The Weight of Their Votes - Annotated by Lorraine Gates Schuyler (Paperback)

About the Book

Weight of Their Votes: Southern Women and Political Leverage in the 1920s

Book Synopsis

After the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, hundreds of thousands of southern women went to the polls for the first time. In The Weight of Their Votes Lorraine Gates Schuyler examines the consequences this had in states across the South. She shows that from polling places to the halls of state legislatures, women altered the political landscape in ways both symbolic and substantive. Schuyler challenges popular scholarly opinion that women failed to wield their ballots effectively in the 1920s, arguing instead that in state and local politics, women made the most of their votes.

Schuyler explores get-out-the-vote campaigns staged by black and white women in the region and the response of white politicians to the sudden expansion of the electorate. Despite the cultural expectations of southern womanhood and the obstacles of poll taxes, literacy tests, and other suffrage restrictions, southern women took advantage of their voting power, Schuyler shows. Black women mobilized to challenge disfranchisement and seize their right to vote. White women lobbied state legislators for policy changes and threatened their representatives with political defeat if they failed to heed women's policy demands. Thus, even as southern Democrats remained in power, the social welfare policies and public spending priorities of southern states changed in the 1920s as a consequence of woman suffrage.

Review Quotes

A lively and wide-ranging account of southern women's activism in the aftermath of the Nineteenth Amendment . . . Schuyler convincingly show[s] that from 1920 the conservative cultural landscape of the New South was not just about the politics of gender, as Corra Harris would have it, but the meaningful gendering of politics."--Gender & History

In an elegant introduction and seven well-conceived chapters, Schuyler lays out her argument in a confident yet balanced tone that specialists and nonspecialists alike will appreciate and find accessible. . . . A superb and engaging book of historiographical significance.--American Historical Review

Lorraine Gates Schuyler demonstrates in this important book [that] southern white women in the 1920s opened up the political process, voted, earned the attention of political leaders, and affected political outcomes.--Journal of American History

Offers a new perspective on key historical questions, and this influential study should guide many future projects.--American Journal of Legal History

Debunk[s] the argument that the political power of women lost potency after they received the vote.--Journal of Southern History

Presents a highly original and convincing look at the contested right to vote.--Virginia Quarterly Review

Should be widely read, not only by historians of southern women but also by scholars of southern politics. Clearly written and deeply researched, it should help redirect our attention to this much-neglected history of southern women after enfranchisement and challenge us to think more critically about the nature of women's political activism in the 1920s.--North Carolina Historical Review