| The American Woman Suffrage Association and the National Woman Suffrage Association actively pursued women's enfranchisement from their formation in 1869 until their merger in 1890. This dissertation compares the two associations by viewing suffrage leaders' responses to local conditions, state suffrage campaigns, and national developments in the 1870s and 1880s. Historians have tended to emphasize differences between the American Association, led by Massachusetts suffragists Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell, and the National Association, headed by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton of New York. American leaders did prefer to focus on the state level to win women's enfranchisement while National leaders prioritized national work, but American and National leaders' responses to national, and especially local, developments demonstrate a nuanced relationship between the two organizations. Although not always the same, leaders' responses to national and local developments demonstrate some important similarities among leaders and between the two associations.;At the local and state levels, school suffrage campaigns, often overlooked by historians, had an impact on American and National leaders' decisions. Winning school suffrage, which would allow women to elect members of school boards and vote on school-related issues, was not a goal American and National leaders pursued. School suffrage campaigns in Massachusetts and New York, however, had the power to both distract American and National leaders from other suffrage activity and influence subsequent suffrage strategies. Outside of the Northeast, Nebraska suffragists' 1882 state referendum campaign for full enfranchisement also created a diversion for American and National leaders. At the state and national levels, prohibition and partisan politics offered suffrage leaders opportunities and challenges. American and National leaders sought strategies that aligned their suffrage and partisan identities, but the Republican party's retreat from woman suffrage, the Democratic party's favorable treatment of suffragists, combined with the openness of the Prohibition party and Greenback party to woman suffrage, complicated these strategies. Ultimately, the political decisions of American and National leaders caused divisions within and between the two Associations. |
