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30 W. Legal Hist. 5 (2019)
How the Woman's Vote Was Won in the West: An Overview

handle is hein.journals/wlehist30 and id is 12 raw text is: Rebecca J. Mead, Ph.D* How the Woman's Vote Was Won in the West: An Overview This special issue addresses the processes that produced a remarkable achievement by the end of 1914: almost every western state and territory had enfranchised its female citizens, creating a new voting population of four million women. The situation in the West stands in profound contrast to the East, where few women voted until after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment (1920), and to the South, where the disfranchisement of African-American men was widespread. Yet earlier suffrage histories have neglected these developments, focusing instead on anomalous nineteenth-century successes or generally failing to explain adequately how this precocious region broke the national stalemate in the early twentieth century. The reasons for early western victories include the unsettled nature of regional politics, the cultivation of alliances between suffragists and farmer-labor-progressive reformers, the complex nature of western race relations, and the sophisticated activism of western women. The contributions in this special issue provide insight into these factors (and others) through examination of the achievement of women's suffrage in specific states.' * Dr. Rebecca Mead is a professor of history at Northern Mighigan University. She earned her PhD at UCLA. Her doctoral dissertation was published by New York University Press in 2004 as How the Vote Was Won: Women Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868-1914. 1. There are few historical syntheses on this topic. The most recent is my book, How the Vote Was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868-1914 (New York: New York University Press, 2004), and there is an earlier work by Beverly Beeton, Women Vote in the West: The Woman Suffrage Movement, 1869-1896 (New York: Garland, 1986). Articles with a more comprehensive approach include Rebecca Edwards, Pioneers at the Polls: Woman Suffrage in the West, in Votes for Women, ed. Jean H. Baker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), and Sandra L. Myres, Suffering for Suffrage: Western Women and the Struggle for Political, Legal, and Economic Rights, in Sandra L. Myres, Westering Women and the Frontier Experience, 1800-1915 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982). Otherwise, most articles relate to the history of individual states, beginning with early 5

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