women's disenfranchisement essay

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100 Years and Counting: The Fight for Women’s Suffrage Continues

One hundred years ago this month, the Nineteenth Amendment became part of the U.S. Constitution, giving women the right to vote in the single largest voting rights expansion in our nation’s history. However, as we commemorate this historic centennial, we must remember that not all women got the right to vote in 1920.

To this day, women who are people of color, transgender, incarcerated or formerly incarcerated, or have disabilities continue to face barriers to voting, along with other marginalized groups. We have more work to do to ensure that all women — and all people, regardless of gender identity — are able to exercise their voting rights. 

Women of color

For many decades after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, Black women continued to be blocked from accessing the ballot by Jim Crow-era restrictions aimed at segregating Black Americans, like poll taxes and literacy tests. Native Americans were unable to vote in all states until the 1960s, even after being federally recognized as U.S. citizens in 1924. Asian American immigrant women were unable to vote until immigration and naturalization restrictions were lifted in 1952.

Through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Congress took action to ensure that communities of color were able to register to vote, cast their ballots, and elect representatives of their choice. However, relics of the Jim Crow era persist in our legal and electoral systems.

Incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women

Felony disenfranchisement laws strip voting rights from millions of people convicted of certain felonies—and can prohibit people who have felony convictions from voting while incarcerated, while on parole or on probation, or even after completing their sentence. These laws, enacted in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, were deliberately designed to target Black populations and enshrine white supremacy. Due to the racist roots of our nation’s mass incarceration crisis, the majority of those barred from voting under these laws continue to be people of color, especially Black men. 

Women make up an increasing part of the population harmed by felony disenfranchisement, as their incarceration rates are growing at more than twice the rate of men. By 2017, over 1.3 million women and girls—disproportionately people of color, and from low-income communities—were incarcerated, on probation, or on parole.

Trans women and other trans and non-binary people

Trans women, and the trans and non-binary community at large, also face barriers to voting due to voter registration forms and voter ID laws that ask for gender and do not permit voters to update their names, gender markers, or photos. Currently, 36 states have voter ID laws, and 18 of those states specifically require a photo ID. Such laws pose a barrier to trans voters, for whom updating identification cards can be a significant financial and administrative burden. Even in states that do allow trans and non-binary people to correct their IDs, voters often have to jump through hoops to do so. For example, trans people in some states are required to prove that they have undergone gender confirmation surgery , even though many transgender people cannot afford it, and some do not want it as part of their gender-affirming care. 

Not only do these laws block hundreds of thousands of trans people from exercising their right to vote, they also further marginalize the trans community, serving as a stark reminder that the government does not respect their identities. Furthermore, these impacts are most keenly felt by trans voters who belong to other politically-marginalized groups; data suggest that “transgender citizens are more likely to have no accurate IDs if they are young adults (age 18-24; 69 percent), people of color (48 percent), students (54 percent), those with low incomes (less than $10,000 annual household income; 60 percent), or have disabilities (55 percent).”

Even in places where there are minimal legal and policy barriers for transgender voters, voting in-person can lead to harassment or discrimination — including from poll workers.

Women with disabilities

Historically, people with certain types of disabilities have been disenfranchised by state laws that explicitly denied the right to vote to people who were assumed to lack the “mental capacity” to vote. These laws were also used to justify the continued disenfranchisement of women and the Black community. Across the country , such laws are largely still in effect. As a result, on an annual basis, tens of thousands of voters are blocked from the ballot box without any judicial determination that they lack the capacity to vote. 

Voters with disabilities also continue to face architectural, attitudinal, and even digital barriers to the franchise. Recent federal studies have consistently revealed that the majority of polling places surveyed were not fully accessible. Additionally, voters with disabilities are severely underrepresented in our political system, even though they make up one-sixth of the American electorate. Voters with disabilities are also far less likely to participate in elections than their peers, partially because of feelings of political alienation that are reinforced by the barriers they face when attempting to vote. Most states have made voter registration and absentee ballot application forms or portals, in addition to critical information about voting procedures, available online. However, few state election websites have been made fully accessible to allow voters with disabilities to navigate them autonomously. 

On top of these barriers, the present pandemic has created additional hurdles for voters with disabilities, many of whom have medical conditions that render them at high risk for severe illness or death if they contract COVID-19. Urban areas, precisely where people with disabilities are more likely to be women , are where the health risks of voting in-person are most acute. COVID-19 has highlighted the need for universal and accessible mail-in voting . Voters with disabilities are more likely to live alone than the general population, meaning they are less likely to be able to vote by mail in states that require a witness requirement for absentee voting. They are also far more likely to live in congregate care facilities—which have been ravaged by COVID-19 . Though residents of congregate care facilities account for only 1 percent of the U.S. population, 50 percent of all COVID-19-related deaths have occurred in those facilities. 

Youth, caregivers, and immigrants 

Young people, such as college students, may face difficulty meeting voter ID requirements if they go to school outside their home state. Several states prohibit students from using their student IDs to vote, and are increasing other obstacles for students, such as requiring them to prove their domicile or closing polling places on college campuses. Women are disproportionately affected by these restrictions, as the majority of students enrolled in higher education are women. 

Most caregivers are also women, and specifically women of color . Roughly 85 percent of Black mothers and 60 percent of Latinx mothers are caregivers for their families as well as primary or co-breadwinners. Cutbacks to early in-person voting opportunities and lack of no-excuse absentee voting options for those seeking to vote by mail block many caregivers from accessing the ballot. Caregivers require more flexibility in voting hours and options to be able to cast their ballots. 

More than 12 million immigrant women have become naturalized U.S. citizens. Naturalized citizens have lower than average electoral participation rates, partly due to lack of outreach from political campaigns, as well as widespread language access barriers. Unfortunately, because of disruptions caused by COVID-19, more than 300,000 immigrants may not complete the naturalization process in time to vote in the November election. These voters are disproportionately women, as women make up the majority of naturalized citizens from nine of the top 10 countries of origin.

The fight for suffrage continues

Since the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, several critical civil rights protections have solidified access to the ballot, including the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990. In 2013, the Supreme Court gutted provisions of the Voting Rights Act which protected voters from discriminatory election practices. The decision cleared the path for states to pass a slew of new voter suppression laws, many of which rolled back access to the ballot for historically disenfranchised groups, including women. Meanwhile, the ADA has been woefully under-enforced in the elections context. 

Today, the ACLU is actively litigating to safeguard voters’ rights. We have initiated lawsuits across the country (20 and counting) to expand access to voting by mail to ensure that voters can vote safely from their homes, protect themselves and the public at large, and minimize the risk COVID-19 transmission while exercising the fundamental right to vote. We are also going to trial next month with our partners at the Native American Rights Fund to challenge a law that severely inhibits Native Americans ’ access to the ballot. 

The ACLU also went back to court this month to defend our victory protecting the voting rights of Floridians with past felony convictions. Before the historic passage of Amendment 4 in 2018, Florida was one of four states that banned voting for life for people convicted of a felony, disenfranchising more than a million people. Amendment 4 was one of the largest expansions of voting rights since the Nineteenth Amendment. 

Throughout the country, activists are fighting voter suppression tactics and pushing to expand access to the ballot through the VRAA , the VoteSafe Act , and the HEROES Act . The ACLU is also advocating for the Accessible Voting Act , which would establish new protections for voters with disabilities, seniors, Indigenous voters, and language minority voters. Activists on the ground can also spread awareness with our Let People Vote educational resource on voting by mail, our Know Your Voting Rights pages, and by sharing our Let People with Disabilities Vote content.

On the 100th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment, we must remember that the law did not enfranchise all women equally and let that knowledge  guide us as we march forward in our fight for voting rights. 

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Enfranchisement of Women

[Editorial Note: When this essay first appeared in the Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review , one of England's premier journals of political opinion, virtually everyone attributed it to John Stuart Mill. Mill, widely recognized as one of the most eminent British economists and philosophers, later credited the essay to his wife, Harriet Taylor. (See his letter to Paulina Wright Davis included in her address to the 1870 Anniversary Convention.) Similarly, he wrote that the views expressed in his subsequent book, The Subjection of Women , also derived from Taylor. In his Autobiography he went even further, claiming that Taylor was responsible for the key ideas in most of his work. Biographers and historians have long sought to trace the parameters of Taylor's influence upon Mill, but all agree that it was both profound and exceedingly difficult to pin down. Most scholars, however, accept Mill's claim that Taylor wrote "Enfranchisement of Women."

The essay itself had a profound effect on both sides of the Atlantic, not least of all because of the (mistaken) attribution of its authorship to Mill. It gave the woman's rights movement an immediate claim to intellectual respectability at a time when most commentators, when they deigned notice the arguments of movement spokespeople, only scoffed. It also directly affected the debate over woman's rights within the fledgling movement. The resolutions adopted at the 1851 national woman's rights convention, according to Wendell Phillips who introduced them, sought to embody the essay's central contentions.

"Enfranchisement of Women" also anticipated some of the arguments that would continue to divide advocates of woman's rights down to the present such as that between so-called "difference" feminists and "equality" feminists as the following quotation demonstrates;

Like other popular movements . . . this may be seriously retarded by the blunders of its adherents. Tried by the ordinary standard of public meetings, the speeches at the [1850 Worcester] Convention are remarkable for the preponderance of the rational over the declamatory element; but there are some exceptions; and things to which it is impossible to attach any rational meaning, have found their way into the resolutions. Thus, the resolution which sets forth the claims made in behalf of women, after claiming equality in education, in industrial pursuits, and in political rights, enumerates as a fourth head of demand something under the name of "social and spiritual union," and "a medium of expressing the highest moral and spiritual views of justice," with other similar ver[P.23]biage, serving only to mar the simplicity and rationality of the other demands: resembling those who would weakly attempt to combine nominal equality between men and women with enforced distinctions in their privileges and functions. What is wanted for women is equal rights, equal admission to all social privileges; not a position apart, a sort of sentimental priesthood. . . .The strength of the cause lies in the support of those who are influenced by reason and principle; and to attempt to recommend it by sentimentalities, absurd in reason, and inconsistent with the principle on which the movement is founded, is to place a good cause on a level with a bad one.]

[Harriet Taylor], "Enfranchisement of Women," reprinted from the Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review for July 1851, Woman's Rights Tracts, . . . . No. 4 (Syracuse, 1852 or 1853) as excerpted.

P.1: Most of our readers will probably learn from these pages [ New-York Tribune, For Europe , October 29, 1850], for the first time, that there has arisen in the United States, and in the most enlightened and civilized portion of them, an organized agitation on a new question--new, not to thinkers, nor to any one by whom the principles of free and popular government are felt as well as acknowledged, but new, and even unheard of, as a subject for public meetings and practical political action. This question is, the enfranchisement of women; their admission, in law and in fact, to equality in all rights, political, civil and social, with the male citizens of the community.

It will add to the surprise with which many will receive this intelligence, that the agitation which has commenced is not a pleading by male writers and orators for women, those who are professedly to be benefitted remaining either indifferent or ostensibly hostile; it is a political movement, practical in its objects, carried on in a form which denotes an intention to preserve. And it is a movement not merely for women , but by them. Its first public manifestation appears to have been a Convention of Women, held in the State of Ohio, in the Spring of 1850. Of this meeting we have seen no report. On the 23rd and 24th of October last, a succession of public meetings was held at Worcester, in Massachusetts, under the name of a "Women's [sic] Rights Convention, of which the President was a woman [Paulina Wright Davis], and nearly all the chief speakers women; numerously reinforced, however, by men among whom were some of the most distinguished leaders in the kindred cause of negro emancipation. A general, and four special committees were nominated, for the purpose of carrying on the undertaking until the next annual meeting.

. . . . . . . . .

P.2: . . . In regard to the quality of the speaking, the proceedings bear an advantageous comparison with those of any popular movement with which we are acquainted, either in this country or in America. Very rarely, in the oratory of public meetings, is the part of verbiage and declamation so small, that of calm good sense and season so considerable. The result of the Convention was, in every respect, encouraging to those by whom it was summoned; and it is probably destined to inaugurate one of the most important of the movements towards political and social reform, which are the best characteristics of the present age.

That the promoters of this new agitation take their stand on principles, and do not fear to declare these in their widest extent, without time serving or compromise, will be seen from the resolutions adopted by the Convention . . . .[here follows a partial transcription of the resolutions. For the full text, see the Proceedings .]

It would be difficult to put so much true, just, and reasonable meaning into a style so little calculated to recommend it as that of some [P.3] of the resolutions. But whatever objection may be made to some of the expressions, none, in our opinion, can be made to the demands themselves. As a question of justice, the case seems to us too clear for dispute. As one of expediency, the more thoroughly it is examined the stronger it will appear.

. . . . . . . .

P.3: . . . After a struggle which, by many of its incidents, deserves the name heroic, the abolitionists are now so strong in numbers and influence, that they hold the balance of parties in the United States. It was fitting that the men whose names will remain associated with the extirpation, from the democratic soil of America, of the aristocracy of color, should be among the originators, for America and for the rest of the world, of the first collective protest against the aristocracy of sex; a distinction as accidental as that of color, and fully as irrelevant to all questions of government.

