Women Will Vote

Winning Suffrage in New York State

Susan Goodier, Karen Pastorello

• Publisher: Three Hills
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781501713194
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Women Will Vote celebrates the 1917 victory of the women's suffrage movement in New York State. Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello highlight the activism of rural, urban, African American, Jewish, immigrant, and European American women, as well as male suffragists, both upstate and downstate, who helped secure the 1917 referendum. They contend that this win energized the national suffrage battle, escalating the momentum for the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.

Goodier and Pastorello reveal how thousands of New York's suffrage advocates sparked a major political, social, and legal shift. Diverse women groups collectively built a powerful coalition that extended well beyond New York City's elite white leadership.

Women Will Vote convincingly argues that the organization and agitation led to what one prominent suffrage leader called the "very greatest victory." New York suffragists' 1917 success helped change the course of American history.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Timeline
• Introduction: From Ridicule to Referendum
• 1. Tenuous Ties: Creating a Woman Suffrage Movement in New York State
• 2. “Ruffling the Somewhat Calm Domain”: Rural Women and Suffrage
• 3. The Quest for Industrial Citizenship: Woman Suffrage and Immigrant Garment Workers
• 4. A Fundamental Component: Suffrage for African American Women
• 5. Persuading the “Male Preserve”: Men and the Woman Suffrage Movement
• 6. Radicalism and Spectacle: New Women Modernize the Suffrage Movement
• 7. The Great Interruption: World War I and Woman Suffrage
• 8. Rising from the Ashes of Defeat: The Woman Suffrage Victory in New York State
• Conclusion: Winning the Nation
• Appendixes
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index