{"version":"1.0","type":"rich","provider_name":"Acast","provider_url":"https://acast.com","height":250,"width":700,"html":"","title":"128: Her Hat Was in the Ring: How Women Won the Right to Run for Office in the United States","thumbnail_width":200,"thumbnail_height":200,"thumbnail_url":"https://open-images.acast.com/shows/61168564926b7100124612a7/1792383545023-57b550ed-70f5-43d7-98f5-42b3ae8e7396.jpeg?height=200","description":"

Today we are talking about Wendy E. Chmielewski and Jill Norgren’s wonderful Her Hat Was in the Ring: How Women Won the Right to Run for Office in the United States. The book starts with the astonish fact that over 6,000 women candidates ran for elected office before the ratification of the 19th amendment in 1920! This history of women’s campaigning and office holding, they argue offers a different story of women’s fight for equal rights than the more familiar suffrage story and that it deserves much more attention than it has received. As you will hear in our conversation, this book is paired with a digital history project also called Her Hat Was in the Ring. Chmielewski and Norgren combed through local, county, and state records and searched newspaper databases to find women officeholders and candidates. The impressive project offers bibliographic and other information about the women who ran. The book, however, places those individual stories into the larger context of nineteenth-century political changes. It ask why women became office holders before they could vote, why male electors chose to vote for them, and how the debates and discussions around female office holding changed over time. As they move chronologically from the 1850s to 1920, Chmielewski and Norgren point to the importance of married women’s property acts in creating political standing for women as well as other ideas like maternalism and gendered ideas about women’s place in society opening opportunities for them. They also highlight the importance of understanding the US system of federalism and the many different state constitutions that determined both women’s suffrage rights and rules around women’s office holding. The story, they argue, looks very different at the state and local level than it does at the national level. And it is a story that historians have generally overlooked. I hope you enjoy the conversation with Chmielewski and Norgren as much as I did. We covered a lot, but there’s so much more in the book and the database. Be sure to look at both and don’t forget to get out there and vote!


The link to the book is here: https://nyupress.org/9781479847082/her-hat-was-in-the-ring/


The link to the database can be found here: https://herhat.historyit.com


Other books mentioned in the episode include Jill Norgren's Belva Lockwood: The Woman Who Would Be President (NYU) and Robyn Muncy's Relentless Reformer: Josephine Roche and Progressivism in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, UP)

","author_name":"Michael Patrick Cullinane"}