The Weight of Their Votes
Southern Women and Political Leverage in the 1920s
Lorraine Gates Schuyler
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Imprint: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 09/2008
Pages: 352
Subject: Social Science, Political Science, History
| University of North Carolina
Print ISBN: 9.78E+12
eBook ISBN: 9780807876695
DESCRIPTION
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.