. . . . . . .

P. 5: . . While, far from being expedient, we are firmly convinced that the division of mankind into two castes, one born to rule over the other, is in this case, as in all cases, an unqualified mischief; a source of perversion and demoralization, both to the favored class, and to those at whose expense they are favored; producing none of the good which it is the custom to ascribe to it, and forming a bar, almost insuperable while it lasts, to any really vital improvement, either in the character or in the social condition of the human race.

P. 6: . . . Throughout history, the nations, races, classes, which found themselves the strongest, either in muscles, in riches, or in military discipline, have conquered and held in subjection the rest. If, even in the most improved nations, the law of the sword is at last discountenanced as unworthy, it is only since the calumniated eighteenth century. 1 Wars of conquest have only ceased since democratic revolutions began. The world is very young, and has only just begun to cast off injustice. It is only now getting rid of negro slavery. It is only now getting rid of monarchial despotism. It is only now getting rid of hereditary feudal nobility. It is only now getting rid of disabilities on the grounds of religion. 2 It is only beginning to treat any men as citizens, except the rich and a favored portion of the middle class. 3 Can we wonder that it has not yet done as much for women? As society was constituted until the last few generations, inequality was its very basis; association grounded on equal rights scarcely existed; to be equals was to be enemies; two persons could hardly cooperate in anything, or meet in any amicable relation, without the law's appointing that one of them should be the superior of the other. Mankind have outgrown this state, and all things now tend to substitute, as the general principle of human relations, a just equality, instead of the dominion of the strongest. But of all relations, that be[P. 7]tween men and women being the nearest and most intimate, and connected with the greatest number of strong emotions, was sure to be the last to throw off the old rule and receive the new; for in proportion to the strength of a feeling, is the tenacity with which it clings to the forms and circumstances with which it has even accidentally become associated.

When a prejudice, which has any hold on the feelings, finds itself reduced to the unpleasant necessity of assigning reasons, it thinks it has done enough when it has re-asserted the very point in dispute, in phrases with appeal to the pre-existing feeling. Thus, many persons think they have sufficiently justified the restrictions on women's field of action, when they have said that the pursuits from which women are excluded are unfeminine , and that the proper sphere of women is not politics or publicity, but private and domestic life.

P. 9: Concerning the fitness, then, of women for politics, there can be no question: but the dispute is more likely to turn upon the fitness of politics for women. When the reasons alleged for excluding women from active life in all its higher departments, are stripped of their garb of declamatory phrases, and reduced to the simple expression of meaning, they seem to be mainly three: the incompatibility of active life with maternity, and the cares of a household; secondly, its alleged hardening effect on the character; and thirdly, the inexpediency of making an addition to the already excessive pressure of competition in every kind of professional or lucrative employment.

The first, the maternity argument, is usually laid most stress upon: although (it needs hardly be said) this reason, if it be one, can apply only to mothers. It is neither necessary nor just to make imperative on women that they shall be either mothers or nothing; or that if they have been mothers once, they shall be nothing else during the whole remainder of their lives.

P. 10: . . . There is no inherent reason or necessity that all women should voluntarily choose to devote their lives to one animal function and its consequences. Numbers of women are wives and mothers only because there is no other career open to them, no other occupation for their feelings or their activities. Every improvement in their education and enlargement of their faculties--everything which renders them more qualified for any other mode of life, increases the number of those to whom it is an injury and an oppression to be denied the choice.

But secondly, it is urged, that to give the same freedom of occupation to women as to men, would be an injurious addition to the crowd of competitors, by whom the avenues to almost all kinds of employment are choked up, and its remuneration depressed. This argument, it is to be observed, does not reach the political question. It gives no excuse for withholding from women the rights of citizenship. . . . Even if every woman, as matters now stand, had a claim on some man for support, how infinitely preferable is it that part of the income should be of the woman's earning, even if the aggregate sum were but little increased by it, rather than that she should be compelled to stand aside in order that men may be the sole earners, and the sole dispensers of what is earned.

P. 11: the third objection to the admission of women to political or professional life, its alleged hardening tendency, belongs to an age now past, and is scarcely to be comprehended by people of the present time. There are still, however, persons who say that the world and its avocations render men selfish and unfeeling; that the struggles, rivalries and collisions of business and of politics make them harsh and unamiable; that if half the species must unavoidably be given up to these things, it is the more necessary that the other half should be kept free from them; that to preserve women from the bad influences of the world, is the only chance of preventing men from being wholly given up to them.

P. 12: . . . in the present condition of human life, we do not know where those hardening influences are to be found, to which men are subject, and from which women are at present exempt. Individuals now-a-days are seldom called upon to fight hand to hand, even with peaceful weapons; personal enmities and rivalries count for little in worldly transactions; the general pressure of circumstances, not the adverse will of individuals, is the obstacle men now have to make head against. That pressure, when excessive, breaks the spirit, and cramps and sours the feelings, but not less of women than of men, since they suffer certainly not less from its evils.

P. 12: But, in truth, none of these arguments and considerations touch the foundations of the subject. The real question is, whether it is right and expedient that one-half of the human race should pass through life in a state of forced subordination to the other half. . . .

When, however, we ask why the existence of one-half the species should be merely ancillary to that of the other--why each woman should be a mere appendage to a man, allowed to have no interests of her own, that there may be nothing to compete in her mind with his [P. 13] interests and his pleasure; the only reason which can be given is, that men like it. It is agreeable to them that men should live for their own sake, women for the sake of men; and the qualities and conduct in subjects which are agreeable to rulers, they succeed for a long time in making the subjects themselves consider as their appropriate virtues.

P. 16: . . . Our argument here brings us into collision with what may be termed the moderate reformers of the education of women; a sort of persons who cross the path of improvement on all great questions; those who would maintain the old bad principles, mitigating their consequences. These say, that women should be, not slaves, nor servants, but companions; and educated for that office; (they do not say that men should be educated to be the companions of women). But since uncultivated women are not suitable companions for cultivated men, and a man who feels interest in things above and beyond the family circle, wishes that his companion should sympathize with him in that interest; they therefore say, let women improve their understanding and taste, acquire general knowledge, cultivate poetry, art, even coquet with science, and some stretch their liberality so far as to say, inform themselves on politics; not as pursuits, but sufficiently to feel an interest in the subjects, and to be capable of holding a conversation on them with the husband, or at least of understanding and imbibing his wisdom. Very agreeable to him, no doubt, but unfortunately the reverse of improving. . . . The modern, and what are regarded as the improved and enlightened modes of education of women, abjure, as far as words go, an education of mere show, and profess to aim at solid instruction, but mean by that expression, superficial information on solid subjects. Except accomplishments, 4 which are now generally regarded as to be taught well, if taught at all, nothing is taught to women thoroughly. Small portions only of what is attempted to teach thoroughly to boys, are the whole of what it is intended or desired to teach to women. What makes intelligent beings is the power of thought; the stimuli which call forth that power are the interest and dignity of thought itself, and a field for its practical application. Both motives are cut off from those who are told from infancy that thought, [P. 17] and all its greater applications, are other people's business, while theirs is to make themselves agreeable to other people. High mental powers in women will be but an exceptional accident, until every career is open to them, and until they, as well as men, are educated for themselves and for the world -not one sex for the other.

P. 17: The common opinion is, that whatever may be the case with the intellectual, the moral influence of women over men is almost always salutary. It is, we are often told, the great counteractive of selfishness. However the case may be as to personal influence, the influence of the position tends eminently to selfishness. The most insignificant of men, the man who can obtain influence or consideration nowhere else, finds one place where he is chief and head. There is one person, often greatly his superior in understanding, who is obliged to consult him, and whom he is not obliged to consult. He is judge, magistrate, ruler, over their joint concerns; arbiter of all differences between them. . . . The generous mind, in such a situation, makes the balance incline against his own side . . . . But how is it when average men are invested with this power, without [P. 18] reciprocity and without responsibility? Give such a man the idea that he is first in law and in opinion--that to will is his part, and hers to submit; it is absurd to suppose that this idea merely glides over his mind, without sinking in, or having any effect on his feelings and practice. . . .If there is any self-will in the man, he becomes either the conscious or unconscious despot of his household. The wife, indeed, often succeeds in gaining her objects, but it is by some of the many various forms of indirectness and management.

Thus the position is corrupting equally to both; in the one it produces the vices of power, in the other those of artifice. Women, in their present physical and moral state, having stronger impulses, would naturally be franker and more direct than men; yet all the old saws and traditions represent them as artful and dissembling. Why? Because their only way to their objects is by indirect paths. In all countries where women have strong wishes and active minds, this consequence is inevitable; and if it is less conspicuous in England than in some other places, it is because English women, saving occasional exceptions, have ceased to have either strong wishes or active minds.

P. 22: . . .In the United States at least, there are women, seemingly numerous, and now organized for action on the public mind, who demand equality in the fullest acceptation [sic] of that word, and demand it by a straight-forward appeal to men's sense of justice, not plead for it with a timid deprecation of their displeasure.

Like other popular movements, however, this may be seriously retarded by the blunders of its adherents. Tried by the ordinary standard of public meetings, the speeches at the Convention are remarkable for the preponderance of the rational over the declamatory element; but there are some exceptions; and things to which it is impossible to attach any rational meaning, have found their way into the resolutions. Thus, the resolution which sets forth the claims made in behalf of women, after claiming equality in education, in industrial pursuits, and in political rights, enumerates as a fourth head of demand something under the name of "social and spiritual union," and "a medium of expressing the highest moral and spiritual views of justice," with other similar ver[P.23]biage, serving only to mar the simplicity and rationality of the other demands: resembling those who would weakly attempt to combine nominal equality between men and women with enforced distinctions in their privileges and functions. What is wanted for women is equal rights, equal admission to all social privileges; not a position apart, a sort of sentimental priesthood. . . .The strength of the cause lies in the support of those who are influenced by reason and principle; and to attempt to recommend it by sentimentalities, absurd in reason, and inconsistent with the principle on which the movement is founded, is to place a good cause on a level with a bad one.

There are indications that the example of America will be followed on this side of the Atlantic; and the first step has been taken in that part of England where every serious movement in the direction of political progress has its commencement--the manufacturing districts of the North. On the 13 of February, 1851, a petition of women, agreed to by a public meeting at Sheffield, and claiming the elective franchise, was presented to the House of Lords by the Earl of Carlisle.

1 The reference is to the American and French Revolutions.

2 A reference to the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1832 by which Parliament extended limited freedom of religion to Catholics and repealed the provisions barring them from holding public office.

3 In 1833 Parliament passed a Reform Bill which extended the franchise to males who met a specified property qualification.

4 A reference to the teaching of subjects such as drawing and music in schools for women.

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Copyright ©2023, Worcester Women's History Project

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Harriet taylor mill's " the enfranchisement of women".

The Enfranchisement of Women was written by Harriet Taylor Mill and published by the Westminster Review in July 1851. This essay was considered one of the most significant texts in feminine history as it came out during the early English feminist movement where concerns over women’s employment, education and legal status in society were brought up (Hackleman 274). Through this published work, Mill advocated for the “enfranchisement of women; their admission, in law and in fact, to equality in all rights, political, civil, and social, with the male citizens of the community”(Mill 3). Mill made several important points throughout her work and one of the issues she brought up was that the present conditions did not allow women the opportunity to live according to their “nature” or desires since they were deprived of rights such as legal rights. She brought up the issue of women being excluded from common rights of citizenship, bringing up an example of  British law that claims, “all persons should be tried by their peers; yet women whenever tried, are tried by male judges and a male jury” (Mill 6). The lack of freedom for women also forced them to become wives and mothers because these were the only options that they had. Mill brought up the argument that women were largely oppressed because of the maternal and care-taking responsibilities placed upon them, which was another way that women were deprived of being able to live according to their “nature”. Mill also advocated for women to have the ability to participate in the work force and public life, stating how women would prefer that that part of the income would be from their own doing (Miller). Mill believed that women deserved the same educational rights as men. Women were expected to take care of their families and also encourage their husbands’ moral and intellectual developments. If women did not go to school, they would not be able to support their husbands and families in general.

        Mill also brought up the situation of the lower class and claimed that, “nothing will refine and elevate the lower classes but the elevation of women to perfect equality” (Mill 24). Mill claimed that the working-class women suffered the most as the law denied them property and control over earnings and at the same time, she brought up the idea of violence. She argued that lower-class women were the biggest victims of domestic violence and the unjust law (Deutscher 139). In The Enfranchisement of Women , Mill made it clear that the freedom of women was part of the general progress of England during the 19 th century in general. She pointed out that, “for the interest, therefore, not only of women but of men, and of human improvement in the widest sense, the emancipation of women...cannot stop where it is (Mill 19 ). Mill’s work represented a beginning in the improvement of women’s rights condition in 19 th century England and this issue was only further escalated by future feminists and supporters for better women’s rights. There was debate over whether Harriet Taylor Mill was the main author of this work because she had collaborated with her husband, John Stuart Mill on several works and many of the ideas in this essay were similar to her husband’s essay, The Subjection of Women , but despite conflicting evidence, there was a general consensus that Harriet was the article’s main author since many of the views in the essay corresponded to her radical view of gender roles (Miller). Although Mill was not given the full credit at first and her work was relatively unknown, she was still able to make a big contribution to women’s rights. Her radical views shown through The Enfranchisement of Women and she gave a very clear and rational analysis of the oppression and coercion that women faced in a time when they were considered nothing compared to men and were only defined by their reproductive and care-taking responsibilities (Deutscher 278). Harriet Taylor Mill was able to use this essay to help encourage women to fight for their rights and place in society.   

