A Simple Justice

Melanie Beals Goan's study of Kentucky's woman suffrage history is a timely addition to the scholarship celebrating the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment. The state's distinctive status as an early adapter, in 1838, of suffrage for taxpaying women in school-related issues as well as its particular position as a border state with enslaved people that chose to remain within the Union during the Civil War, make for an important and complex case study—albeit one that lacks the extraordinary excitement of the story of neighboring Tennessee, which has been infused with glamor as the all-important thirty-sixth ratifier of the Nineteenth Amendment. Nonetheless, Kentucky's story is not without drama, including a battle between two white daughters of the South, Laura Clay and Madeline McDowell Breckinridge, demonstrating the complex interplay between ideologies of white supremacy and of women's rights. The author's work follows nearly a century of suffrage mobilization, noting its origins in efforts to secure the property rights of white women. Goan is particularly lively in illuminating the contest waged between Clay and Breckinridge in the final decade of Kentucky's campaign, underscoring how deeply racism, frequently invoked in the circumlocution “states' rights,” was implicated in both the Kentucky and the national struggles. She appreciates the irony that a daughter of Cassius Clay, Kentucky's homegrown outspoken abolitionist, held fast to opposition to a federal enactment that might empower “inexperienced” voters (p. 191). At the same time, she sounds a note of forgiveness for Breckinridge, a Progressive in political terms, yet still a daughter of the Confederacy. “Expedience drove her exclusionary approach,” agues Goan, “not racism,” thereby shifting blame from the movement's leaders to those it sought to woo (p. 137). To her credit, Goan documents the support for suffrage among African American women and offers important evidence that the state's white supremacists were indeed right to predict the power of enfranchised women of color who had, at least twice, gone to the polls in local school elections in larger proportions than their white counterparts (pp. 75, 95–96

Art · Battle · CONTEST · Ideology · Irony · Opposition (politics · Political science · Politics · Racism · Sociology · State (computer science · Suffrage · White (mutation · White supremacy · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · Gender Studies · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society