Jane Addams: “Why Women Should Vote”

Impact

“Why Women Should Vote” was one of the most influential articles written in the debate about women's suffrage. Historians estimate that the campaign for female suffrage was discussed in more than two hundred articles in American magazines in the first fifteen years of the twentieth century. The same year that Addams's essay appeared, more than twenty articles were published on the same topic. The popularity of the essay has exceeded Addams's lifetime, and its pro-suffrage argument continues to interest readers to this day, when the women's right to vote is a firmly established gain.

Because of the vast readership of Ladies' Home Journal and the respected status of its author, “Why Women Should Vote” went on to become the most frequently cited argument in favor of women's suffrage, contributing to the 1916 Democratic and Republican endorsement of female suffrage and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. The year after the publication of the essay, Addams became the vice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. “Why Women Should Vote” had made apparent her association with woman suffrage, yet her reputation and fame predated her involvement with the suffrage movement. Paradoxically, this increased the impact of the article, as it showed that Addams was concerned with the common good more than with a single cause.

The popularity of the essay, however, was not due simply to the journal's large circulation or the author's status. Curiously, when the essay was published, the journal did not have an explicit pro-suffrage stance. On the contrary, it was considered to stand in opposition to women's vote. The significant impact that the article had in the 1910s was due to Addams's skillful merging of her own agenda for female suffrage with the larger Progressive goals of urban sanitation, improvement of the workplace, and youth education. Addams understood the need to appeal to the mainstream to extend the suffrage to women, and she used arguments such as women's competences in the domestic sphere, which were consonant with and approved by mainstream sectors of society. At the same time, she refused to have women defined according to the possible stereotypical views that could emerge from this assumption. Thus, Addams appealed to traditional gender roles only to have them subverted by emancipation and the possibility of having their voices heard that women would attain through the vote. That Addams's argument was appreciated even by a predominantly antisuffrage journal is proved by the fact that three years after the publication of “Why Women Should Vote,” Ladies' Home Journal employed Addams to write a regular monthly column.

Readers have continued to discuss Addams's argument well after the vote became an exercisable right for women. While feminists in the 1960s and 1970s did not appreciate Addams's lack of emphasis on women's suffrage as an individual right, later studies of the essay have explored its importance in advancing the cause for female suffrage. In these more historicized readings, Addams's reference to women's traditional domestic duties is not considered pandering to the mainstream, stereotypical view of women. On the contrary, by appealing to a “universal” common good, Addams was able to make the cause for female suffrage an integral part of the Progressive agenda.