Over one of the many lunches we have enjoyed through the years, she persuaded me that a book of essays incorporating new scholarship on the American suffrage movement would prove useful for students and their professors. And so, three years later, Votes For Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited has moved from conversational abstraction to material reality. It becomes the third volume in Clinton's series Viewpoints on American Culture, and is intended to provide a practical, handy guide to an important subject. Throughout, Catherine Clinton has herself been the best of guides, casting an experienced eye perceptively and knowledgeably over all the essays that are included. I believe that Votes for Women adds to Clinton's many contributions to her larger endeavor of increasing and thickening our understanding of women's history, even as we place it within the widening boundaries of the studied American past. This volume was also immensely improved by Susan Ferber, our diligent and intelligent editor at Oxford University Press, who corrected mistakes of interpretation, fact, and writing.

I am also appreciative of the dedicated efforts of the thirteen contributors who took seriously the mandate to make their essays, in the cliché of our times, “accessible” to different audiences. Their approach to suffrage has been fresh and innovative. They have also made the story of American suffrage dramatic and relevant, as they have moved beyond the traditional retelling of this story to place women's struggle to get the vote where it belongs—in the larger narrative of American democracy and government. From my perspective working on this book has been a collegial, cooperative effort, and I am honored to have worked with all of them.

I am also grateful to several research assistants at Goucher College, especially Paige Young and Candice Hill, who were supported by the Clapp Fund, and Jamie Winter, for support in getting the final manuscript to