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The article discusses several essays that appeared in the journal concerning the comparative history of political activism, engagement, and mobilization in Europe and the U.S. It discusses representative government in Europe, the concept of communalism and its relationship to political participation and the goals of national governments, and partisan political communication. It also discusses universal suffrage in post-revolutionary France, local activism in the U.S. during the late 20th century, and partisanship.

This article focuses on the Romanian women's movement in Hungary before World War I and on its veiled suffrage politics. The first part of the article presents an overview of the organizational history of the Romanian women's movement from 1850 to 1914. The establishment of the Union of the Romanian Women in Hungary in 1913 constitutes a key event in this account. The second part of the article addresses the politics behind the Union and explores the converging suffrage politics of two more historical actors: the internationalization strategies of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) and the suffrage politics of the Romanian National Party in Hungary. The article concludes that the Union's actions resembled those of similar organizations in Austria-Hungary that sought to join the IWSA, indicating that the Union may have been preparing to adopt a pro-suffrage position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the extension of political 'liberty' and franchise - as well as the eventual extension of citizenship rights - to Indians during the decades of France's Third Republic (1870s-80s) in French colonial India. Not only does this example stand in stark contrast to the civil position of Indians in British India at the time, but it was also something of a unique situation in the French colonial world. How did the French attempt to apply a colonial policy of liberalism to Indian communities in Pondicherry, India, whose social world was constructed upon caste-based rituals and rules? I argue that liberal policies that could violate caste rules concerning purity and lead to the loss of communal rights cannot be assessed without understanding how they were received and instrumentalized by the Indian population. Overall, the difficulty of transplanting liberalism in Pondicherry was not due just to the opposition of colonial society, but also due to the resistance of local Indians. Rejections of a more emancipatory agenda meant that the republican 'civility' of liberty, equality and fraternity was compromised, and this illustrates one of the fundamental tensions in imperial/liberal discourse at the time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Participation in electoral politics is not a fully voluntary act. Suffrage rules regulate who can participate, whereas institutional arrangements affect incentives to vote by shaping the consequences of the voting act. The secular increase of electoral participation in the world during the past two centuries was largely due to extensions of suffrage rather than to increased turnout of those eligible. The relation between voting and electing, as manifested in institutional arrangements, had a strong effect on individual decisions to vote. In the end, the voice of the people is inescapably structured by the ideas and the institutional frameworks that relate voting to electing. Keywords: electoral participation; suffrage: turnout: electoral ideology; electoral institutions: world 1788- 2000

This essay analyzes the discourses on woman suffrage articulated at the annual meetings of the National Council of Women of Canada from 1894 to 1918. The essay argues that the women active in the National Council articulated a vision of transcendent citizenship for Canadian women. This 'transcendent' citizenship was exercised through personal influence and moral suasion, through the election of men with strong moral character, and through raising public-spirited sons. This understanding of women's citizenship valorized women's personal, moral influence over and above their political equality. Literally and figuratively concerned with enfranchising White women, the woman suffrage debate in the National Council was influenced by a nation-building project that sought to establish Canada as a White settler nation. While the woman suffrage movement was important for extending the political rights of White women, it was also authorized through race-based arguments that linked White women's enfranchisement to the need to protect the nation from 'racial degeneration.' Cet article analyse les discussions sur le suffrage feminin qui se sont deroulees lors des rencontres annuelles du Conseil national des femmes du Canada de 1894 a 1918. L'article avance que les femmes qui jouaient un role actif au sein du Conseil national refletaient une vision de citoyennete transcendante pour les femmes canadiennes. Cette citoyennete << transcendante >> etait exprimee par l'influence personnelle et la persuasion, l'election d'hommes ayant une forte moralite et l'elevage de fils imbus d'esprit civique. Cette comprehension de la citoyennete des femmes a donne bien plus de valeur a leur influence morale personnelle que leur equite politique. Les discussions sur le suffrage feminin du Conseil national visaient d'un point de vue pratique et figuratif a emanciper les femmes blanches et ont ete influencees par un projet visant a faire du Canada une nation de colons blancs. Bien que le mouvement du suffrage feminin fut important pour l'elargissement des droits politiques des femmes blanches, il a egalement ete habilite par les arguments raciaux qui liaient l'emancipation des femmes blanches avec le besoin de proteger la nation contre la << degeneration raciale >>.

