Epilogue

The epilogue discusses Laura Clay's work after 1920, the creation of the Kentucky League of Women Voters, and assesses the limited role women have played in Kentucky politics over the past century. It also explores why the suffrage movement still maters one hundred years later.

Absentee Ballot Day in the library: Empowering students to vote

On September 25, 2018, American University Library held its inaugural Absentee Ballot Day, helping 1,005 students request absentee ballots. The library partnered with student government, the alumni association, and the League of Women Voters of the District of Columbia to empower our students in exercising their fundamental right and responsibility as citizens in a democracy. This article describes the reasoning behind this initiative, the planning process, and the event itself. The hope is that many academic libraries will join in this effort for the 2020 general election. Resources for institutions wishing to hold their own Absentee Ballot Day are included.

The Toronto Meeting of the A. A. A. S. 1922. A surprising election and a voyage westward

This chapter examines the American Association for the Advancement of Science (A. A. A. S.) meeting in Toronto in the last week in December of 1921. On the evening of December 28, a great surprise came to John Henry Comstock—a dinner was given in his honor. It was held in Annersley House, Victoria College, of the University of Toronto and there were sixty-nine present, many of them Henry's old students and all of them personal friends. The entomological meetings were excellent; the Comstocks listened to the scientific papers by many of their old students. On May 6, 1923, Anna Botsford Comstock was elected as one of the twelve greatest women in America by the League of Women Voters. The chapter then looks at the Comstocks' voyage to the West.

After Suffrage

After gaining the vote in 1920, suffragists faced a new quandary—to attempt to enter the existing male power structure or focus on the broader cause of advancing women by upholding traditional femininity while still exercising the ballot. Efforts to deal with this dilemma can be seen by examining the contents of contemporary periodicals, particularly three from women’s organizations: Equal Rights, the voice of the National Woman Party; the Woman Citizen, produced by the League of Women Voters, and Independent Woman, the bulletin of the National Federation of Business and Professional Women. These publications illustrated the fracturing of the idealism of the suffrage movement when women actually went to the polls and were forced to deal with political realities as well as conflicting ideas of their proper roles.

Emerging Routes to Environmental Activism: Lake Erie Sportsmen and the League of Women Voters

This paper comparatively examines how the League of Women Voters and Lake Erie sportsmen emerged to awaken the public to the pollution crisis affecting the Lake Erie watershed in the mid-twentieth century. Recognizing the degradation of the smallest of the Great Lakes due to the explosion of wartime industrial development and population growth, the League and the sportsmen commenced a decades-long struggle to clean up the lake and its tributaries through direct action in urban areas throughout the Lake Erie watershed. Disgusted by a fall in the number of fish, caused by cyanide poisoning, and the effect of oil on waterfowl, the sportsmen pressed for pollution control. The League members’ approach to water resources, on the other hand, was based on a broad and academic perspective regarding water quality and quantity in response to a series of regionally severe droughts that plagued the United States in the late 1940s and mid-1950s, and led to a national debate on water shortages and supplies. Ultimately, this paper examines two distinctly different approaches to an environmental emergency in the immediate postwar era.

Defining Equality

Chapter 6 explores the “equality versus difference” debate--a defining feature of feminism in modern America--through the lens of Breckinridge’s work in both the national suffrage organization, the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and its successor organization, the League of Women Voters. By exploring Breckinridge’s work with national feminist organizations during and after the suffrage struggle, this chapter highlights both women’s continuous activism and their ideological differences, especially their debate over the Equal Rights Amendment and so-called “protective legislation.”

Profile

Shortly before his inauguration as mayor in January 1934, Fiorello La Guardia asked Pearl Bernstein, a young woman then working for the New York City League of Women Voters, to come see him. She had voted for him but never met him before. Wasting no time, he asked her straight out: “How would you like to be Secretary of the Board of Estimate and Apportionment and Director of the Budget?” This was a new position he hoped would rationalize the board’s chaotic budget procedures. “What they did,” Bernstein recalled later, “was to put some figures together and then every week they would add or subtract or multiply or divide—and nobody knew in the middle of the year how much had been spent.” The mayor chaired the board, but the borough presidents also submitted budgetary proposals, “and so it was a very unsatisfactory situation.” The League of Women Voters, where Bernstein had worked for the previous seven years monitoring municipal affairs, had advocated the city’s adoption of an executive budget prepared solely by the mayor. In the end she persuaded La Guardia to separate the two jobs he offered her, and because she knew nothing about accounting or budgets, she took the post of secretary. In January, the new board of estimate confirmed her appointment....