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The politics of the 1920s are often portrayed in fairly drab terms. Sandwiched between the more compelling eras of Progressivism and the New Deal, the decade seems comparatively uneventful as Americans turned their backs on reform while conservative big business reigned over a "politics of normalcy." However, many scholars have challenged this stereotypical view of the eclipse of reform, and none more resoundingly than historians of American women. Conventional textbook treatment usually includes a brief mention of the passage of the women's suffrage amendment in 1920 and perhaps a discussion of the "new woman" embodied in one of the most pervasive icons of the decade, the flapper. A more in-depth analysis, however, that includes changes in the family and sexual mores, women's participation in the work force, and the political activism of these newly enfranchised citizens, offers a vehicle for broadening our understanding of the social, economic, and political developments of the era. This essay on women and politics focuses on African American and white women's efforts to expand their political influence once enfranchised. Their activism illustrates women's role in developing political pressure groups in the early twentieth century and demonstrates both the continuation of reform - and its limits - in the so-called "jazz age" (i).
It should not be surprising that women activists would play an important role in the effort to keep the Progressive Era reform spirit alive in the 19205. In the suffrage campaign's last stages in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, women's demand for the vote had been intertwined with the ferment for social justice. The practical uses of the vote attracted both upper and middle-class white and black reformers as well as workingclass women to the campaign.
Although a broad group of women supported the suffrage campaigns, they were far from united. With few exceptions, black women were excluded from the white-dominated suffrage groups. Racism, as well as a fear that black participation in the movement would confirm southern perceptions that expanding the suffrage to women would disrupt well-established black disenfranchisement in that region, led white suffragists to rebuff black women's overtures at cooperation. White women themselves were divided, especially after Alice Paul formed the Congressional Union in 1914. This group, the members of which tended to...