Tuesday afternoon, two UI history faculty presented “Idaho Women Win the Right to Vote” at the Malcolm Renfrew Interdisciplinary Colloquium.
Emeritus professor Katherine Aiken and assistant professor Rebecca Scofield shared their research for an article they submitted to the Western Legal History journal. Their paper and the work of other historians will appear in the journal as part of a two-year-long celebration of the 19th amendment, which gave women the right to vote in federal elections.
“We looked at how the ground game of getting the suffrage legislation passed in Idaho played out in 1896, particularly because it is surprising to many people that Idaho is the fourth state to have passed woman’s suffrage, which is not a foregone conclusion,” Scofield said. “A lot of what we talk about is how suffrage workers had to do a very delicate balancing act between different political interests and the state.”
Aiken and Scofield said the referendum that allowed women to vote may have passed because the population was distracted with the issues surrounding silver, the biggest industry in Idaho at the time.
Scofield began the by explaining how the national women’s suffrage movement began. She acknowledged that racism, classism and other forms of segregation were present in the movement from the beginning. The Idaho suffrage movement, like the national movement, excluded women who did not fit the narrative that upper class white women created, Scofield said.
“The basic advice from the National American Women’s Suffrage Association was avoid prohibition and temperance thought, avoid talk about rights, avoid talk about anything controversial and avoid any controversial supporters of women’s suffrage,” Aiken said. “As a result, a lot of what we call club women, upper middle-class women were the leaders of the women’s suffrage movement in Idaho in 1896.”
Aiken and Scofield acknowledge that they are interested in this research because the history of women’s voting rights directly impacts them. Scofield said she believes the history is important to keep alive.
“I really think it’s important for students at UI to understand this longer history of who was enfranchised and why in our state,” Scofield said. “These are tense and uneasy histories and difficult histories to grapple with, but they are necessary to understand the current political context and why its important for us to be politically engaged.”
Scofield said the history they shared is vital to understanding how Americans operate day to day. She and Aiken said they think it is important to recognize the sacrifices people made for the hard-won right to vote.
“If we understand what it meant to get the vote, then we also know that we could lose the vote,” Scofield said. “History can go backwards. We understand what the stakes are for fighting for political inclusion, for a variety of voices at the table and for pushing beyond easy answers to have a difficult conversation.”
Next week, the Malcolm Renfrew Interdisciplinary Colloquium will share its penultimate presentation for spring 2019. Instead of meeting in the Idaho Commons Whitewater room, the colloquium will meet in the physical education building for a presentation on European martial arts by Norman Pendegraft. The event will run from 12:30 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 30 in Physical Education Building room 111.
Lex Miller can be reached at [email protected]