The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States

"This is about the only comprehensive history of the right to vote. Alexander Keyssar originally published this book in 2000, about two months before the election contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore. It was spectacular timing, all of a sudden people were paying a lot of attention to ballot box access and voting suppression. Americans often think that we have universal suffrage—that everybody can vote and that it’s always been that way. That’s not correct. Keyssar traces back to the property qualifications for voting. At the founding of our country, you had to have a certain level of affluence to cast a vote. He looks at the racial dynamics of voting after the Civil War and the demand for restricting immigrants’ access to the ballot box through literacy tests. This book is a critical read because it reminds us that voting rights are always contested. It puts the suffrage story, the story of women organizing to get the vote, into the larger history of voting. Seeing the suffrage movement out of its silo shows its commonalities with other movements. Keyssar shows that sometimes voting rights expand and sometimes they contract. Voting and citizenship have been contested in the past and therefore shouldn’t be taken for granted in the future. The last three years has certainly shown that aspects of American political life which many of us thought were settled are actually contingent. Certainly, this is true with voting. We’ve seen battles over gerrymandering and voter suppression through ID laws and other means. These questions are all about political power and are getting decided in ways that are making it hard for certain people to exercise their right to vote. The reason I included The Right to Vote is because in the current political moment, the right to vote is under attack. This book and the suffrage centennial remind us that when we take a right for granted, we risk losing it. Suffragists knew that the vote is the most effective tool for effecting social change. They were the voting rights activists of their day, but they’re part of the larger fight to make sure that the electorate is as wide and representative as possible. Voting rights activists of today stand on the shoulders of suffragists. The suffrage movement is also part of the larger story of women mobilization and women’s political activism. The current political climate shows us that the struggle for women’s rights is subject to reversal. So, both history and today’s papers remind us that it remains essential for activists to push forward. In the initial publication of this interview, editors mistakenly substituted the word “suffragette” or “suffragettes” instead of “suffragist” and “suffragists.” We apologize for misquoting Professor Susan Ware who subsequently explained the important distinction between these terms, as quoted below: American suffragists never referred to themselves as Suffragettes. That term is rightly applied to the British movement but should not be used here. Why? Because the American women consciously tried to distance themselves from the way that the British movement embraced violence against property, something that was never countenanced in the U.S. True, there was suffrage militance (like picketing the White House) but it never involved violence against people or property. American suffragists wanted to make clear that they were not going that route. We apologize to Professor Ware and our readers for this mistake."