Review: How the West was won — and lost — by women: A new history revises the record of gender and Western history
One hundred years ago today, a women’s suffrage parade in the streets of Paris carried a banner demanding that women “have the vote.” In 1908, suffrage was the goal of the International Women’s Day protest, and in 2015, the centennial was marked by the first-ever trans march. In the United States, suffrage is officially enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Yet, this was just one of the many milestones in the long road to equality for women.
Last week, the Oxford History of the West Project unveiled a new edition of its seminal and well-regarded book on Western gender, titled How the West Was Won: The Battle for the Vote, Sexuality, and the Right to Party. The new, revised edition (which can be purchased now on its website) offers a broad-ranging history of what is thought to be the most significant social change in modern history. But as the editor put it, the book is not just about voting and sexual rights in the West; the book is about a “transformation of Western society, of the West and of the American story.”
At the time of its publication, How the West Was Won was praised for its careful re-examination “of a fundamental question: why did women vote in the West?” The contributors, whose backgrounds range from women’s suffrage activists to historians, scholars, and journalists, explore how the modern history of women’s right to vote in the West is “a complex story” that must be read “in its historical and cultural context.”
“We didn’t know if it was going to be a good book when it came out,” said Susan Brown Marquis, a historian at the University of Southern California who was the project associate editor at the time. “It was considered a work of great importance. We thought it was going to be the best book on the Western woman question. We never thought we’d be revisiting it again.”
The authors have now come back to the project with the full new version of How the West Was Won,