Women's History Month Online Exhibit 2021

Over the last forty years, the gap between men and women with respect to labor-market outcomes, paid hours of work, hours working at home, occupations, college majors, and education levels in the United States has narrowed or disappeared. We ask whether these substantial changes in women's lives—changes in precisely the variables that have seemed to matter so much to our understanding of political participation—have enabled women's political action in the United States.

Stacey Abrams served as minority leader of the Georgia House of Representatives from 2011 to 2017. She was the Democratic Party’s nominee in the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election, making her the first black woman nominee for a major party, and she founded Fair Fight Action, a nonprofit that supports voting rights. Valerie Boyd is author of the critically acclaimed biography Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. Formerly arts editor at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, she is the Charlayne Hunter-Gault professor of journalism at the University of Georgia, where she founded and directs the low-residency MFA Program in Narrative Nonfiction.

Women have been politically active through feminist activity since the United States' founding. Contemporary American women enjoy greater sociopolitical power as a result, but gender gaps remain, most notably in economic opportunity and political representation. Because the mainstream press is an integral part of society's perception of reality, it is paramount in exploring gender, politics and social reform. This thesis explores why gender disparities still exist, through an examination of news narratives regarding the feminist movement/political women from 1917 to 2008.

A century of struggle preceded the 1920 passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, granting women the right to vote. Conventional wisdom holds that passage of the amendment heralded women's right to vote and that, at the same time, it signaled the end of the women's rights movement until the 1960s. This essay challenges both assumptions.

One hundred years after ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, the ability of women to effectively exercise the right to vote is far from guaranteed. Although 1920 may mark the historical moment when women’s suffrage was added to the Constitution, the past century has been rife with obstacles preventing many women, particularly women of color, from exercising their right to vote. Scholars have noted that for these women, the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965 was pivotal in more fully securing the right to vote (Hewitt 2010; Junn and Brown 2008; Montoya 2018; Smooth 2006). With a resurgence in voter-suppression efforts and a US Supreme Court ruling that weakened the VRA, voting rights again are imperiled. Although the role of race and class justifiably have been placed at the center of analysis, little attention has been given to the potential gendered considerations. This article argues that gender is still a salient part of the story, and intersectional analysis is necessary for a more thorough understanding of the impact that restrictive laws might have in order to counter them.

"Beginning in Mississippi in 1890, southern states adopted new constitutions with disfranchising provisions that white supremacists believed would make these exclusions permanent and lock Black men out of the electorate for good.4 Now, with the newly ratified Nineteenth Amendment imposing woman suffrage upon states that did not ratify it, the "problem" had returned. This time, not only were African American men demanding the ballot; now, Black women were demanding it, too."

African American women were not promised inclusion in the Nineteenth Amendment. The ratification was achieved at a time when segregation and racial discrimination characterized American institutions. Although Black women had been woman suffrage advocates since the movement began in the post-Civil War years, their inclusion in the Nineteenth Amendment was not a given. This was a struggle that took considerable effort, primarily among African American women who set out to educate Black people about strategies for change. Nonetheless, like Black men a generation earlier, the majority of African American women-those living in the South—were disenfranchised, or lost the right to vote, soon after the amendment was ratified in 1920. Not until the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which led to the 1965 Voting Rights Act, did Black women and men living in the South regain their lost right to vote.