WHY THE VOTE? WOMAN SUFFRAGE AND THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRATIC DEVELOPMENT IN THE UNITED STATES, 1820-1893 (COLORADO, ANTISLAVERY, RECONSTRUCTION, POPULISM, RIGHTS)

This study explains why organized, middle class, white women made woman suffrage their primary objective in the nineteenth century. The focus on this objective followed the emergence of the woman's rights movement from the antislavery movement; the exclusion of women from the rights guaranteed to black men by the Fourteenth Amendment precipitated the struggle for suffrage. The dynamics of the early state constitutional campaigns are examined in a case study of the Colorado woman suffrage campaigns of 1877 and 1893.;This study contributes to studies of both American political development and interest group politics in the United States. In reference to American political development, it shows the insulation of the nineteenth century federal government from popular reforms, the changes that made woman suffrage a popular goal, and the access that woman suffrage reformers used and created to the government. Pluralist studies introduced the important roles that groups play in the American political system, but they have not provided an adequate explanation of women's demands for rights, especially the suffrage. This study helps to fill that gap.;Primary historical resources have been used extensively in this study. These include the minutes of woman's rights and woman suffrage conventions as well as newspapers such as The Woman's Journal and correspondence.;The study argues that the woman's rights and woman suffrage movements made the American political system more democratic, and that the transformation of women from a politically excluded group to an included group helped to liberate women. The roles that men played in these movements as supporters, advisers, and opponents to the women leaders were crucial in this transformation; the interactions between men and women during the first American feminist movements are basic to the study.