Works Cited:

 Deutscher, Penelope. “When Feminism Is ‘High’ and Ignorance Is ‘Low’: Harriet Taylor Mill  

    on the Progress of the Species.” Hypatia, vol. 21, no. 3, 2006, pp. 136–150. JSTOR,

     www.jstor.org/stable/3810955. Accessed 20 Sept. 2020 .

Hackleman, Leah D. “Suppressed Speech: The Language of Emotion in Harriet Taylor’s The

     Enfranchisement of Women.”  Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal , vol. 20, no. 3–

     4, 1992, pp. 273–286.  EBSCOhost , doi:10.1080/00497878.1992.9978913.

Mill, Harriet Hardy Taylor.  Enfranchisement of Women . 1868.  JSTOR ,

      jstor.org/stable/10.2307/60203575. Accessed 20 Sept. 2020.

Miller, Dale E., "Harriet Taylor Mill", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2018

       Edition) , Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =

     < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2018/entries/harriet-mill/ >.

“Portait of Harriet Taylor Mill” Wikimedia Commons, London’s National Portrait Gallery,

      https://www.college.columbia.edu/core/content/harriet-taylor-mill . Accessed 21 Sept. 2020.

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19th Amendment

By: History.com Editors

Updated: March 9, 2022 | Original: March 5, 2010

The 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granted American women the right to vote, a right known as women’s suffrage , and was ratified on August 18, 1920, ending almost a century of protest. In 1848, the movement for women’s rights launched on a national level with the Seneca Falls Convention , organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott . 

Following the convention, the demand for the vote became a centerpiece of the women’s rights movement. Stanton and Mott, along with Susan B. Anthony and other activists, raised public awareness and lobbied the government to grant voting rights to women. After a lengthy battle, these groups finally emerged victorious with the passage of the 19th Amendment .

Despite the passage of the amendment and the decades-long contributions of Black women to achieve suffrage , poll taxes, local laws and other restrictions continued to block women of color from voting . Black men and women also faced intimidation and often violent opposition at the polls or when attempting to register to vote. It would take more than 40 years for all women to achieve voting equality.

Women’s Suffrage

During America’s early history, women were denied some of the basic rights enjoyed by male citizens.

For example, married women couldn’t own property and had no legal claim to any money they might earn, and no female had the right to vote. Women were expected to focus on housework and motherhood, not politics.

The campaign for women’s suffrage was a small but growing movement in the decades before the Civil War . Starting in the 1820s, various reform groups proliferated across the U.S. including temperance leagues , the abolitionist movement and religious groups. Women played a prominent role in a number of them.

Meanwhile, many American women were resisting the notion that the ideal woman was a pious, submissive wife and mother concerned exclusively with home and family. Combined, these factors contributed to a new way of thinking about what it meant to be a woman and a citizen in the United States.

Seneca Falls Convention

It was not until 1848 that the movement for women’s rights began to organize at the national level.

In July of that year, reformers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott organized the first women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York (where Stanton lived). More than 300 people—mostly women, but also some men—attended, including former African-American slave and activist Frederick Douglass .

In addition to their belief that women should be afforded better opportunities for education and employment, most of the delegates at the Seneca Falls Convention agreed that American women were autonomous individuals who deserved their own political identities.

Declaration of Sentiments

A group of delegates led by Stanton produced a “Declaration of Sentiments” document, modeled after the Declaration of Independence , which stated: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

What this meant, among other things, was that the delegates believed women should have the right to vote.

Following the convention, the idea of voting rights for women was mocked in the press and some delegates withdrew their support for the Declaration of Sentiments. Nonetheless, Stanton and Mott persisted—they went on to spearhead additional women’s rights conferences and they were eventually joined in their advocacy work by Susan B. Anthony and other activists.

National Suffrage Groups Established

With the onset of the Civil War, the suffrage movement lost some momentum, as many women turned their attention to assisting in efforts related to the conflict between the states.

After the war, women’s suffrage endured another setback, when the women’s rights movement found itself divided over the issue of voting rights for Black men. Stanton and some other suffrage leaders objected to the proposed 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution , which would give Black men the right to vote, but failed to extend the same privilege to American women of any skin color.

In 1869, Stanton and Anthony formed the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) with their eyes on a federal constitutional amendment that would grant women the right to vote.

That same year, abolitionists Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell founded the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA); the group’s leaders supported the 15th Amendment and feared it would not pass if it included voting rights for women. ( The 15th Amendment was ratified in 1870. )

The AWSA believed women’s enfranchisement could best be gained through amendments to individual state constitutions. Despite the divisions between the two organizations, there was a victory for voting rights in 1869 when the Wyoming Territory granted all-female residents age 21 and older the right to vote. (When Wyoming was admitted to the Union in 1890, women’s suffrage remained part of the state constitution.)

By 1878, the NWSA and the collective suffrage movement had gathered enough influence to lobby the U.S. Congress for a constitutional amendment. Congress responded by forming committees in the House of Representatives and the Senate to study and debate the issue. However, when the proposal finally reached the Senate floor in 1886, it was defeated.

In 1890, the NWSA and the AWSA merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). The new organization’s strategy was to lobby for women’s voting rights on a state-by-state basis. Within six years, Colorado, Utah and Idaho adopted amendments to their state constitutions granting women the right to vote. In 1900, with Stanton and Anthony advancing in age, Carrie Chapman Catt stepped up to lead NAWSA.

Black Women in the Suffrage Movement

During debate over the 15th Amendment, white suffragist leaders like Stanton and Anthony had argued fiercely against Black men getting the vote before white women. Such a stance led to a break with their abolitionist allies, like Douglass, and ignored the distinct viewpoints and goals of Black women, led by prominent activists like Sojourner Truth and Frances E.W. Harper , fighting alongside them for the right to vote. 

As the fight for voting rights continued, Black women in the suffrage movement continued to experience discrimination from white suffragists who wanted to distance their fight for voting rights from the question of race. 

Pushed out of national suffrage organizations, Black suffragists founded their own groups, including the National Association of Colored Women Clubs (NACWC), founded in 1896 by a group of women including Harper, Mary Church Terrell and Ida B. Wells-Barnett . They fought hard for the passage of the 19th Amendment, seeing the women’s right to vote as a crucial tool to winning legal protections for Black women (as well as Black men) against continued repression and violence.

State-level Successes for Voting Rights

The turn of the 20th century brought renewed momentum to the women's suffrage cause. Although the deaths of Stanton in 1902 and Anthony in 1906 appeared to be setbacks, the NASWA under the leadership of Catt achieved rolling successes for women’s enfranchisement at state levels.

Between 1910 and 1918, the Alaska Territory, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota and Washington extended voting rights to women.

Also during this time, through the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women (later, the Women’s Political Union), Stanton’s daughter Harriot Stanton Blatch introduced parades, pickets and marches as means of calling attention to the cause. These tactics succeeded in raising awareness and led to unrest in Washington, D.C.

Did you know? Wyoming, the first state to grant voting rights to women, was also the first state to elect a female governor. Nellie Tayloe Ross (1876-1977) was elected governor of the Equality State—Wyoming's official nickname—in 1924. And from 1933 to 1953, she served as the first woman director of the U.S. Mint.

Protest and Progress

On the eve of the inauguration of President Woodrow Wilson in 1913, protesters thronged a massive suffrage parade in the nation’s capital, and hundreds of women were injured. That same year, Alice Paul founded the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, which later became the National Woman’s Party.

The organization staged numerous demonstrations and regularly picketed the White House , among other militant tactics. As a result of these actions, some group members were arrested and served jail time.

In 1918, President Wilson switched his stand on women’s voting rights from objection to support through the influence of Catt, who had a less-combative style than Paul. Wilson also tied the proposed suffrage amendment to America’s involvement in World War I and the increased role women had played in the war efforts.

When the amendment came up for vote, Wilson addressed the Senate in favor of suffrage. As reported in The New York Times on October 1, 1918, Wilson said, “I regard the extension of suffrage to women as vitally essential to the successful prosecution of the great war of humanity in which we are engaged.”

However, despite Wilson’s newfound support, the amendment proposal failed in the Senate by two votes. Another year passed before Congress took up the measure again.

The Final Struggle For Passage

On May 21, 1919, U.S. Representative James R. Mann, a Republican from Illinois and chairman of the Suffrage Committee, proposed the House resolution to approve the Susan Anthony Amendment granting women the right to vote. The measure passed the House 304 to 89—a full 42 votes above the required two-thirds majority.

Two weeks later, on June 4, 1919, the U.S. Senate passed the 19th Amendment by two votes over its two-thirds required majority, 56-25. The amendment was then sent to the states for ratification.

Within six days of the ratification cycle, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin each ratified the amendment. Kansas, New York and Ohio followed on June 16, 1919. By March of the following year, a total of 35 states had approved the amendment, just shy of the three-fourths required for ratification.

Southern states were adamantly opposed to the amendment, however, and seven of them—Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, South Carolina and Virginia—had already rejected it before Tennessee’s vote on August 18, 1920. It was up to Tennessee to tip the scale for woman suffrage.

The outlook appeared bleak, given the outcomes in other Southern states and given the position of Tennessee’s state legislators in their 48-48 tie. The state’s decision came down to 23-year-old Representative Harry T. Burn, a Republican from McMinn County, to cast the deciding vote.

Although Burn opposed the amendment, his mother convinced him to approve it. Mrs. Burn reportedly wrote to her son: “Don’t forget to be a good boy and help Mrs. Catt put the ‘rat’ in ratification.”

With Burn’s vote, the 19th Amendment was fully ratified.

When Did Women Get the Right to Vote?

On August 26, 1920, the 19th Amendment was certified by U.S. Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby, and women finally achieved the long-sought right to vote throughout the United States.

On November 2 of that same year, more than 8 million women across the U.S. voted in elections for the first time.

It took over 60 years for the remaining 12 states to ratify the 19th Amendment. Mississippi was the last to do so, on March 22, 1984.

What Is the 19 Amendment?

The 19th Amendment granted women the right to vote, and reads:

“The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

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THE AMERICAN YAWP

20. the progressive era.

From an undated William Jennings Bryan campaign print, “Shall the People Rule?” Library of Congress .

*The American Yawp is an evolving, collaborative text. Please click  here  to improve this chapter.*

I. Introduction

Ii. mobilizing for reform, iii. women’s movements, iv. targeting the trusts, v. progressive environmentalism, vi. jim crow and african american life, vii. conclusion, viii. primary sources, ix. reference material.

“Never in the history of the world was society in so terrific flux as it is right now,” Jack London wrote in The Iron Heel , his 1908 dystopian novel in which a corporate oligarchy comes to rule the United States. He wrote, “The swift changes in our industrial system are causing equally swift changes in our religious, political, and social structures. An unseen and fearful revolution is taking place in the fiber and structure of society. One can only dimly feel these things, but they are in the air, now, today.” 1

The many problems associated with the Gilded Age—the rise of unprecedented fortunes and unprecedented poverty, controversies over imperialism, urban squalor, a near-war between capital and labor, loosening social mores, unsanitary food production, the onrush of foreign immigration, environmental destruction, and the outbreak of political radicalism—confronted Americans. Terrible forces seemed out of control and the nation seemed imperiled. Farmers and workers had been waging political war against capitalists and political conservatives for decades, but then, slowly, toward the end of the nineteenth century a new generation of middle-class Americans interjected themselves into public life and advocated new reforms to tame the runaway world of the Gilded Age.

Widespread dissatisfaction with new trends in American society spurred the Progressive Era, named for the various progressive movements that attracted various constituencies around various reforms. Americans had many different ideas about how the country’s development should be managed and whose interests required the greatest protection. Reformers sought to clean up politics; Black Americans continued their long struggle for civil rights; women demanded the vote with greater intensity while also demanding a more equal role in society at large; and workers demanded higher wages, safer workplaces, and the union recognition that would guarantee these rights. Whatever their goals, reform became the word of the age, and the sum of their efforts, whatever their ultimate impact or original intentions, gave the era its name.

