Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State

Women Will Vote celebrates the 1917 victory of the women’s suffrage movement in New York State. Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello highlight the activism of rural, urban, African American, Jewish, immigrant, and European American women, as well as male suffragists, both upstate and downstate, who helped secure the 1917 referendum. They contend that this win energized the national suffrage battle, escalating the momentum for the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.

Goodier and Pastorello reveal how thousands of New York’s suffrage advocates sparked a major political, social, and legal shift. Diverse women groups collectively built a powerful coalition that extended well beyond New York City’s elite white leadership.

Women Will Vote convincingly argues that the organization and agitation led to what one prominent suffrage leader called the ＂very greatest victory.＂ New York suffragists’ 1917 success helped change the course of American history.

Susan Goodier is Lecturer in History at SUNY Oneonta. She is the author of No Votes for Women. Karen Pastorello is Professor of History at Tompkins Cortland Community College (SUNY). She is the author of The Progressives and A Power Among Them.