This article establishes the significance of elections held in the annexed departments of the Napoleonic Empire from 1802 to 1813. It thus represents an original, and perhaps surprising, contribution to recent debate on the nature of Napoleonic imperialism, in which attention has shifted from core to periphery, and away from purely military matters. The electoral process under this authoritarian regime has been alternately neglected or derided, especially where the newly created departments of the Low Countries and parts of Germany and Italy are concerned. However, extensive archival research demonstrates that it was taken extremely seriously by both regime and voters, especially outside metropolitan France. These ‘First European Elections', as they may be dubbed, took place in regular fashion right across the Empire and are studied here on a transnational basis, which also involves the metropolitan departments. Though open to all adult males at the primary level, they were not exercises in democracy, but they did create some rare political space which local people were not slow to exploit for their own purposes. Above all, they served as a means of integrating ‘new Frenchmen’, particularly members of indigenous elites, into the Napoleonic system. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Shame has been heavily relied on as a political tool in the modern world and yet it is still a much under-historicised emotion. Using the examples of early twentieth-century Britain and Ireland, I examine how women opposed to the campaign for female suffrage used shame instrumentally in their writing. Exploring the versatility of this political device, I find that shame was used with the oppositional intentions of binding and excluding. Whereas British conservatives used it to protect an already well-established imagined community of good imperial women, Irish radicals drew on it to invite women to take part in the construction of a new nationalist sisterhood. This paper further problematizes claims that as an emotion that plays on a sense of the communal, shame has had no place in a highly individualistic modern world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the political environment in Argentina during the early 20th century. The author comments on the rise in nationalist ideologies and policies and describes the political changes, particularly regarding elections. She also considers the question of citizen participation in politics, including the notion of universal suffrage. Information is obtained from the archives of the newspaper "La Nación." The role of Argentine writer Ricardo Rojas in promoting nationalism and political participation is also explored.

Advocates for woman's suffrage faced significant rhetorical challenges due to gender norms of the 'Cult of True Womanhood' (Welter, 1966). This study examines the portrayals of womanhood in thirty-one suffrage songs to understand how the music functioned as a rhetorical device to shape the meaning of member's 'womanhood' in relation to the Cult. This analysis identifies three discursive representations of 'womanhood' in suffrage music and concludes that suffrage songs generally reified the tenets of the Cult. Finally, this study suggests that maintaining musically relevant styles in protest songs may benefit social movements as a 'buffer' to unify, legitimize and energize advocates and create interest among opposition. However, musical styles may also inhibit social movements from conveying complex ideologies or forming the desired collective identity for advocates of social change. Keywords: Discursive identity formation; Feminist advocacy; Protest music; Social movement theory; Woman suffrage, Women's rights agitation began humbly with a convention held in a small church in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. The suffrage movement emerged as an extension of other reform [...]

Although women played no direct role in California law and politics until 1870, both their interest in law reform and their later entry into the political arena can be traced [...]

Clara Bewick Colby established the Woman's Tribune in Beatrice, Nebraska, in 1883. The suffragist newspaper survived twenty-six years and would later include Washington, D. C., and Portland, Oregon, as places of publication. This study is an analysis of the content of the newspaper in the years when it was published in Nebraska (1883-89), during which time the paper provided rural, isolated women with information that transcended the right to vote. The study concludes that the Woman's Tribune consistently was framed within an identifiable feminist ideology, in which Colby held to the notion that suffrage and equality for women were moral rights in a democratic society.