In 1911 the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in Manhattan caught fire. The doors of the factory had been chained shut to prevent employees from taking unauthorized breaks (the managers who held the keys saved themselves, but left over two hundred women behind). A rickety fire ladder on the side of the building collapsed immediately. Women lined the rooftop and windows of the ten-story building and jumped, landing in a “mangled, bloody pulp.” Life nets held by firemen tore at the impact of the falling bodies. Among the onlookers, “women were hysterical, scores fainted; men wept as, in paroxysms of frenzy, they hurled themselves against the police lines.” By the time the fire burned itself out, 71 workers were injured and 146 had died. 2

Policemen place the bodies of workers who were burned alive in the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire into coffins. Photographs like this made real the atrocities that could result from unsafe working conditions. March 25, 1911. Library of Congress .

A year before, the Triangle workers had gone on strike demanding union recognition, higher wages, and better safety conditions. Remembering their workers’ “chief value,” the owners of the factory decided that a viable fire escape and unlocked doors were too expensive and called in the city police to break up the strike. After the 1911 fire, reporter Bill Shepherd reflected, “I looked upon the heap of dead bodies and I remembered these girls were shirtwaist makers. I remembered their great strike last year in which the same girls had demanded more sanitary conditions and more safety precautions in the shops. These dead bodies were the answer.” 3  Former Triangle worker and labor organizer Rose Schneiderman said, “This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in this city. Every week I must learn of the untimely death of one of my sister workers . . . the life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred! There are so many of us for one job, it matters little if 140-odd are burned to death.” 4 After the fire, Triangle owners Max Blanck and Isaac Harris were brought up on manslaughter charges. They were acquitted after less than two hours of deliberation. The outcome continued a trend in the industrializing economy that saw workers’ deaths answered with little punishment of the business owners responsible for such dangerous conditions. But as such tragedies mounted and working and living conditions worsened and inequality grew, it became increasingly difficult to develop justifications for this new modern order.

Events such as the Triangle Shirtwaist fire convinced many Americans of the need for reform, but the energies of activists were needed to spread a new commitment to political activism and government interference in the economy. Politicians, journalists, novelists, religious leaders, and activists all raised their voices to push Americans toward reform.

Reformers turned to books and mass-circulation magazines to publicize the plight of the nation’s poor and the many corruptions endemic to the new industrial order. Journalists who exposed business practices, poverty, and corruption—labeled by Theodore Roosevelt as “muckrakers”—aroused public demands for reform. Magazines such as McClure’s detailed political corruption and economic malfeasance. The muckrakers confirmed Americans’ suspicions about runaway wealth and political corruption. Ray Stannard Baker, a journalist whose reports on U.S. Steel exposed the underbelly of the new corporate capitalism, wrote, “I think I can understand now why these exposure articles took such a hold upon the American people. It was because the country, for years, had been swept by the agitation of soap-box orators, prophets crying in the wilderness, and political campaigns based upon charges of corruption and privilege which everyone believed or suspected had some basis of truth, but which were largely unsubstantiated.” 5

Journalists shaped popular perceptions of Gilded Age injustice. In 1890, New York City journalist Jacob Riis published How the Other Half Lives , a scathing indictment of living and working conditions in the city’s slums. Riis not only vividly described the squalor he saw, he documented it with photography, giving readers an unflinching view of urban poverty. Riis’s book led to housing reform in New York and other cities and helped instill the idea that society bore at least some responsibility for alleviating poverty. 6 In 1906, Upton Sinclair published The Jungle , a novel dramatizing the experiences of a Lithuanian immigrant family who moved to Chicago to work in the stockyards. Although Sinclair intended the novel to reveal the brutal exploitation of labor in the meatpacking industry, and thus to build support for the socialist movement, its major impact was to lay bare the entire process of industrialized food production. The growing invisibility of slaughterhouses and livestock production for urban consumers had enabled unsanitary and unsafe conditions. “The slaughtering machine ran on, visitors or no visitors,” wrote Sinclair, “like some horrible crime committed in a dungeon, all unseen and unheeded, buried out of sight and of memory.” 7 Sinclair’s exposé led to the passage of the Meat Inspection Act and Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906.

Jacob Riis, “Home of an Italian Ragpicker.” ca. 1888-1889. Wikimedia.

Of course, it was not only journalists who raised questions about American society. One of the most popular novels of the nineteenth century, Edward Bellamy’s 1888 Looking Backward, was a national sensation. In it, a man falls asleep in Boston in 1887 and awakens in 2000 to find society radically altered. Poverty and disease and competition gave way as new industrial armies cooperated to build a utopia of social harmony and economic prosperity. Bellamy’s vision of a reformed society enthralled readers, inspired hundreds of Bellamy clubs, and pushed many young readers onto the road to reform. 8  It led countless Americans to question the realities of American life in the nineteenth century:

“I am aware that you called yourselves free in the nineteenth century. The meaning of the word could not then, however, have been at all what it is at present, or you certainly would not have applied it to a society of which nearly every member was in a position of galling personal dependence upon others as to the very means of life, the poor upon the rich, or employed upon employer, women upon men, children upon parents.” 9

But Americans were urged to action not only by books and magazines but by preachers and theologians, too. Confronted by both the benefits and the ravages of industrialization, many Americans asked themselves, “What Would Jesus Do?” In 1896, Charles Sheldon, a Congregational minister in Topeka, Kansas, published In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do? The novel told the story of Henry Maxwell, a pastor in a small Midwestern town one day confronted by an unemployed migrant who criticized his congregation’s lack of concern for the poor and downtrodden. Moved by the man’s plight, Maxwell preached a series of sermons in which he asked his congregation: “Would it not be true, think you, that if every Christian in America did as Jesus would do, society itself, the business world, yes, the very political system under which our commercial and government activity is carried on, would be so changed that human suffering would be reduced to a minimum?” 10 Sheldon’s novel became a best seller, not only because of its story but because the book’s plot connected with a new movement transforming American religion: the social gospel.

The social gospel emerged within Protestant Christianity at the end of the nineteenth century. It emphasized the need for Christians to be concerned for the salvation of society, and not simply individual souls. Instead of just caring for family or fellow church members, social gospel advocates encouraged Christians to engage society; challenge social, political, and economic structures; and help those less fortunate than themselves. Responding to the developments of the industrial revolution in America and the increasing concentration of people in urban spaces, with its attendant social and economic problems, some social gospelers went so far as to advocate a form of Christian socialism, but all urged Americans to confront the sins of their society.

One of the most notable advocates of the social gospel was Walter Rauschenbusch. After graduating from Rochester Theological Seminary, in 1886 Rauschenbusch accepted the pastorate of a German Baptist church in the Hell’s Kitchen section of New York City, where he confronted rampant crime and stark poverty, problems not adequately addressed by the political leaders of the city. Rauschenbusch joined with fellow reformers to elect a new mayoral candidate, but he also realized that a new theological framework had to reflect his interest in society and its problems. He revived Jesus’s phrase, “the Kingdom of God,” claiming that it encompassed every aspect of life and made every part of society a purview of the proper Christian. Like Charles Sheldon’s fictional Rev. Maxwell, Rauschenbusch believed that every Christian, whether they were a businessperson, a politician, or a stay-at-home parent, should ask themselves what they could do to enact the kingdom of God on Earth. 11

“The social gospel is the old message of salvation, but enlarged and intensified. The individualistic gospel has taught us to see the sinfulness of every human heart and has inspired us with faith in the willingness and power of God to save every soul that comes to him. But it has not given us an adequate understanding of the sinfulness of the social order and its share in the sins of all individuals within it. It has not evoked faith in the will and power of God to redeem the permanent institutions of human society from their inherited guilt of oppression and extortion. Both our sense of sin and our faith in salvation have fallen short of the realities under its teaching. The social gospel seeks to bring men under repentance for their collective sins and to create a more sensitive and more modern conscience. It calls on us for the faith of the old prophets who believed in the salvation of nations.” 12

Glaring blind spots persisted within the proposals of most social gospel advocates. As men, they often ignored the plight of women, and thus most refused to support women’s suffrage. Many were also silent on the plight of African Americans, Native Americans, and other oppressed minority groups. However, the writings of Rauschenbusch and other social gospel proponents had a profound influence on twentieth-century American life. Most immediately, they fueled progressive reform. But they also inspired future activists, including Martin Luther King Jr., who envisioned a “beloved community” that resembled Rauschenbusch’s “Kingdom of God.”

Suffragists campaigned tirelessly for the vote in the first two decades of the twentieth century, taking to the streets in public displays like this 1915 pre-election parade in New York City. During this one event, 20,000 women defied the gender norms that tried to relegate them to the private sphere and deny them the vote. 1915. Wikimedia .

Reform opened new possibilities for women’s activism in American public life and gave new impetus to the long campaign for women’s suffrage. Much energy for women’s work came from female “clubs,” social organizations devoted to various purposes. Some focused on intellectual development; others emphasized philanthropic activities. Increasingly, these organizations looked outward, to their communities and to the place of women in the larger political sphere.

Women’s clubs flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the 1890s women formed national women’s club federations. Particularly significant in campaigns for suffrage and women’s rights were the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (formed in New York City in 1890) and the National Association of Colored Women (organized in Washington, D.C., in 1896), both of which were dominated by upper-middle-class, educated, northern women. Few of these organizations were biracial, a legacy of the sometimes uneasy midnineteenth-century relationship between socially active African Americans and white women. Rising American prejudice led many white female activists to ban inclusion of their African American sisters.

Black women produced vibrant organizations that could promise racial uplift and civil rights for all Black Americans as well as equal rights for all women. Black abolitionist Mary Jane Richardson Jones organized Black women in Chicago around settlement work, moral uplift, and suffrage. Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, who had also worked for abolition and suffrage, worked with club women in Boston and organized, in 1895, the First National Conference of the Colored Women of America. The following year, Mary Church Terrell and other black activists formed the National Association of Colored Women, later known as the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs. These leagues of service-oriented women’s organizations provided powerful networks to organize and amplify Black women’s efforts not only to secure suffrage but to challenge discrimination and uplift Black communities across the United States. 13

Other women worked through churches and moral reform organizations to clean up American life. And still others worked as moral vigilantes. The fearsome Carrie A. Nation, an imposing woman who believed she worked God’s will, won headlines for destroying saloons. In Wichita, Kansas, on December 27, 1900, Nation took a hatchet and broke bottles and bars at the luxurious Carey Hotel. Arrested and charged with causing $3,000 in damages, Nation spent a month in jail before the county dismissed the charges on account of “a delusion to such an extent as to be practically irresponsible.” But Nation’s “hatchetation” drew national attention. Describing herself as “a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what He doesn’t like,” she continued her assaults, and days later she smashed two more Wichita bars. 14

Few women followed in Nation’s footsteps, and many more worked within more reputable organizations. Nation, for instance, had founded a chapter of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), but the organization’s leaders described her as “unwomanly and unchristian.” The WCTU was founded in 1874 as a modest temperance organization devoted to combating the evils of drunkenness. But then, from 1879 to 1898, Frances Willard invigorated the organization by transforming it into a national political organization, embracing a “do everything” policy that adopted any and all reasonable reforms that would improve social welfare and advance women’s rights. WCTU women worked to alleviate urban poverty, pursued prison reform, championed the eight-hour workday, pushed for child labor laws, advocated “h ome protection,” and fought for numerous other progressive causes.  Temperance, and then the full prohibition of alcohol, however, always loomed large.

Many American reformers associated alcohol with nearly every social ill. Alcohol was blamed for domestic abuse, poverty, crime, and disease. The 1912 Anti-Saloon League Yearbook , for instance, presented charts indicating comparable increases in alcohol consumption alongside rising divorce rates. The WCTU called alcohol a “home wrecker.” More insidiously, perhaps, reformers also associated alcohol with cities and immigrants, necessarily maligning America’s immigrants, Catholics, and working classes in their crusade against liquor. Still, reformers believed that the abolition of “strong drink” would bring about social progress, obviate the need for prisons and insane asylums, save women and children from domestic abuse, and usher in a more just, progressive society.

