Description
How Ohios women were essential to the national womens suffrage movement
Conversations and legal battles surrounding voting rights, once again a topic looming large in the United States, reflect a long history of such debates and suffrage campaigns. The struggle for womens voting rights, in particular, required persistence in the face of defeat, and unbeknownst to most people, Ohiothe fifth state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendmentplayed a key role in the national womens suffrage movement.
Covering 70 years of the movement, from 1850 through 1920, Jamie Capuzza demonstrates that the tendency to overlook the contributions of Ohio suffragists dates back to the earliest years of the movement. Ohioans were the first to petition a government for womens enfranchisement, and Ohioans helped build the infrastructure for the movement by forming the nations first state womens rights organization and by hosting two of the earliest national womens rights conventions.
Many of the movements early leaders were Ohioans, including Frances Barker Gage, a movement leader since the 1850s who was among the first to emphasize the inherent connections between gender and race by linking womens suffrage to African American suffrage; Victoria Claflin Woodhull, a stockbroker, newspaper publisher, and radical activist who was the first woman ever to address the US Congress or to run for the US presidency; and Harriet Taylor Upton, president of the Ohio Womens Suffrage Association longer than any other woman and executive in the National American Womans Suffrage Association, who hobnobbed with presidents and congressmen. Also among the leadership were African Americans with Ohio connections such as Mary Church Terrell, Frances Harper, Julia Cooper, Hallie Brown, Jane Hunter, Carrie Clifford, and Jewelia Higgins.
The Fifth Star describes these determined leaders, their agenda, organizational capacity, and political engagement. Drawing on extensive historical records and primary sources, including suffrage convention proceedings, state senate and house reports, local mainstream and feminist media, and the personal letters and diaries of Ohio reformers, Capuzza details this fight in the context of the national womens rights movement and parallel reform movements like abolitionism and temperance. The Fifth Star is a story of remarkable perseverance and determination in pursuit of the most fundamental right in a democracy, the right to vote.
Author: Jamie C. Capuzza
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Kent State University Press
Published: 04/18/2023
Pages: 324
Weight: 1.15lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.98w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9781606354551
Language: English
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