This article explores the "tactical polyvalency" of scientific discourse for early twentieth-century feminism by examining the writings of Johanna Elberskirchen (1864-1943), an independent and prolific agitator on behalf of women's and homosexual emancipation in Wilhelmine Germany. Based on an analysis of four texts written by Elberskirchen, I argue that science offered Elberskirchen and feminists like her an opportunity to assert truthful "facts" about women in an authoritative, objective voice, which they claimed was not at odds with a feminist standpoint. Drawing upon science helped feminists like Elberskirchen to move discursively from a moral critique to an objective one. In advancing such an argument, I contribute to an emerging historiography that analyzes first wave feminists' engagement with science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1868, Lydia Becker (1827-1890), the renowned Manchester suffragist, announced in a talk before the British Association for the Advancement of Science that the mind had no sex. A year later, she presented original botanical research at the BAAS, contending that a parasitic fungus forced normally single-sex female flowers of Lychnis diurna to develop stamens and become hermaphroditic. This essay uncovers the complex relationship between Lydia Becker's botanical research and her stance on women's rights by investigating how her interest in evolutionary theory, as well as her correspondence with Charles Darwin, critically informed her reform agendas by providing her with a new vocabulary for advocating for equality. One of the facts that Becker took away from her work on Lychnis was that even supposedly fixed, dichotomous categories such as biological sex became unfocused under the evolutionary lens. The details of evolutionary theory, from specific arguments on structural adaptations to more encompassing theories on heredity (i.e., pangenesis), informed Becker's understanding of human physiology. At the same time, Becker's belief in the fundamental equality of the sexes enabled her to perceive the distinction between inherent, biological differences and culturally contingent ones. She applied biological principles to social constructs as she asked: Do analogous evolutionary forces act on humans? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The integration of women and African Americans into the politically active southern electorate in the 1960s and the 1970s was a turning point in the rise of the "New South" and essential to the establishment of a democratic political process in the region. Whereas there are numerous studies of the reenfranchisement of African Americans in the South in the literature, temporal changes in the gender gap in southern political participation have received less attention. Gender inequality in voting has historically been greatest in the South and was more resistant to change over time. This study is the first to examine the intersection of gender and racial inequality in political participation in the South over a period spanning several decades. Building on previous theories of political participation, including the civic voluntarism model and the strategic mobilization perspective, we develop and test a conceptual model based on the interplay between individual characteristics and the broader institutional context. Using data from the American National Election Studies, we examine racial differences in the gender gap in southern political participation over time using hierarchical age-period-cohort analysis. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical implications for the study of gender and racial inequality in political participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Historia Contemporanea is the property of Historia Contemporania and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Several key historical events are viewed in light of how history would have changed had the key historical figures made different decisions or been subject to different circumstances. Topics include the speech Pres Richard Nixon would have given the had the first space flight to the moon failed, how the right for women to vote may have changed had a Tennessee representative not received a note from his mother, and how presidential history might have changed had Gen Ulysses S. Grant chosen to accompany Abraham Lincoln to the Ford Theater on the night Lincoln was assassinated.

The article discusses the role of plebiscite forums in the historiographical debate on the history of Italian Unification in the year 1860. Topics discussed include polemics of the 1860s on the structure of the Italian government, the politics of Italian Unification, and the protests of women excluded from voting for the government.

Copyright of Revista de Sociologia e Política is the property of Revista de Sociologia e Politica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Women were an important part of the great public meetings held in connection with the Chicago World's Fair. One of these "Congresses," as they were called, was devoted to the achievements of nineteenth century women, and brought together suffragists, club women, society ladies, and activists of all stripes from around the world. The Congress of Jurisprudence and Law Reform featured two American women lawyers holding their own on a platform with leading professors, judges and advocates. With an extraordinary speech based largely on her own experience in the courts, Clara Foltz launched the public defender movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An examination is presented of an article published in the newspaper "El Anunciador" on March 22, 1883 by Venezuelan author José Gil Fortoul titled "Sufragio Popular" (Popular vote) related to suffrage in Venezuela during the late 19th century. It explores Fortoul's ideas regarding the importance of voting as part of the Republican ideal, including the necessity of political participation. The author discusses Fortoul's support of universal suffrage as well as his influence on subsequent Constitutional amendments related to suffrage.

After independence, the new Latin American polities adopted republican systems of government. This crucial decision stressed the importance of vast projects of popular education for the shaping of the virtuous citizenry to come, a clearly different agent from the old colonial society. As a means of creating new citizens and, at the same time, guaranteeing political rights, many Latin American constitutions and electoral laws foresaw restrictions of male universal franchises on the basis of literacy. Only those citizens able to read and write would be considered full citizens with regard to electoral practices. The illiterate had the use of their political rights temporarily revoked. The article explores the origins, meanings and implementations of this association of elementary school policies and political rights by analysing constitutions and constitutional drafts from all Latin American countries until the middle of the century. Not only will the different voting restrictions and their development be analysed, but also some discursive configurations that accompanied the consolidation of this conception of modern citizenship through formal education in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Socio-Economic History / Shakai-Keizai Shigaku is the property of Socio-Economic History Society and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article examines the role of women within the political structure of Bermuda. The author discusses prominent female figures who have served as governmental officials, and provides a history of women in Bermudan politics, beginning with the suffrage movement led by Gladys Misick Morrell. It is urged that more women need to serve within the colony’s government.

