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Canada and the United States
Assembly firmly in the hands of Rhode Island Democrats.
Sterne's book possesses many virtues. First, she links
the Providence story with developments embroiling
the nation as a whole, charting especially the impact of
World War I and AI Smith's 1928 political campaign in
Providence. She also connects the uphill fight for an
expanded franchise in Rhode Island with developments in the South, revealing that the battle for voting
rights continued to be an important issue for all
Americans in the Gilded Age. Second, Sterne is effective in showing how Catholic women as well as men
embraced urban politics. Even after the passage of the
Nineteenth Amendment, Sterne argues, the municipal
property qualification fell with substantial weight on
Providence's Catholic working women. Indeed, she
shows that Catholic women emerged as significant
political players well before the Constitutional Amendment was ratified and not as a result of it. Finally,
Sterne writes of the diversity of the Catholic immigrant
experiences with sensitivity, showing where the interests of Irish, French-Canadian, and Italian Catholics
overlapped and where they diverged.
In sum, Sterne opens to us the rich political world
made by Catholic immigrants. Her crisply written and
well-organized book should be of interest to students
of urban, Catholic, political, and labor history.
Tocqueville was shrewd to intuit the democratic leanings of American Catholicism. Now Sterne has given
us the historical evidence to bolster that hunch.
MARK S. SCHANTZ
Hendrix College
REBECCA J. MEAD. How the Vote Was Won: Woman
Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868-1914. New
York: New York University Press. 2004. Pp. x, 273.
$45.00.
In this superb study of woman suffrage in the western
states and territories, Rebecca J. Mead convincingly
demonstrates the importance of the region to understanding the success of the national suffrage movement. She accomplishes this by skillfully connecting
the vicissitudes of the suffrage movement to the fluidity of western regional politics. Moreover, her wellresearched account introduces the reader to a wonderful array of relatively obscure and radical western
suffrage leaders such as Emily Pitts-Stevens of San
Francisco, Caroline Churchill of Colorado, and May
Arkwright Hutton of Oregon.
Mead does a nice job of organizing her discussion of
woman suffrage campaigns within broader themes of
political developments in the West and the nation, in
particular Reconstruction, Populism, and Progressivism. During Reconstruction, for instance, debates over
citizenship and suffrage became entangled with territorial organization and campaigns for statehood in
Wyoming, Utah, and Washington. In addition, suffragists sought unsuccessfully to use both the Fourteenth
Amendment's definition of national citizenship and
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
the Fifteenth Amendment's guarantee of voting rights
for black males to ensure a wholesale right to vote for
white women.
Mead's most significant contribution concerns the
association of western suffragists' successes with working-class and radical political movements. It was these
alliances, Mead contends, that allowed western suffragists to neutralize powerful anti-suffrage pressures
in urban centers. The author demonstrates this point
with her analysis of the post-Reconstruction phase in
western suffrage victories, which coincided with the
rise of Populism and the successful 1893 referendum in
Colorado. Labor activists, socialists, and Populists
combined with politicized middle-class clubwomen to
engineer a successful mass-based campaign.
Mead next discusses the failed referendum campaign of 1896 in California, where suffrage supporters
attempted to duplicate the farmer-labor-reformer alliance employed to such good effect in Colorado. Nonetheless, the lessons learned in that defeat provided the
foundations for a spate of victories facilitated by the
rise of progressivism. Although frequently embroiled
in internecine strife, an innovative new generation of
leaders in California and the Pacific Northwest-elites
based in women's clubs and voluntary associations,
working-class activists in trade unions, and socialistsorganized and secured key suffrage victories in Washington State (1910), California (1911), and Oregon
(1912), largely without direct interference by national
leaders. Mead presents the California campaign as a
turning point for the national suffrage movement, with
suffragists mobilizing a decentralized yet sophisticated
mass campaign that borrowed techniques from both
the labor movement and the emerging advertising
industry. The attempt to dissociate the question of
woman suffrage from that of temperance eased the
task of labor suffragists and socialists in garnering
urban working-class support, and, with the addition of
majorities among rural voters, the California referendum prevailed by a narrow margin.
With subsequent triumphs in Arizona, Alaska Territory, Montana, and Nevada, all of the western states
with the exception of New Mexico had woman suffrage
by 1914. At that point, Mead shows, western women
voters affected the national drive for a federal suffrage
amendment by bringing pressure to bear on congressional representatives and the moderate leadership of
the national movement. Younger, radicalized activists
such as Nevada's Anne Martin and Montana's Jeanette
Rankin brought western insights into the national
suffrage drive and contributed their skills in forging
alliances with working-class and racial-ethnic constituencies.
While Mead's conclusions about western influence
on the national suffrage movement are necessarily
tentative, they are nonetheless compelling. The fluidity
of western politics facilitated suffragists' development
of effective methods to advance a radical political goal.
