How <em>The Atlantic </em>Covered the Fight for Women’s Suffrage
Editor’s Note: Read more stories in our series about women and political power.
When The Atlantic was founded in 1857, the U.S. comprised 31 states and eight territories. Women didn’t have the right to vote in any of them. But they were already fighting to change that: Suffrage had been adopted, over protest, as a tenet of the women’s-rights movement at the Seneca Falls Convention nine years earlier and thereafter became the focus of annual national conventions, public addresses, petition campaigns, and a slate of newly formed organizations in the lead-up to the Civil War. Those efforts went unmentioned in The Atlantic’s early issues, however; the magazine’s coverage of American politics was dominated by the issues of slavery and industrial-labor conditions.
Only around the turn of the 20th century, after national suffrage organizations had been formed and the movement had won victories in a smattering of states and territories, did the debate over women’s suffrage take hold in The Atlantic. Contributors—half of them men—detailed how the fight for the vote fit into the broader women’s-rights movement and considered how suffrage would affect roles in the home and family, what impact it would have on the nation’s politics, how many women would actually make use of the right to vote if they won it, and even whether women really wanted the right at all.
When the Nineteenth Amendment. “The Prohibition Amendment became effective in January, and the Woman Suffrage Amendment in August,” a male contributor wrote. “The tail promises to wag the dog.”
