Women’s Suffrage in the Americas

This corrective history of the western hemispheric suffrage movements of the nineteenth and twentieth century sheds light on the cooperative nature of the women’s efforts to gain the vote across geographic and cultural divides.

The first hemispheric study to trace how women in the Americas obtained the right to vote, Women’s Suffrage in the Americas pushes back against the misconception that women’s movements originated in the United States. The volume brings Latin American voices to the forefront of English-language scholarship. Suffragists across the hemisphere worked together, formed collegial networks to support each other’s work, and fostered advances toward women gaining the vote over time and space from one country to the next. The collection as a whole suggests several models by which women in the Americas gained the right to vote: through party politics; through decree, despite delays justified by women’s supposed conservative politics; through conservative defense of traditional roles for women; and within the context of imperialism. However, until now historians have traditionally failed to view this common history through a hemispheric lens.

Stephanie Mitchell is a professor of history at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin. She is the coeditor of The Women’s Revolution in Mexico, 1910-1953.