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Acknowledgments: All of the authors of this article made proportionate contributions to the work; author order is alphabetical. We thank Elisabeth Clemens, Alana Jeydel, Alice Kang, the audiences at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in 2015, and the editors and anonymous reviewers for comments. We thank Holly McCammon for sharing data on suffrage movement organizations, and Kevin Corder and Christina Wolbrecht for sharing data on early women's turnout aggregates after the Nineteenth Amendment.
For research support, we acknowledge the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the Behavioral Laboratory in the Social Sciences Program (BLISS) of the Division of Social Sciences at Harvard University. For helpful data from Massachusetts, we acknowledge the National Endowment for the Humanities (PW-5105612). We remain responsible for all errors and omissions.
The woman suffrage movement remade the United States in ways both formal and pragmatic, in the nation's practice as well as its parchment.1Emerging from patterns of moral reform and antislavery activism in the antebellum nineteenth century, driven forward by new organization in the wake of the Civil War, and swelling in the Progressive Era with agenda-setting triumphs wrought through vibrant but vituperative debates about the meaning of American democracy, the suffrage movement restyled citizenship as well as political discourse. Contributing to a range of state-level voting rights expansions before 1920 and then to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the woman suffrage movement changed American institutions and norms and is responsible for the largest nominal and proportional expansion of the American electorate in national history.
In this long struggle, as scholars and students alike know, women organized and reorganized. They protested. They mimicked and mocked patterns of male voting, especially white male voting. They created new rhetorical and argumentative registers, new claim patterns ranging from Madisonian representation to republican motherhood to Victorian morality and its contrasts with the corruptions of the male-dominated party system. And to a degree that has been overlooked by most studies, they petitioned--massively, continually, and earnestly--for the transformation of citizenship. From 1870 to 1920, pro-suffrage activists sent at least 2,157 petitions to U.S. Congress asking for the granting of voting rights to women.2