Ready to work: Women in Vermont and Michigan from suffrage to Republican Party politics

Women comprise one-half the population but they do not hold fifty percent of the elected offices in America, nor has a woman ever held the office of president or vice-president. Although American women have had the vote since 1920 and now vote in equal or greater numbers than men, they still fall behind not only in office holding, but also in wielding political power. This dissertation seeks to identify the reasons for this inequality through a comparative analysis of women's political participation in Republican Party politics in Vermont and Michigan, from the era of the suffrage struggle to the 1980s. It demonstrates that women in each state carved out their own niche in local, state and national politics by working in suffrage organizations, women's voluntary organizations, and finally Republican Party politics. But it also demonstrates that gendered notions of citizenship contributed to shaping women's political possibilities over the course of the twentieth century in ways that took precedence over demographic and structural similarities or differences between women in these two states.;The findings from this dissertation are that this disparity is rooted in the enlightenment foundations of American democracy. A political system that produced gendered political assumptions of our democratic government that in turn produced a system of structural and ideological impediments to women's equal political participation. Thus, a democratic political system that purportedly provides equal access to participation as pluralist theory or mass political theory would argue, is in fact one that has systematically and deliberately denied that equal access to women.