The University of Wisconsin Press

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Women's Studies / Sociology / Politics / American HIstory

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Splintered Sisterhood Gender and Class in the Campaign against Woman Suffrage Susan E. Marshall "Women's antifeminism is a paradox awaiting explanation."—from the Introduction When Tennessee became the thirty-sixth and final state needed to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment in August 1920, giving women the right to vote, one group of women expressed bitter disappointment and vowed to fight against "this feminist disease." Why this fierce and extended opposition? In Splintered Sisterhood, Susan Marshall argues that the women of the antisuffrage movement mobilized not as threatened homemakers but as influential political strategists. Drawing on surviving records of major antisuffrage organizations, Marshall makes clear that antisuffrage women organized to protect gendered class interests. She shows that many of the most vocal antisuffragists were wealthy, educated women who exercised considerable political influence through their personal ties to men in politics as well as by their own positions as leaders of social service committees. Under the guise of defending an ideal of "true womanhood," these powerful women sought to keep the vote from lower-class women, fearing it would result in an increase in the "ignorant vote" and in their own displacement from positions of influence. This book reveals the increasingly militant style of antisuffrage protest as the conflict over female voting rights escalated. Splintered Sisterhood  adds a missing piece to the history of women's rights activism in the United States and illuminates current issues of antifeminism. "A fresh, sophisticated, and engaging book. Marshall utilizes extensive qualitative and quantitative evidence to tell the story of the antisuffrage movement and, more broadly, to illuminate the dynamics of counter movements. No one has explored the historical opposition to feminism with more theoretical and empirical rigor than Marshall."—Verta Taylor, coauthor of Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women's Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s Susan E. Marshall is University Distinguished Teaching Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. Media & bookseller inquiries regarding review copies, events, and interviews can be directed to the publicity department at publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu or (608) 263-0734. (If you want to examine a book for possible course use, please see our Course Books page. If you want to examine a book for possible rights licensing, please see Rights & Permissions.)

July 1997 320 pp. 6 x 9 10 cartoons Cloth $55.00 s ISBN 978-0-299-15460-8 Paper $21.95 s ISBN 978-0-299-15464-6 ADD TO CART

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