Abstract

While recently reading the 1914-1919 Congressional Record debates over woman suffrage, I was struck by the familiarity of the content. The concerns of the early 1900s mirror those of the early 2000s: concentration of wealth within a tiny percentage of the population, equal pay across sex and race lines, the risk of U.S. entanglement in foreign wars, food safety, workers' rights, potable water, taxation, and so on. I also was struck by the familiarity of the debate's form. Much like the rebuttal speeches I was trained to deliver as an intercollegiate debater, the pro-suffrage speeches contain systematic, comprehensive, and specific refutation of anti-suffrage arguments.Yet, it took decades of activism outside of...