Southern Suffragists: Maryland Women Fight for the Vote, 1867-1920

Abstract

This dissertation seeks to revise long-standing histories of the woman suffrage movement in the U.S. South by examining woman suffrage movements in Maryland. This examination of woman suffrage activism within Maryland encourages revisions to the chronology, the identities of the participants, and the possibilities for women suffrage activism in the South. Woman suffrage movements in Maryland demonstrate a middle ground where northern and southern woman suffrage organizing intersected even as many women in the state retained their southern identities. The chronology of woman suffrage movements in Maryland upends the prevailing history of woman suffrage activism in the South as primarily beginning only in the 1890s, falling dormant, and then starting again in the 1910s. Instead, southern suffragists in Maryland engaged in continuous activism from 1867 to 1920 and beyond. By the 1910s, white suffragists in the state had become irrevocably divided and experienced discord over various universal and limited state woman suffrage bills. These disagreements proved more divisive than the twentieth-century fight between states’ rights and a federal suffrage amendment that played out in other southern states. By arguing that Black and white women and men of all social and economic classes participated in Maryland’s woman suffrage movements between 1867 and 1920, this study reshapes our understanding of who was a southern suffragist. In addition, it shows that, in Maryland, significant and sustained suffrage activism was often embedded in other political movements, especially the temperance movement and the struggle to maintain the voting rights of African American men. An important argument of the dissertation is that Black women’s struggles to maintain the voting rights of Black men should be considered part of the movement for woman suffrage. Woman suffrage activism was sometimes less visible because such activism was embedded within other social movements or proceeded with little media attention, but this activism was nonetheless significant.