The article discusses how cartoons depict the history of women's suffrage in Europe. It describes the cartoon captioned "Excelsior!" published in the magazine "Punch," on July 13, 1910. According to the author, this cartoon can be a tool in teaching students about women's suffrage. Other cartoons from the publications "The Suffragette," and "The Anti-Suffragist," are also analyzed in the article. Furthermore, the author adds that interpreting the cartoon exposes the student to symbolic references of the historical processes in Europe. In the article, the author uses the approach of Samuel Wineburg, an educational psychologist, in exploring the use of these political cartoons in the visual literacy of the students.

From the late 1860s through the mid-1870s, woman suffrage activists developed an ingenious legal argument, claiming that the U.S. Constitution already enfranchised women citizens. The argument, first articulated by St. Louis activists Virginia and Francis Minor, precipitated rhetorical performances by movement activists on public platforms and in polling places, and the Minors pursued their line of reasoning to the Supreme Court. The Minors' arguments enacted a hermeneutic practice that venerated foundational texts while at the same time subverting their conventional meanings. The rhetorical figure of the gender-neutral, race-neutral citizen provided a basis for imagining a new political subjectivity for women. In the infamous Minor v. Happersett decision of 1875, however, the Court formally dissociated citizenship from voting rights. This analysis of the Minors' rhetoric illustrates the capacity of argument that "failed" in law to invigorate cultural movements, assisting in the production of new ways of imagining political selves and performing political identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1917, National Woman's Party members waged a silent protest outside the White House for woman suffrage. This essay argues that these protesters, the "Silent Sentinels," drew strength from restricting ideological forces to constitute a militant identity. First, the Sentinels enacted early twentieth-century gender ideology and provided political voice to women. Second, the Sentinels appropriated the authority of the rhetorical presidency and constituted themselves and American women as part of the U.S. democratic process. Last, the Sentinels incorporated President Wilson's militaristic doctrine into their militant logic, motivating their fight for woman suffrage as soldiers liberating the oppressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the concept of parliamentarism is extended to the concept of 'government by speaking' (Macaulay 1857), to a political form of rhetorical culture based on arguing for and against. Weber's relationship to parliamentarism is reassessed in this perspective. The first part deals with his 'parliamentary theory of knowledge', which refers to his view that the competition of perspectives is constitutive of the human sciences. In this sense the Weberian ideal of scientific practices resembles politics in its openness to change and re-valuation of controversy. In the second part Weber's critique of anti-parliamentarism is analysed as a rejection of political controversy and struggle. In the third part Weber's theory of knowledge serves as a point of departure for re-reading his late writings on suffrage, parliamentarism and politicians. The opposition between bureaucracy and politics in particular can be rendered more intelligible in terms of Weber's 'parliamentary theory of knowledge'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Features the Dallas Equal Suffrage Association and the grassroots strategies of the woman suffrage movement in the U.S. in 1913-1919. Use of popular culture to center a political issue within social values; Development of campaigns that expressed the issue in familiar metaphors; Development of own political style and a unique expression of popular politics.

Discusses a proposed 18th-century amendment to the constitution of the State of New York that set out to limit universal male suffrage in municipal elections. Anti-democratic proposals in the polarized world of urban politics in the Gilded Age of the U.S.; Breadth and depth of upper-class New Yorkers' hostility toward popular suffrage; Ideology and politics of New York's economic elite.

Examines suffrage restriction efforts in Texas between the collapse of Reconstruction in 1873 to 1874 and the passage of a poll tax restriction on the franchise in 1902 and 1903. Reasons why Democratic politicians and editors agitated for suffrage restriction; Black constituents of Republican politicians that were a chief focus of disenfranchisement efforts.

Focuses on the history of women's suffrage in Australia, New Zealand and Hawaii. Role of World Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in the effort to politically mobilize women; Background on the missionaries of WCTU: Details of racial politics in the three countries; Political orientation of suffrage activists.