www.herhatwasinthering.org project
Women Political Candidates Who Ran for Political Office before 1920
For almost a century scholarship in the United States focusing on elections, political parties, and civic participation has virtually ignored the political candidacies of women running for public office before the 1920 ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment granting woman suffrage. Instead, scholars focused on the woman suffrage movement (1848-1920) as the crucial movement for women's full citizenship. Most were content to depict public-minded women as working for civic betterment using non-partisan methods. However, women did participate in the political system, campaigning for and winning elective office as early as the 1850s.
In the first canvas of its kind to date, historians Wendy Chmielewski, Kristen Gwinn-Becker, and I established that more than 5,000 women campaigned for elective positions in as many as 6,000 campaigns at the local, state, and federal levels between the 1850s and the 1920 ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.
This canvas has been shaped into a digital website, www.herhatwasinthering.org, freely available to all. Our data present a narrative of women's public lives that has been ignored in the telling of U.S. political and social history. The more than 5,000 entries completed to date include over half of the women candidates we estimate ran for office in the study period. This project upends the previous interpretation of U.S. political history as one in which women did not run for public office prior to 1920. Within the framework of American political development, we argue a model of evolutionary change in which female candidates steadily competed for elective office for fifty years prior to ratification of the suffrage amendment. In a period of competitive party politics and social activism, these women often campaigned as partisan candidates, with support from mainstream and third parties.
The unique aspect of our research is the aggregate data. Together, these data will provide the foundation for our history, one that will fuse a narrative of women's participation in Gilded Age and Progressive era elective politics with our analysis of the meaning of these candidacies for U.S. political development and social history.
Click on www.herhatwasinthering.org and search for early women candidates from your state, or the names and biographies of women who ran for particular elective offices. Look for women candidates by party affiliation or scroll through the search alphabet and read the biographies of different women candidates. And be certain to clink on the "Political Images" page to see various images related to women's journey into elective politics including cartoons, photographs, and campaign cards.
In the first canvas of its kind to date, historians Wendy Chmielewski, Kristen Gwinn-Becker, and I established that more than 5,000 women campaigned for elective positions in as many as 6,000 campaigns at the local, state, and federal levels between the 1850s and the 1920 ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.
This canvas has been shaped into a digital website, www.herhatwasinthering.org, freely available to all. Our data present a narrative of women's public lives that has been ignored in the telling of U.S. political and social history. The more than 5,000 entries completed to date include over half of the women candidates we estimate ran for office in the study period. This project upends the previous interpretation of U.S. political history as one in which women did not run for public office prior to 1920. Within the framework of American political development, we argue a model of evolutionary change in which female candidates steadily competed for elective office for fifty years prior to ratification of the suffrage amendment. In a period of competitive party politics and social activism, these women often campaigned as partisan candidates, with support from mainstream and third parties.
The unique aspect of our research is the aggregate data. Together, these data will provide the foundation for our history, one that will fuse a narrative of women's participation in Gilded Age and Progressive era elective politics with our analysis of the meaning of these candidacies for U.S. political development and social history.
Click on www.herhatwasinthering.org and search for early women candidates from your state, or the names and biographies of women who ran for particular elective offices. Look for women candidates by party affiliation or scroll through the search alphabet and read the biographies of different women candidates. And be certain to clink on the "Political Images" page to see various images related to women's journey into elective politics including cartoons, photographs, and campaign cards.