Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited

women's history out of the shadows, Anne Firor Scott contemplates the difference the vote has made. She provides a useful overview of suffrage as a historical subject, as a practical empowerment, and as an effective instrument of policymaking.

Today some of the predictions of women who never had the right to vote have been enacted by those who do. More women than men go to the polls, and women reveal statistically significant voting patterns from men in their partisan choices and in their attention to various issues. The meaning of suffrage to our national history will forever be unfinished from the perspective of historians who continue to find new stories. The women of the suffrage movement knew they were making history and so kept their records carefully. On another level, the unflinching assertion of previous generations of American women that the vote is the fundamental transaction within a democratic society remains a constant political reenactment for our present and future.

-20-