Splintered Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Campaign Against Woman Suffrage.(Review)

Publication: Gender Issues

Publication Date: 01-JAN-99

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COPYRIGHT 1999 Transaction Publishers, Inc.

Susan Marshall, Splintered Sisterhood. Gender and Class in the Campaign against Woman Suffrage. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997.

Susan Marshall has written an outstanding monograph on the female antisuffragists, or "remonstrants," as they originally called themselves. A sociologist, Marshall knows the secondary literature, not only the historical accounts, but relevant social and political theories as well. The historical literature on female antisuffragists is not large and, in general, we historians were wrong about them, seeing them as fronts for male antisuffragists and relegating them to the margin of women's history. This is especially true of the first generation of professional historians who studied the suffrage movement, including, among others, Eleanor Flexnor, Aileen Kraditor, Anne Firor Scott, and myself. Marshall kindly lets us off the hook, explaining that we were misled by the suffragists and the female antisuffragists alike, nearly all of whom downplayed the political shrewdness and autonomy of the women who opposed...

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