The “hush” of the title comes suddenly, when first Elizabeth Cady Stanton dies on October 26, 1902, and three years later Susan B. Anthony dies on March 13, 1906. It is sudden because Stanton, despite near blindness and immobility, wrote so intently right to the end that editors had supplies of her articles on hand to publish several months after her death. It is sudden because Anthony, at the age of eighty-five, set off for one more transcontinental trip, telling a friend on the Pacific Coast, “it will be just as well if I come to the end on the cars, or anywhere, as to be at home.” Volume VI of this extraordinary series of selected papers is inescapably about endings, death, and silence. But death happens here to women still in the fight. An Awful Hush is about reformers trained “in the school of anti-slavery” trying to practice their craft in the age of Jim Crow and a new American Empire. It recounts new challenges to “an aristocracy of sex,” whether among the bishops of the Episcopal church, the voters of California, or the trustees of the University of Rochester. And it sends last messages about woman suffrage. As Stanton wrote to Theodore Roosevelt on the day before she died, “Surely there is no greater monopoly than that of all men, in denying to all women a voice in the laws they are compelled to obey.” With the publication of Volume VI, this series is now complete.
Social purity in the anti-slavery tradition, struggled to prevent State-regulated prostitution in the 19th century and neo-regulation in the twentieth. Joining with Mid-Western and Far Western purity reform associations and with the vigilance societies formed to end the traffic in white slaves, the American Purity Alliance left those organizations to join the Rockefeller and physician dominated American Social Hygiene Association. Seen as old lights by Rockefeller, purity reformers and their feminist allies were pushed to the periphery of power. They struggled to maintain the environmental implications of social hygiene, but lost to the eugenic/hereditarian thought that narrowed the movement's implications. This study raises new questions about American feminism, Progressive reforms, public health, and the significance of women's suffrage. Rather than rescuing prostitutes, the movement resulted in their further criminalization, deportation, and detainment. Venereal disease rates, rather than declining as they had in Europe, rose dramatically in the 1920s as a result of policies implemented between 1900 and 1920. Ultimately, the repression of white slave traffic and the closing of the red light districts rivaled or exceeded the scope of Prohibition upon the nation. Pivar provides a comparative perspective often missing in other studies of policy toward prostitution and venereal disease.
"The National Park Service is excited to commemorate the 100th year anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that abolished sex as a basis for voting and to tell the diverse history of women's suffrage-the right to vote-more broadly. The U.S. Congress passed the 19th Amendment on June 4, 1919. The states ratified the amendment on August 18, 1920, officially recognizing women's right to vote. This handbook demonstrates the expansiveness of the stories the NPS is telling to preserve and protect women's history for this and future generations. The essays included within tell a broad history of various women advocating for their rights. Sprinkled throughout are short biographies of notable ladies who devoted their time to the women's suffrage movement along with summaries of events important to the cause"--