As the debate over ratification of the Susan B. Anthony Amendment to enfranchise American women intensified after the Great War, both suffragists and antisuffragists believed that a great deal was at stake. Suffrage proponents promised that, armed with the ballot, women would tackle the great social issues of the day and usher in a new era of progress and peace. Antisuffragists, by contrast, worried that suffrage would damage women’s elevated moral stature and threaten the very stability of life in the home. Now, in 2020, historians have the opportunity to reconsider those predictions using a century’s worth of evidence. A hundred years out, what difference did the Nineteenth Amendment make?
2020-05-17