Powerful female activists emerged out of the club movement and temperance campaigns. Perhaps no American reformer matched Jane Addams in fame, energy, and innovation. Born in Cedarville, Illinois, in 1860, Addams lost her mother by age two and lived under the attentive care of her father. At seventeen, she left home to attend Rockford Female Seminary. An idealist, Addams sought the means to make the world a better place. She believed that well-educated women of means, such as herself, lacked practical strategies for engaging everyday reform. After four years at Rockford, Addams embarked on a multiyear “grand tour” of Europe. She found herself drawn to English settlement houses, a kind of prototype for social work in which philanthropists embedded themselves among communities and offered services to disadvantaged populations. After visiting London’s Toynbee Hall in 1887, Addams returned to the United States and in 1889 founded Hull House in Chicago with her longtime confidant and companion Ellen Gates Starr. 15

The Settlement … is an experimental effort to aid in the solution of the social and industrial problems which are engendered by the modern conditions of life in a great city. It insists that these problems are not confined to any one portion of the city. It is an attempt to relieve, at the same time, the overaccumulation at one end of society and the destitution at the other … It must be grounded in a philosophy whose foundation is on the solidarity of the human race, a philosophy which will not waver when the race happens to be represented by a drunken woman or an idiot boy. 16  

Hull House workers provided for their neighbors by running a nursery and a kindergarten, administering classes for parents and clubs for children, and organizing social and cultural events for the community. Reformer Florence Kelley, who stayed at Hull House from 1891 to 1899, convinced Addams to move into the realm of social reform. 17 Hull House began exposing conditions in local sweatshops and advocated for the organization of workers. She called the conditions caused by urban poverty and industrialization a “social crime.” Hull House workers surveyed their community and produced statistics on poverty, disease, and living conditions. Addams began pressuring politicians. Together Kelley and Addams petitioned legislators to pass antisweatshop legislation that limited the hours of work for women and children to eight per day. Yet Addams was an upper-class white Protestant woman who, like many reformers, refused to embrace more radical policies. While Addams called labor organizing a “social obligation,” she also warned the labor movement against the “constant temptation towards class warfare.” Addams, like many reformers, favored cooperation between rich and poor and bosses and workers, whether cooperation was a realistic possibility or not. 18

Addams became a kind of celebrity. In 1912, she became the first woman to give a nominating speech at a major party convention when she seconded the nomination of Theodore Roosevelt as the Progressive Party’s candidate for president. Her campaigns for social reform and women’s rights won headlines and her voice became ubiquitous in progressive politics. 19

Addams’s advocacy grew beyond domestic concerns. Beginning with her work in the Anti-Imperialist League during the Spanish-American War, Addams increasingly began to see militarism as a drain on resources better spent on social reform. In 1907 she wrote Newer Ideals of Peace , a book that would become for many a philosophical foundation of pacifism. Addams emerged as a prominent opponent of America’s entry into World War I. She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. 20

It would be suffrage, ultimately, that would mark the full emergence of women in American public life. Generations of women—and, occasionally, men—had pushed for women’s suffrage. Suffragists’ hard work resulted in slow but encouraging steps forward during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Notable victories were won in the West, where suffragists mobilized large numbers of women and male politicians were open to experimental forms of governance. By 1911, six western states had passed suffrage amendments to their constitutions.

Women protested silently in front of the White House for over two years before the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Here, women represent their colleges as they picket the White House in support of women’s suffrage. 1917. Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-31799).

Women’s suffrage was typically entwined with a wide range of reform efforts. Many suffragists argued that women’s votes were necessary to clean up politics and combat social evils. By the 1890s, for example, the WCTU, then the largest women’s organization in America, endorsed suffrage. An alliance of working-class and middle- and upper-class women organized the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) in 1903 and campaigned for the vote alongside the National American Woman Suffrage Association, a leading suffrage organization composed largely of middle- and upper-class women. WTUL members viewed the vote as a way to further their economic interests and to foster a new sense of respect for working-class women. “What the woman who labors wants is the right to live, not simply exist,” said Rose Schneiderman, a WTUL leader, during a 1912 speech. “The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too.” 21

Many suffragists adopted a much crueler message. Some, even outside the South, argued that white women’s votes were necessary to maintain white supremacy. Many white American women argued that enfranchising white upper- and middle-class women would counteract Black voters. These arguments even stretched into international politics. But whether the message advocated gender equality, class politics, or white supremacy, the suffrage campaign was winning.

The final push for women’s suffrage came on the eve of World War I. Determined to win the vote, the National American Woman Suffrage Association developed a dual strategy that focused on the passage of state voting rights laws and on the ratification of an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Meanwhile, a new, more militant, suffrage organization emerged on the scene. Led by Alice Paul, the National Woman’s Party took to the streets to demand voting rights, organizing marches and protests that mobilized thousands of women. Beginning in January 1917, National Woman’s Party members also began to picket the White House, an action that led to the arrest and imprisonment of over 150 women. 22

In January 1918, President Woodrow Wilson declared his support for the women’s suffrage amendment, and two years later women’s suffrage became a reality. After the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, women from all walks of life mobilized to vote. They were driven by the promise of change but also in some cases by their anxieties about the future. Much had changed since their campaign began; the United States was now more industrial than not, increasingly more urban than rural. The activism and activities of these new urban denizens also gave rise to a new American culture.

In one of the defining books of the Progressive Era, The Promise of American Life , Herbert Croly argued that because “the corrupt politician has usurped too much of the power which should be exercised by the people,” the “millionaire and the trust have appropriated too many of the economic opportunities formerly enjoyed by the people.” Croly and other reformers believed that wealth inequality eroded democracy and reformers had to win back for the people the power usurped by the moneyed trusts. But what exactly were these “trusts,” and why did it suddenly seem so important to reform them? 23

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a trust was a monopoly or cartel associated with the large corporations of the Gilded and Progressive Eras who entered into agreements—legal or otherwise—or consolidations to exercise exclusive control over a specific product or industry under the control of a single entity. Certain types of monopolies, specifically for intellectual property like copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets, are protected under the Constitution “to promote the progress of science and useful arts,” but for powerful entities to control entire national markets was something wholly new, and, for many Americans, wholly unsettling.

An illustration shows a “Standard Oil” storage tank as an octopus with many tentacles wrapped around the steel, copper, and shipping industries, as well as a statehouse, the U.S. Capitol, and one tentacle reaching for the White House. The only building not yet within reach of the octopus is the White House—President Teddy Roosevelt had won a reputation as a trustbuster. Udo Keppler, “Next!” 1904. Library of Congress (LC-USZCN4-122).

The rapid industrialization, technological advancement, and urban growth of the 1870s and 1880s triggered major changes in the way businesses structured themselves. The Second Industrial Revolution, made possible by available natural resources, growth in the labor supply through immigration, increasing capital, new legal economic entities, novel production strategies, and a growing national market, was commonly asserted to be the natural product of the federal government’s laissez faire, or “hands off,” economic policy. An unregulated business climate, the argument went, allowed for the growth of major trusts, most notably Andrew Carnegie’s Carnegie Steel (later consolidated with other producers as U.S. Steel) and John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company. Each displayed the vertical and horizontal integration strategies common to the new trusts: Carnegie first used vertical integration by controlling every phase of business (raw materials, transportation, manufacturing, distribution), and Rockefeller adhered to horizontal integration by buying out competing refineries. Once dominant in a market, critics alleged, the trusts could artificially inflate prices, bully rivals, and bribe politicians.

Between 1897 and 1904, over four thousand companies were consolidated down into 257 corporate firms. As one historian wrote, “By 1904 a total of 318 trusts held 40% of US manufacturing assets and boasted a capitalization of $7 billion, seven times bigger than the US national debt.” 24 With the twentieth century came the age of monopoly. Mergers and the aggressive business policies of wealthy men such as Carnegie and Rockefeller earned them the epithet robber barons . Their cutthroat stifling of economic competition, mistreatment of workers, and corruption of politics sparked an opposition that pushed for regulations to rein in the power of monopolies. The great corporations became a major target of reformers.

Big business, whether in meatpacking, railroads, telegraph lines, oil, or steel, posed new problems for the American legal system. Before the Civil War, most businesses operated in a single state. They might ship goods across state lines or to other countries, but they typically had offices and factories in just one state. Individual states naturally regulated industry and commerce. But extensive railroad routes crossed several state lines and new mass-producing corporations operated across the nation, raising questions about where the authority to regulate such practices rested. During the 1870s, many states passed laws to check the growing power of vast new corporations. In the Midwest, farmers formed a network of organizations that were part political pressure group, part social club, and part mutual aid society. Together they pushed for so-called Granger laws that regulated railroads and other new companies. Railroads and others opposed these regulations because they restrained profits and because of the difficulty of meeting the standards of each state’s separate regulatory laws. In 1877, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld these laws in a series of rulings, finding in cases such as Munn v. Illinois and Stone v. Wisconsin that railroads and other companies of such size necessarily affected the public interest and could thus be regulated by individual states. In Munn , the court declared, “Property does become clothed with a public interest when used in a manner to make it of public consequence, and affect the community at large. When, therefore, one devoted his property to a use in which the public has an interest, he, in effect, grants to the public an interest in that use, and must submit to be controlled by the public for the common good, to the extent of the interest he has thus created.” 25

Later rulings, however, conceded that only the federal government could constitutionally regulate interstate commerce and the new national businesses operating it. And as more and more power and capital and market share flowed to the great corporations, the onus of regulation passed to the federal government. In 1887, Congress passed the Interstate Commerce Act, which established the Interstate Commerce Commission to stop discriminatory and predatory pricing practices. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 aimed to limit anticompetitive practices, such as those institutionalized in cartels and monopolistic corporations. It stated that a “trust . . . or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce . . . is declared to be illegal” and that those who “monopolize . . . any part of the trade or commerce . . . shall be deemed guilty.” 26 The Sherman Anti-Trust Act declared that not all monopolies were illegal, only those that “unreasonably” stifled free trade. The courts seized on the law’s vague language, however, and the act was turned against itself, manipulated and used, for instance, to limit the growing power of labor unions. Only in 1914, with the Clayton Anti-Trust Act, did Congress attempt to close loopholes in previous legislation.

Aggression against the trusts—and the progressive vogue for “trust busting”—took on new meaning under the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, a reform-minded Republican who ascended to the presidency after the death of William McKinley in 1901. Roosevelt’s youthful energy and confrontational politics captivated the nation.” 27 Roosevelt was by no means antibusiness. Instead, he envisioned his presidency as a mediator between opposing forces, such as between labor unions and corporate executives. Despite his own wealthy background, Roosevelt pushed for antitrust legislation and regulations, arguing that the courts could not be relied on to break up the trusts. Roosevelt also used his own moral judgment to determine which monopolies he would pursue. Roosevelt believed that there were good and bad trusts, necessary monopolies and corrupt ones. Although his reputation as a trust buster was wildly exaggerated, he was the first major national politician to go after the trusts. “The great corporations which we have grown to speak of rather loosely as trusts,” he said, “are the creatures of the State, and the State not only has the right to control them, but it is in duty bound to control them wherever the need of such control is shown.” 28

His first target was the Northern Securities Company, a “holding” trust in which several wealthy bankers, most famously J. P. Morgan, used to hold controlling shares in all the major railroad companies in the American Northwest. Holding trusts had emerged as a way to circumvent the Sherman Anti-Trust Act: by controlling the majority of shares, rather than the principal, Morgan and his collaborators tried to claim that it was not a monopoly. Roosevelt’s administration sued and won in court, and in 1904 the Northern Securities Company was ordered to disband into separate competitive companies. Two years later, in 1906, Roosevelt signed the Hepburn Act, allowing the Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate best practices and set reasonable rates for the railroads.

Roosevelt was more interested in regulating corporations than breaking them apart. Besides, the courts were slow and unpredictable. However, his successor after 1908, William Howard Taft, firmly believed in court-oriented trust busting and during his four years in office more than doubled the number of monopoly breakups that occurred during Roosevelt’s seven years in office. Taft notably went after U.S. Steel, the world’s first billion-dollar corporation formed from the consolidation of nearly every major American steel producer.

Trust busting and the handling of monopolies dominated the election of 1912. When the Republican Party spurned Roosevelt’s return to politics and renominated the incumbent Taft, Roosevelt left and formed his own coalition, the Progressive or “Bull Moose” Party. Whereas Taft took an all-encompassing view on the illegality of monopolies, Roosevelt adopted a New Nationalism program, which once again emphasized the regulation of already existing corporations or the expansion of federal power over the economy. In contrast, Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic Party nominee, emphasized in his New Freedom agenda neither trust busting nor federal regulation but rather small-business incentives so that individual companies could increase their competitive chances. Yet once he won the election, Wilson edged nearer to Roosevelt’s position, signing the Clayton Anti-Trust Act of 1914. The Clayton Anti-Trust Act substantially enhanced the Sherman Act, specifically regulating mergers and price discrimination and protecting labor’s access to collective bargaining and related strategies of picketing, boycotting, and protesting. Congress further created the Federal Trade Commission to enforce the Clayton Act, ensuring at least some measure of implementation. 29

While the three presidents—Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson—pushed the development and enforcement of antitrust law, their commitments were uneven, and trust busting itself manifested the political pressure put on politicians by the workers, farmers, and progressive writers who so strongly drew attention to the ramifications of trusts and corporate capital on the lives of everyday Americans.

The potential scope of environmental destruction wrought by industrial capitalism was unparalleled in human history. Professional bison hunting expeditions nearly eradicated an entire species, industrialized logging companies denuded whole forests, and chemical plants polluted an entire region’s water supply. As American development and industrialization marched westward, reformers embraced environmental protections.

Historians often cite preservation and conservation as two competing strategies that dueled for supremacy among environmental reformers during the Progressive Era. The tensions between these two approaches crystalized in the debate over a proposed dam in the Hetch Hetchy Valley in California. The fight revolved around the provision of water for San Francisco. Engineers identified the location where the Tuolumne River ran through Hetch Hetchy as an ideal site for a reservoir. The project had been suggested in the 1880s but picked up momentum in the early twentieth century. But the valley was located inside Yosemite National Park. (Yosemite was designated a national park in 1890, though the land had been set aside earlier in a grant approved by President Lincoln in 1864.) The debate over Hetch Hetchy revealed two distinct positions on the value of the valley and on the purpose of public lands.

