Sara Egge. Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest, 1870–1920

How did American women win the vote? To answer this question fully, historians must go beyond the familiar story of national suffrage leaders and the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to activity at the regional, state, and local levels. Sara Egge contributes to this ongoing project with her study Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest, 1870–1920. Egge argues that midwestern women persuaded men to grant them the vote by asserting credible claims to citizenship, based on their active contributions to community building. Claims of womanly civic responsibility—not equal rights—ultimately proved effective, but not until World War I burnished female citizenship with an added patina of loyalty and patriotism. Faced with the fact that the “Midwest” lacks a consistent regional definition, Egge chooses to focus on three states in the upper Midwest, and then proceeds to home in on one county in each state. Thus this study is based on primary source materials from Clay County, Iowa; Lyon County, Minnesota; and Yankton County, South Dakota. Such choices were evidently necessary, given the difficulties of working through fifty years of local newspapers, community histories, church annals, and voluntary group records, but the result is a bit disjointed. Egge’s narrative must shift back and forth between county-level events and state-level politics in three different states, all while hewing to a chronological through line.

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