Linking the question of votes for women to the
broader reform agendas of Populists and Progressives
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2005
164
Reviews of Books and Films
also played a significant part in western successes.
Likewise, the linkage of voting rights to economic
justice assisted in bridging class divisions within the
broad coalitions of winning suffrage campaigns. As
Mead states in her conclusion, the importance of
working-class and socialist support for woman suffrage
has been obscured by the biased accounts of elitist
suffrage leaders and uncritical historians. This book is
an excellent starting point for painting a far more
complex, multilayered picture of western suffragists
and their crucial impact on women and politics nationwide.
FRANK VAN Nuys
South Dakota School of Mines and Technology
LYNN MUSSLEWHITE and SUZANNE JONES CRAWFORD.
One Woman's Political Journey: Kate Barnard and
Social Reform, 1875-1930. Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press. 2003. Pp. xii, 231. $34.95.
This new biography by Lynn Musslewhite and Suzanne
Jones Crawford sees Kate Barnard as a key figure in
Oklahoma politics during the Progressive era and
claims that she was the first woman in the United
States to be elected to a state post. Barnard played an
important part in securing social justice reform in the
state. Her career was not without its setbacks, but this
first full-length biography argues that she was one of
the most influential women in Oklahoma at the height
of her career. Barnard was responsible for securing
child labor laws, a compulsory school attendance law,
and a juvenile justice system, as well as modernizing
the penal structure in the state. She managed to do so
by persuading the all-male legislature to do her bidding. After her initial successes, however, Barnard was
increasingly thwarted in her reform ambitions. She was
not always able to secure the budgets she needed, nor
the personnel she wanted, and her position as Commissioner of Charities and Corrections came under
threat. Her attempts to use her office to protect Indian
property rights were defeated in Oklahoma, and she
became progressively more disillusioned with politics.
Over the last few years, the scholarship on women's
involvement in Progressive-era politics and reform has
grown rapidly. Historians have examined the ways in
which female reformers used their own institutions and
networks to create what some have called a "maternalist" welfare state. Assuming it to be their duty to
extend their female skills and concerns beyond their
own homes, they insisted on a role as universal mothers, responsible for the welfare of all children, not just
their own. Musslewhite and Crawford acknowledge
this scholarship but contend that Barnard's career
does not fit this model.
Barnard was not interested in being part of women's
organizations, nor did she try to use networks of
female reformers to lobby for social welfare reforms.
Instead she was suspicious of women's clubs and
believed that women's ingrained passivity undermined
their reform potential. She remained outside the fe-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
male culture of Progressive reform throughout her
career. Moreover, Musslewhite and Crawford argue,
while Barnard recognized the social and legal limitations women labored under, she refused to lobby for
women's suffrage or for other women's rights. Such
issues were contentious, Barnard believed, and would
cost her popularity and the ability to secure reforms
for society's dependents. Unlike many other female
activists who insisted that women were above partisan
politics, Barnard owed her office to, and preferred to
work through, the Democratic Party. However, the
authors argue, she still operated from a female consciousness. She used her gender as a form of protection, to exact respect, deference, and courtesy from
male politicians as she attacked them; and her insistence that the state should be responsible for the
welfare of children places her within the tradition of
female reform.
Barnard's career suggests a number of questions
that Musslewhite and Crawford do not satisfactorily
answer in this biography. Part of the problem is that
the authors rely heavily on narrative, and they see
things through Barnard's eyes, accepting her point of
view without considering what others might have
thought. We are told little about the context in which
Barnard was operating. The emphasis of Progressive
reform was not the same in all parts of the country, but
the authors tell us little about Oklahoma politics or
society. Were the reforms she pressed for the result of
her initiatives, as the authors seem to suggest, or were
others involved? What exactly was the role of the
national reform network in the form of the National
Conference of Charities and Corrections, and other
national reform organizations in securing legislation in
Oklahoma? Why were male politicians prepared to
listen to her, since she seems to have had no obvious
constituency? Why was she so wary of women's organizations and the potential support they could provide
for her campaigns? Barnard was not alone among
female Progressives who did not endorse women's
suffrage-the General Federation of Women's Clubs
did not sanction it until 1914-and her rhetoric sounds
much like that of many of the female anti-suffrage
organizations. The authors should not, perhaps see
this as a particularly divisive aspect of Barnard's
relationship with other female reformers. Barnard,
like other Progressive reformers male and female, was
a self-publicist; her centrality to reform in Oklahoma
needs to be interrogated further.
This is a rather old-fashioned biography. It acknowledges recent scholarship on Progressive reform and
women's part in it, but it does not fully engage that
literature. Despite this, the book is well researched
and provides an interesting account of the career of a
fascinating woman.
ELIZABETH J. CLAPP
University of Leicester
DEREK VAILLANT. Sounds of Reform: Progressivism and
Music in Chicago, 1878-1935. Chapel Hill: University
FEBRUARY 2005