John Muir, a naturalist, a writer, and founder of the Sierra Club, invoked the “God of the Mountains” in his defense of the valley in its supposedly pristine condition. Gifford Pinchot, arguably the father of American forestry and a key player in the federal management of national forests, meanwhile emphasized what he understood to be the purpose of conservation: “to take every part of the land and its resources and put it to that use in which it will serve the most people.” Muir took a wider view of what the people needed, writing that “everybody needs beauty as well as bread.” 30 These dueling arguments revealed the key differences in environmental thought: Muir, on the side of the preservationists, advocated setting aside pristine lands for their aesthetic and spiritual value, for those who could take his advice to “[get] in touch with the nerves of Mother Earth.” 31 Pinchot, on the other hand, led the charge for conservation, a kind of environmental utilitarianism that emphasized the efficient use of available resources, through planning and control and “the prevention of waste.” 32 In Hetch Hetchy, conservation won out. Congress approved the project in 1913. The dam was built and the valley flooded for the benefit of San Francisco residents.

The image on the top shows the Hetch Hetchy Valley before it was dammed. The bottom photograph, taken almost a century later, shows the obvious difference after damming, with the submergence of the valley floor under the reservoir waters. Photograph of the Hetch Hetchy Valley before damming, from the Sierra Club Bulletin, January 1908. Wikimedia ; Daniel Mayer (photographer), May 2002. Wikimedia .

While preservation was often articulated as an escape from an increasingly urbanized and industrialized way of life and as a welcome respite from the challenges of modernity (at least, for those who had the means to escape), the conservationists were more closely aligned with broader trends in American society. Although the “greatest good for the greatest number” was very nearly the catchphrase of conservation, conservationist policies most often benefited the nation’s financial interests. For example, many states instituted game laws to regulate hunting and protect wildlife, but laws could be entirely unbalanced. In Pennsylvania, local game laws included requiring firearm permits for noncitizens, barred hunting on Sundays, and banned the shooting of songbirds. These laws disproportionately affected Italian immigrants, critics said, as Italians often hunted songbirds for subsistence, worked in mines for low wages every day but Sunday, and were too poor to purchase permits or to pay the fines levied against them when game wardens caught them breaking these new laws. Other laws, for example, offered up resources to businesses at costs prohibitive to all but the wealthiest companies and individuals, or with regulatory requirements that could be met only by companies with extensive resources.

But Progressive Era environmentalism addressed more than the management of American public lands. After all, reformers addressing issues facing the urban poor were also doing environmental work. Settlement house workers like Jane Addams and Florence Kelley focused on questions of health and sanitation, while activists concerned with working conditions, most notably Dr. Alice Hamilton, investigated both worksite hazards and occupational and bodily harm. The progressives’ commitment to the provision of public services at the municipal level meant more coordination and oversight in matters of public health, waste management, and even playgrounds and city parks. Their work focused on the intersection of communities and their material environments, highlighting the urgency of urban environmental concerns.

While reform movements focused their attention on the urban poor, other efforts targeted rural communities. The Country Life movement, spearheaded by Liberty Hyde Bailey, sought to support agrarian families and encourage young people to stay in their communities and run family farms. Early-twentieth-century educational reforms included a commitment to environmentalism at the elementary level. Led by Bailey and Anna Botsford Comstock, the nature study movement took students outside to experience natural processes and to help them develop observational skills and an appreciation for the natural world.

Other examples highlight the interconnectedness of urban and rural communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The extinction of the North American passenger pigeon reveals the complexity of Progressive Era relationships between people and nature. Passenger pigeons were actively hunted, prepared at New York’s finest restaurants and in the humblest of farm kitchens. Some hunted them for pay; others shot them in competitions at sporting clubs. And then they were gone, their ubiquity giving way only to nostalgia. Many Americans took notice at the great extinction of a species that had perhaps numbered in the billions and then was eradicated. Women in Audubon Society chapters organized against the fashion of wearing feathers—even whole birds—on ladies’ hats. Upper- and middle-class women made up the lion’s share of the membership of these societies. They used their social standing to fight for birds. Pressure created national wildlife refuges and key laws and regulations that included the Lacey Act of 1900, banning the shipment of species killed illegally across state lines. Examining how women mobilized contemporary notions of womanhood in the service of protecting birds reveals a tangle of cultural and economic processes. Such examples also reveal the range of ideas, policies, and practices wrapped up in figuring out what—and who—American nature should be for.

America’s tragic racial history was not erased by the Progressive Era. In fact, in all too many ways, reform removed African Americans ever farther from American public life. In the South, electoral politics remained a parade of electoral fraud, voter intimidation, and race-baiting. Democratic Party candidates stirred southern whites into frenzies with warnings of “negro domination” and of Black men violating white women. The region’s culture of racial violence and the rise of lynching as a mass public spectacle accelerated. And as the remaining African American voters threatened the dominance of Democratic leadership in the South, southern Democrats turned to what many white southerners understood as a series of progressive electoral and social reforms—disenfranchisement and segregation. Just as reformers would clean up politics by taming city political machines, white southerners would “purify” the ballot box by restricting Black voting, and they would prevent racial strife by legislating the social separation of the races. The strongest supporters of such measures in the South were progressive Democrats and former Populists, both of whom saw in these reforms a way to eliminate the racial demagoguery that conservative Democratic party leaders had so effectively wielded. Leaders in both the North and South embraced and proclaimed the reunion of the sections on the basis of white supremacy. As the nation took up the “white man’s burden” to uplift the world’s racially inferior peoples, the North looked to the South as an example of how to manage nonwhite populations. The South had become the nation’s racial vanguard. 33

The question was how to accomplish disfranchisement. The Fifteenth Amendment clearly prohibited states from denying any citizen the right to vote on the basis of race. In 1890, a Mississippi state newspaper called on politicians to devise “some legal defensible substitute for the abhorrent and evil methods on which white supremacy lies.” 34 The state’s Democratic Party responded with a new state constitution designed to purge corruption at the ballot box through disenfranchisement. African Americans hoping to vote in Mississippi would have to jump through a series of hurdles designed with the explicit purpose of excluding them from political power. The state first established a poll tax, which required voters to pay for the privilege of voting. Second, it stripped suffrage from those convicted of petty crimes most common among the state’s African Americans. Next, the state required voters to pass a literacy test. Local voting officials, who were themselves part of the local party machine, were responsible for judging whether voters were able to read and understand a section of the Constitution. In order to protect illiterate whites from exclusion, the so-called “understanding clause” allowed a voter to qualify if they could adequately explain the meaning of a section that was read to them. In practice these rules were systematically abused to the point where local election officials effectively wielded the power to permit and deny suffrage at will. The disenfranchisement laws effectively moved electoral conflict from the ballot box, where public attention was greatest, to the voting registrar, where supposedly color-blind laws allowed local party officials to deny the ballot without the appearance of fraud. 35

Between 1895 and 1908, the rest of the states in the South approved new constitutions including these disenfranchisement tools. Six southern states also added a grandfather clause, which bestowed suffrage on anyone whose grandfather was eligible to vote in 1867. This ensured that whites who would have been otherwise excluded through mechanisms such as poll taxes or literacy tests would still be eligible, at least until grandfather clauses were struck down by the Supreme Court in 1915. Finally, each southern state adopted an all-white primary and excluded Black Americans from the Democratic primary, the only political contests that mattered across much of the South. 36

For all the legal double-talk, the purpose of these laws was plain. James Kimble Vardaman, later governor of Mississippi, boasted that “there is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter. Mississippi’s constitutional convention was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the nigger from politics; not the ignorant—but the nigger.” 37 These technically color-blind tools did their work well. In 1900 Alabama had 121,159 literate Black men of voting age. Only 3,742 were registered to vote. Louisiana had 130,000 Black voters in the contentious election of 1896. Only 5,320 voted in 1900. Black people were clearly the target of these laws, but that did not prevent some whites from being disenfranchised as well. Louisiana dropped 80,000 white voters over the same period. Most politically engaged southern whites considered this a price worth paying to prevent the alleged fraud that plagued the region’s elections. 38

At the same time that the South’s Democratic leaders were adopting the tools to disenfranchise the region’s Black voters, these same legislatures were constructing a system of racial segregation even more pernicious. While it built on earlier practice, segregation was primarily a modern and urban system of enforcing racial subordination and deference. In rural areas, white and Black southerners negotiated the meaning of racial difference within the context of personal relationships of kinship and patronage. An African American who broke the local community’s racial norms could expect swift personal sanction that often included violence. The crop lien and convict lease systems were the most important legal tools of racial control in the rural South. Maintaining white supremacy there did not require segregation. Maintaining white supremacy within the city, however, was a different matter altogether. As the region’s railroad networks and cities expanded, so too did the anonymity and therefore freedom of southern Black people. Southern cities were becoming a center of Black middle-class life that was an implicit threat to racial hierarchies. White southerners created the system of segregation as a way to maintain white supremacy in restaurants, theaters, public restrooms, schools, water fountains, train cars, and hospitals. Segregation inscribed the superiority of whites and the deference of Black people into the very geography of public spaces.

As with disenfranchisement, segregation violated a plain reading of the Constitution—in this case the Fourteenth Amendment. Here the Supreme Court intervened, ruling in the Civil Rights Cases (1883) that the Fourteenth Amendment only prevented discrimination directly by states. It did not prevent discrimination by individuals, businesses, or other entities. Southern states exploited this interpretation with the first legal segregation of railroad cars in 1888. In a case that reached the Supreme Court in 1896, New Orleans resident Homer Plessy challenged the constitutionality of Louisiana’s segregation of streetcars. The court ruled against Plessy and, in the process, established the legal principle of separate but equal. Racially segregated facilities were legal provided they were equivalent. In practice this was almost never the case. The court’s majority defended its position with logic that reflected the racial assumptions of the day. “If one race be inferior to the other socially,” the court explained, “the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane.” Justice John Harlan, the lone dissenter, countered, “Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.” Harlan went on to warn that the court’s decision would “permit the seeds of race hatred to be planted under the sanction of law.” 39 In their rush to fulfill Harlan’s prophecy, southern whites codified and enforced the segregation of public spaces.

Segregation was built on a fiction—that there could be a white South socially and culturally distinct from African Americans. Its legal basis rested on the constitutional fallacy of “separate but equal.” Southern whites erected a bulwark of white supremacy that would last for nearly sixty years. Segregation and disenfranchisement in the South rejected Black citizenship and relegated Black social and cultural life to segregated spaces. African Americans lived divided lives, acting the part whites demanded of them in public, while maintaining their own world apart from whites. This segregated world provided a measure of independence for the region’s growing Black middle class, yet at the cost of poisoning the relationship between Black and white. Segregation and disenfranchisement created entrenched structures of racism that completed the total rejection of the promises of Reconstruction.

And yet many Black Americans of the Progressive Era fought back. Just as activists such as Ida Wells worked against southern lynching, Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois vied for leadership among African American activists, resulting in years of intense rivalry and debated strategies for the uplifting of Black Americans.

Born into the world of bondage in Virginia in 1856, Booker Taliaferro Washington was subjected to the degradation and exploitation of slavery early in life. But Washington also developed an insatiable thirst to learn. Working against tremendous odds, Washington matriculated into Hampton University in Virginia and thereafter established a southern institution that would educate many Black Americans, the Tuskegee Institute, located in Alabama. Washington envisioned that Tuskegee’s contribution to Black life would come through industrial education and vocational training. He believed that such skills would help African Americans accomplish economic independence while developing a sense of self-worth and pride of accomplishment, even while living within the putrid confines of Jim Crow. Washington poured his life into Tuskegee, and thereby connected with leading white philanthropic interests. Individuals such as Andrew Carnegie, for instance, financially assisted Washington and his educational ventures.

The strategies of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois differed, but their desire remained the same: better lives for African Americans. Harris & Ewing, “WASHINGTON BOOKER T,” between 1905 and 1915. Library of Congress .

Washington became a leading spokesperson for Black Americans at the turn of the twentieth century, particularly after Frederick Douglass’s death in early 1895. Washington’s famous “Atlanta Compromise” speech from that same year encouraged Black Americans to “cast your bucket down” to improve life’s lot under segregation. In the same speech, delivered one year before the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision that legalized segregation under the “separate but equal” doctrine, Washington said to white Americans, “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” 40  Washington was both praised as a race leader and pilloried as an accommodationist to America’s unjust racial hierarchy; his public advocacy of a conciliatory posture toward white supremacy concealed the efforts to which he went to assist African Americans in the legal and economic quest for racial justice. In addition to founding Tuskegee, Washington also published a handful of influential books, including the autobiography Up from Slavery (1901). Like Du Bois, Washington was also active in Black journalism, working to fund and support Black newspaper publications, most of which sought to counter Du Bois’s growing influence. Washington died in 1915, during World War I, of ill health in Tuskegee, Alabama.

Speaking decades later, Du Bois said Washington had, in his 1895 “Compromise” speech, “implicitly abandoned all political and social rights. . . . I never thought Washington was a bad man . . . I believed him to be sincere, though wrong.” Du Bois would directly attack Washington in his classic 1903 The Souls of Black Folk , but at the turn of the century he could never escape the shadow of his longtime rival. “I admired much about him,” Du Bois admitted. “Washington . . . died in 1915. A lot of people think I died at the same time.” 41

Du Bois’s criticism reveals the politicized context of the Black freedom struggle and exposes the many positions available to Black activists. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868, Du Bois entered the world as a free person of color three years after the Civil War ended. He was raised by a hardworking and independent mother; his New England childhood alerted him to the reality of race even as it invested the emerging thinker with an abiding faith in the power of education. Du Bois graduated at the top of his high school class and attended Fisk University. Du Bois’s sojourn to the South in 1880s left a distinct impression that would guide his life’s work to study what he called the “Negro problem,” the systemic racial and economic discrimination that Du Bois prophetically pronounced would be the problem of the twentieth century. After Fisk, Du Bois’s educational path trended back North. He attended Harvard, earned his second degree, crossed the Atlantic for graduate work in Germany, and circulated back to Harvard, and in 1895, he became the first Black American to receive a PhD there.

“W.E.B. (William Edward Burghardt) Du Bois,” 1919. Library of Congress .

Du Bois became one of America’s foremost intellectual leaders on questions of social justice by producing scholarship that underscored the humanity of African Americans. Du Bois’s work as an intellectual, scholar, and college professor began during the Progressive Era, a time in American history marked by rapid social and cultural change as well as complex global political conflicts and developments. Du Bois addressed these domestic and international concerns not only in his classrooms at Wilberforce University in Ohio and Atlanta University in Georgia but also in a number of his early publications on the history of the transatlantic slave trade and Black life in urban Philadelphia. The most well-known of these early works included The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and Darkwater (1920). In these books, Du Bois combined incisive historical analysis with engaging literary drama to validate Black personhood and attack the inhumanity of white supremacy, particularly in the lead-up to and during World War I. In addition to publications and teaching, Du Bois set his sights on political organizing for civil rights, first with the Niagara Movement and later with its offspring, the NAACP. Du Bois’s main work with the NAACP lasted from 1909 to 1934 as editor of The Crisis , one of America’s leading Black publications. Du Bois attacked Washington and urged Black Americans to concede to nothing, to make no compromises and advocate for equal rights under the law. Throughout his early career, he pushed for civil rights legislation, launched legal challenges against discrimination, organized protests against injustice, and applied his capacity for clear research and sharp prose to expose the racial sins of Progressive Era America.

“We refuse to allow the impression to remain that the Negro-American assents to inferiority, is submissive under oppression and apologetic before insults. . . . Any discrimination based simply on race or color is barbarous, we care not how hallowed it be by custom, expediency or prejudice . . . discriminations based simply and solely on physical peculiarities, place of birth, color of skin, are relics of that unreasoning human savagery of which the world is and ought to be thoroughly ashamed. . . . Persistent manly agitation is the way to liberty.” 42

W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington made a tremendous historical impact and left a notable historical legacy. They were reared under markedly different circumstances, and thus their early life experiences and even personal temperaments oriented both leaders’ lives and outlooks in decidedly different ways. Du Bois’s confrontational voice boldly targeted white supremacy. He believed in the power of social science to arrest the reach of white supremacy. Washington advocated incremental change for longer-term gain. He contended that economic self-sufficiency would pay off at a future date. Four years after Du Bois directly spoke out against Washington in the chapter “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington” in Souls of Black Folk , the two men shared the same lectern at Philadelphia Divinity School to address matters of race, history, and culture in the American South. Although their philosophies often differed, both men inspired others to demand that America live up to its democratic creed.

Industrial capitalism unleashed powerful forces in American life. Along with wealth, technological innovation, and rising standards of living, a host of social problems unsettled many who turned to reform politics to set the world right again. The Progressive Era signaled that a turning point had been reached for many Americans who were suddenly willing to confront the age’s problems with national political solutions. Reformers sought to bring order to chaos, to bring efficiency to inefficiency, and to bring justice to injustice. Causes varied, constituencies shifted, and the tangible effects of so much energy was difficult to measure, but the Progressive Era signaled a bursting of long-simmering tensions and introduced new patterns in the relationship between American society, American culture, and American politics.

1. Booker T. Washington & W.E.B. DuBois on Black Progress (1895, 1903)

Booker T. Washington, born enslaved in Virginia in 1856, founded the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in 1881 and became a leading advocate of African American progress. Introduced as “a representative of Negro enterprise and Negro civilization,” Washington delivered the following remarks, sometimes called the “Atlanta Compromise” speech, at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta in 1895.

2. Jane Addams, “The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements” (1892)

Hull House, Chicago’s famed “settlement house,” was designed to uplift urban populations. Here, Addams explains why she believes reformers must “add the social function to democracy.” As Addams explained, Hull House “was opened on the theory that the dependence of classes on each other is reciprocal.”

3. Eugene Debs, “How I Became a Socialist” (April, 1902)

A native of Terre Haute, Indiana, Eugene V. Debs began working as a locomotive fireman (tending the fires of a train’s steam engine) as a youth in the 1870s. His experience in the American labor movement later led him to socialism. In the early-twentieth century, as the Socialist Party of America’s candidate, he ran for the presidency five times and twice earned nearly one-million votes. He was America’s most prominent socialist. In 1902, a New York paper asked Debs how he became a socialist. This is his answer.

4. Walter Rauschenbusch,  Christianity and the Social Crisis  (1907)

Walter Rauschenbusch, a Baptist minister and theologian, advocated for a “social gospel.” Here, he explains why he believes Christianity must address social questions.

5. Alice Stone Blackwell, Answering Objections to Women’s Suffrage (1917)

Alice Stone Blackwell was a feminist activist and writer. In an edited volume published in 1917, Blackwell responded to popular anti-women’s-suffrage arguments.

6. Woodrow Wilson on the “New Freedom,” 1912

Woodrow Wilson campaigned for the presidency in 1912 as a progressive democrat. Wilson argued that changing economic conditions demanded new and aggressive government policies–he called his political program “the New Freedom”– to preserve traditional American liberties.

7. Theodore Roosevelt on “The New Nationalism” (1910)

In 1910, a newly invigorated Theodore Roosevelt delivered his outline for a bold new progressive agenda, which he would advance in 1912 during a failed presidential run under the new Progressive, or “Bull Moose,” Party.

8. “Next!” (1904)

Illustration shows a “Standard Oil” storage tank as an octopus with many tentacles wrapped around the steel, copper, and shipping industries, as well as a state house, the U.S. Capitol, and one tentacle reaching for the White House. The only building not yet within reach of the octopus is the White House—President Teddy Roosevelt had won a reputation as a “trust buster.”

9. “College Day on the Picket Line” (1917 )

Women protested silently in front of the White House for over two years before the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Here, women represent their colleges as they picket the White House in support of women’s suffrage.

This chapter was edited by Mary Anne Henderson, with content contributions by Andrew C. Baker, Peter Catapano, Blaine Hamilton, Mary Anne Henderson, Amanda Hughett, Amy Kohout, Maria Montalvo, Brent Ruswick, Philip Luke Sinitiere, Nora Slonimsky, Whitney Stewart, and Brandy Thomas Wells.

Recommended citation: Andrew C. Baker et al., “The Progressive Era,” Mary Anne Henderson, ed., in The American Yawp , eds. Joseph Locke and Ben Wright (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018).

Recommended Reading

• Ayers, Edward. The Promise of the New South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
• Bay, Mia. To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells. New York: Hill and Wang, 2010.
• Cott, Nancy. The Grounding of Modern Feminism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987.
• Dawley, Alan. Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.
• Dubois, Ellen Carol. Women’s Suffrage and Women’s Rights. New York: New York University Press, 1998.
• Filene, Peter. “An Obituary for ‘The Progressive Movement,’” American Quarterly 22 (Spring 1970): 20–34.
• Flanagan, Maureen. America Reformed: Progressives and Progressivisms, 1890s–1920s. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
• Foley, Neil. The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
• Gilmore, Glenda E. Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
• Hale, Grace Elizabeth. Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
• Hicks, Cheryl. Talk with You Like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1890–1935. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.
• Hofstadter, Richard. The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. New York: Knopf, 1955.
• Johnson, Kimberley. Governing the American State: Congress and the New Federalism, 1877–1929. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.
• Kessler-Harris, Alice. In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
• Kloppenberg, James T. Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
• Kolko, Gabriel. The Triumph of Conservatism. New York: Free Press, 1963.
• Kousser, J. Morgan. The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880–1910 . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974.
• McGerr, Michael. A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920. New York: Free Press, 2003.
• Molina, Natalia. Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
• Muncy, Robyn. Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
• Rodgers, Daniel T. Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
• Sanders, Elizabeth. The Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877–1917. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
• Stromquist, Shelton. Re-Inventing “The People”: The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2006.
• White, Deborah. Too Heavy a Load: In Defense of Themselves. New York: Norton, 1999.
• Wiebe, Robert. The Search for Order, 1877–1920. New York: Hill and Wang, 1967.
• Jack London, The Iron Heel (New York: Macmillan, 1908), 104. [ ↩ ]
• Philip Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement: From Colonial Times to the Eve of World War I (New York: Free Press, 1979.). [ ↩ ]
• Leon Stein, The Triangle Fire (Ithaca, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1962), 20. [ ↩ ]
• Ibid., 144. [ ↩ ]
• Ray Stannard Baker, American Chronicle: The Autobiography of Ray Stannard Baker (New York: Scribner, 1945), 183. [ ↩ ]
• Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (New York: Scribner, 1890). [ ↩ ]
• Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (New York: Doubleday, 1906), 40. [ ↩ ]
• Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (Boston: Ticknor, 1888). [ ↩ ]
• Ibid., 368. [ ↩ ]
• Charles M. Sheldon, In His Steps: “What Would Jesus Do?” (Chicago: Advance, 1896), 273. [ ↩ ]
• Walter Rauschenbusch, A Theology for the Social Gospel (New York: Macmillan, 1917). [ ↩ ]
• Ibid., 5. [ ↩ ]
• See, for instance, Anne Firor Scott, “Most Invisible of All: Black Women’s Voluntary Associations,” <i>The Journal of Southern History</i>. 56 (January, 1990), 3–22. [ ↩ ]
• John Kobler, Ardent Spirits: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (Boston: Da Capo Press, 1993), 147. [ ↩ ]
• Toynbee Hall was the first settlement house. It was built in 1884 by Samuel Barnett as a place for Oxford students to live while at the same time working in the house’s poor neighborhood. Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1998), 64–65; Victoria Bissell Brown, The Education of Jane Addams (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). [ ↩ ]
• Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House (New York: Macmillan, 1911), 125–126. [ ↩ ]
• Allen Davis, American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 77. [ ↩ ]
• Jane Addams, “The Settlement as a Factor in the Labor Movement,” reprinted in Hull-House Maps and Papers: A Presentation of Nationalities and Wages in a Congested District of Chicago Together with Comments and Essays on Problems Growing out of the Social Conditions (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 145, 149. [ ↩ ]
• Kathryn Kish Sklar, “‘Some of Us Who Deal with the Social Fabric’: Jane Addams Blends Peace and Social Justice, 1907–1919,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2, no. 1 (January 2003). [ ↩ ]
• Karen Manners Smith, “New Paths to Power: 1890–1920,” in No Small Courage: A History of Women in the United States , ed. Nancy Cott (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 392. [ ↩ ]
• Sarah Eisenstein, Give Us Bread but Give Us Roses: Working Women’s Consciousness in the United States, 1890 to the First World War (New York: Routledge, 1983), 32. [ ↩ ]
• Ellen Carol Dubois, Women’s Suffrage and Women’s Rights (New York: New York University Press, 1998). [ ↩ ]
• Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York: Macmillan, 1911), 145. [ ↩ ]
• Kevin P. Phillips, Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich (New York: Broadway Books, 2003), 307. [ ↩ ]
• Munn v. Illinois , 94 U.S. 113 (1877). [ ↩ ]
• Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. [ ↩ ]
• The writer Henry Adams said that he “showed the singular primitive quality that belongs to ultimate matter—the quality that medieval theology assigned to God—he was pure act.” Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), 413. [ ↩ ]
• Theodore Roosevelt, Addresses and Presidential Messages of Theodore Roosevelt, 1902–1904 , 15. [ ↩ ]
• The historiography on American progressive politics is vast. See, for instance, Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York: Free Press, 2003). [ ↩ ]
• Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind , 4th ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 167–168, 171, 165. [ ↩ ]
• John Muir, Our National Parks (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1901). [ ↩ ]
• Gifford Pinchot, The Fight for Conservation (New York: Doubleday Page, 1910), 44. [ ↩ ]
• Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001 ). [ ↩ ]
• Edward Ayers, The Promise of the New South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 147. [ ↩ ]
• Ibid. [ ↩ ]
• Neil R. McMillen, Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 43. [ ↩ ]
• Perman, Struggle for Mastery , 147. [ ↩ ]
• Plessy v. Ferguson , 163 U.S. 537 (1896). [ ↩ ]
• Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery: An Autobiography (New York: Doubleday, 1901), 221–222. [ ↩ ]
• Kate A. Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters Between Black and Red (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 297 n. 28. [ ↩ ]
• W. E. B. DuBois, “Niagara’s Declaration of Principles, 1905,” Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, https://glc.yale.edu/niagaras-declaration-principles-1905, accessed June 15, 2018. [ ↩ ]

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Voting Rights: The Fight Against Voter Disenfranchisement

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If the right to vote is what grants us our citizenship and political voice, then a democratic government that values the participation of the people should guarantee the vote for all people. Even in the face of questioning the real impact of the vote, there cannot even be the potential for democratic engagement without the vote. The ability of all citizens to vote has been unavailable since the founding of the United States. Only white, male, landowning citizens were given the right to vote in America’s founding documents. As women incrementally gained voting rights at the beginning of the twentieth century, Black women remained disenfranchised. 

After the end of Reconstruction in 1877, many states enacted laws meant to hinder Black citizens’ access to economic and political agency. Among these were barriers to the right to vote. Requirements stipulating that voters own property, pay poll taxes, and pass literacy exams in order to cast a ballot, for instance, created major obstacles for African American communities. The Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s represented a major effort to remedy the voter disenfranchisement of African Americans. In 2013, the Supreme Court case Shelby County v. Holder struck down a crucial part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which required certain state and local governments to clear changes in election laws with the United States Attorney General or the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. This Supreme Court decision made it easier for states to enact discriminatory voting laws once again.

In the summer of 1963, Ann Arbor and many other cities were getting fired up in their local communities for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom , which was to take place on August 28 in Washington, DC.

Flyer . Ca. 1962. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Atlanta, GA. From the Joseph A Labadie Collection, Subject Vertical Files.  

The flyer above was distributed locally to announce a rally in Ann Arbor on August 26. The headline states "Join the Ann Arbor Freedom Rally and March - Come to City Hall - Huron and Fifth - 7:00PM." Black residents in Ann Arbor were experiencing discrimination in housing and access to services. John Lewis was the main speaker at this rally. He was on a nationwide tour to raise awareness about the March on Washington and to gain support for the Civil Rights Movement.

Student groups were actively involved in the fight for civil and voting rights. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had an active chapter in Ann Arbor in the early 1960s. Some University of Michigan students were involved. Out of this group came Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which was formed in response to the civil rights struggles in the North and the South.

Joseph A. Labadie Collection, Pinback Button Digital Collection.

This red and white pin from 1969, pictured above, reads “Vote in the Streets, November 5, SDS.” SDS is the acronym for the Students for a Democratic Society. The activist organization was strongly invested in the idea of “participatory democracy” and decentralized leadership, with the aim of promoting civil, political, and voting rights for all people.

Poster. Ca. 1962. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Atlanta, GA. From the Joseph A Labadie Collection, Political Posters Digital Collection.

The poster above features an image of a Black man in work overalls, work boots, and a straw hat sitting on a chair near what looks to be his front porch made of worn wood and cracked cement. The main title text reads “One Man One Vote.” At the bottom it advertises for the “Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee” and lists the location of the committee at “8 ½ Raymond Street, N.W. Atlanta 14, Georgia.”

The pictured man represents ordinary people, such as poor, rural, African American farmers located in the Deep South that SNCC worked to help empower through their organizing efforts. In 1962 the SNCC began conducting voter education and registration drives in Mississippi using the slogan, “One Man, One Vote.” The slogan adorned buttons, banners, and posters.

Freedom News . Richmond, CA. Joseph A. Labadie Collection.

Incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people have also been targets of voter disenfranchisement. Most states disallow voting for felons actively incarcerated. But more than 30 states extend that disenfranchisement well beyond time served. Some 20 million Americans have felony convictions. When far, far more Black and brown Americans than white ones are convicted of felonies, this form of disenfranchisement secures meaningful advantages for the dominant political body (white, affluent, patriarchal).

The article above in the July 1972 issue of Freedom News , a local alternative community newspaper from Richmond, California, describes a lawsuit filed by the California Rural Legal Assistance group in 1972 on behalf of three disenfranchised ex-felons. It explains how voting rights for ex-convicts are differentially applied on the local level, based on varying interpretations of the Supreme Court's Otsuka v. Hite decision which limited denial of voting rights only to those whose crimes would "threaten the purity of the ballot box." Supporting the right to vote, evidence is provided from the President's Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence which found that denying voting rights may lead to alienation and negative, sometimes violent, expressions of emotion. The article closes with a quote from the president of the League of Women Voters of California who said that "An ex-felon should have the same rights as all other citizens, so that he will again feel that he is a part of society and has a legitimate role in the political process."

The long struggle to obtain voting rights for Black and other Americans of Color may, as part of the larger Civil Rights Movement, be emblematic of concerted efforts to deny or suppress the vote among a certain population. But it is by no means the only instance of such efforts, nor, indeed, is that struggle ended.

It was only on August 18, 1920, after a campaign lasting nearly 100 years, that the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment granted white women suffrage. It marked the single largest expansion of voting rights in the nation’s history and meant that political decision making could no longer solely reflect the priorities of white males. 

This white pin shown above reads “I am woman, Watch me vote,” referencing the popular 1972 song by Helen Reddy “I am woman.”

Joseph A. Labadie Collection Subject Vertical Files: Women - Suffrage

The above broadside was created in 1912 by the National American Woman Suffrage Association. It states 10 reasons why women should have the same voting rights as men. In making its case, the flyer alludes to a famous statement from Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address when it reads, "Because women are citizens of a government of the people, by the people and for the people. And women are people."

Legal battles continue to affect the rights of voters in many states, which have changed rapidly before and since the 2020 election. Another current front for voter suppression is the debate over mail-in ballots, with some fighting to limit access to mail in ballots on the basis of unsupported accusations of voter fraud. Voting rights groups seek to expand access to mail-in ballots in order to make it easier and more convenient for people to vote.

Independent Journalism: Making Dissident Voices Heard

Anarchism & Anti-Voting

Art by Kathleen Greco

Disenfranchisement in the United States of America 

Prepared by Aisury Vasque

Disenfranchisement is the cancelation of an individual’s right to vote whether legally or through discriminatory practices.   Six years before his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial, Dr. Martin Luther King called on the United States government to end voter suppression and disenfranchisement. In “Give Us the Ballot” Dr. King stated, “The denial of this sacred right is a tragic betrayal of the highest mandates of our democratic tradition.” (1957). Yet, the Civil Rights Era was not the first time that Americans fought for their right to vote. Nearly 60 years before Dr. King, women marched and fought for a right that had been taken from them legally.    Upon its creation the US Constitution did not formally state who had the right to vote, leaving that power to the states. With that power, the states have made it very clear who they do not want to vote.  In 1868, the 14th Amendment was the first document to specifically state that voting rights would only be granted to men. Women were denied voting rights, because they were believed to be “childlike” and “incapable of independent thought” (Teaching Tolerance), and according to most researchers, mental exertion could jeopardize reproductive health . After the passage of the 15th Amendment to the US Constitution, granting Black men the right to vote, states adopted policies that targeted offenses statistically committed by Black voters in an effort to disenfranchise them .     In recent years, the United States has continued to suppress voting rights, particularly those of Black, Hispanic, and Latinx individuals, by advocating for voter ID laws.  The rationale is that voter ID laws prevent voter fraud. Yet in a study conducted by Professor Justin Levitt from 2000 to 2014, only  31 cases of voter fraud were detected out of one billion total votes cast. Moreover, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a proponent of voter ID laws , was only able to find two cases of voter fraud in his state.The United States stands alone as a modern democracy that takes voting rights away from its citizens on the basis of criminal convictions . Changes in law and policy have led to mass incarceration, especially of Black Americans, who are incarcerated at six times the rate of white Americans, thereby disenfranchising people due to felony convictions. States like Florida ban Americans with felony convictions for life from voting.     In 2013, the Supreme Court rolled back protections of the historic Voting Rights Act of 1965 in Shelby County v Holder by no longer requiring jurisdictions, selected on their history of discrimination in voting, to pass federal scrutiny in order to enact any new election or voting laws, thus opening the door for States to pass laws that would overwhelmingly target communities of color. Although the United States brands itself as a democratic nation, voter disenfranchisement has a more than 100-year-long history and several Americans are still denied the fundamental right of our “democratic tradition”.  

The Fight To Vote Part 4: The Disenfranchisement Of Women

A hundred years after women earned the right to vote, they’re now the fastest-growing group of people losing it. Part 4 of this series examining felon disenfranchisement looks at how and why women are being incarcerated in record numbers, and how the issue affects Black women in particular.

At a Leon County polling booth during the March presidential primary, new voter Gena Grant was elated to cast a ballot for the first time in 20 years.

“I’m just grateful that society gave me another opportunity to be able to say that I made a mistake and I am not a bad person,” Grant said.

She was one of the thousands of felons who could cast ballots thanks to 2018’s state constitutional amendment, Amendment 4.

“Don’t take away my rights fully allowing me to be an American and voting and having a part in how I want my country to be ran just because I made a mistake 20 years ago,” Grant said.

According to the Prison Policy Initiative, 93% of inmates in Florida are men. Women make up 7% and that number hasn’t changed much. Though the percentages don’t seem like a lot, since 1980 the number of women in state prison has increased by 733%. A hundred years after the passage of the 19th amendment, when women earned the right to vote, they’re losing that right in record numbers.

“Specifically, women of color and black women who enter the system and exit the system at an economic disadvantage," says the Southern Poverty Law Center 's Nancy Abudu.

Nearly 2,000 women inmates are Black, making up 29% of the population in prison while Blacks in total are only 17% of the state population. Abudu believes laws are biased against Black women. During the trial over a state law requiring felons to repay fines, fees, and restitution before they can register to vote, Abudu argued Black women aren’t treated equally compared to white men.

“If you equate everything between a white man and a black woman: education, professional experience we find that Black women at the same level are still making about 62 cents on the dollar to a white man,” Abudu said.

She says that adds to the difficulty a Black woman who is also a felon will have.

“When they're coming out of prison or probation, they often are the sole breadwinners and caretakers of their children,” Abudu said. “And so to ask them to choose between paying restitution or a fine as opposed to putting food on their table, I think that the answer speaks for itself, in terms for what their focus is.”

Certain laws also disproportionally affect Black women. Take laws against domestic violence:

“The idea was to encourage women who are being brutalized in their home to call police. But then the police in some places would adopt a policy where if they show up for a domestic violence dispute or call, they [are] arresting everybody,” Abudu said. “That’s not only intimidating women from seeking help. But then it also results in them getting arrested and getting caught up in the system.”

Then, there are the drug laws.

“You have a lot of situations where women are the girlfriends or they hold the drugs or they might carry the drugs,” Abudu said. “But they’re not the mastermind behind the drug operation and yet they’re getting sentenced at rates that are just as high as the mastermind of that drug operation.”

Andrea James is a lawyer and former federal inmate who founded the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, about her experience. She talked to PBS’s Newshour in a 2018 interview .

“But the fact of the matter is that, for many of the reasons that women are incarcerated for, we need to find other solutions, because they are directly in relation to women being victims themselves,” James said.

In 2018 the U.S. Department of Justice conducted a review of how the Federal Bureau of Prisons handles female inmates. Among its recommendations: prisons need better training for staff on the needs of women and trauma victims. It also called for better access to feminine hygiene products.

Florida took that step in 2019 through a state law that makes those products free.

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Disenfranchisement of Women in Lower Dir Results of a Fact Finding Exercise

Related Papers

Gabrielle Bardall, PhD

Pakistani women face unique and frequently more severe challenges to their political participation than men do. In particular, the violence faced by Pakistani female political candidates, and voters is a serious barrier to their full participation in civic life. These challenges are especially difficult to address because they often go unrecorded and unreported. Security actors and public bodies such as Electoral Management Bodies (EMBs) may struggle to respond to protect and promote women’s public participation because of the absence of documentation and understanding of the nature and magnitude of the problem, as well as lack of specific programming responses that may be appropriate to the context. The present study seeks to fill this knowledge gap by documenting the distinct challenges to women’s political participation in Pakistan, specifically examining the issue of violence against women in politics (VAWP) during electoral processes. The aim of the study is to produce an evidence base and identify the types of VAWP in Pakistan to encourage appropriate policy measures through legislative reforms by Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP), and other key stakeholders. Specifically, the aim of this baseline study is to identify the forms of VAWP and to document its prevalence and magnitude in the country. Based on this analysis, the study offers a number of policy options to address the issue of VAWP as well as providing recommendations to develop effective measures for eliminating VAWP in consultation with Civil Society Organizations (CSOs), media, political parties, women candidates and voters, the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) and ECP. The study concludes with recommendations for the development of mechanisms to monitor incidents of VAWP ahead of elections.

A Comparative Analysis of Elections Manifesto of Seven Major Political Parties of Pakistan

Dr. Shahid Bukhari

The gender gap in politics is a universal phenomenon analyzed and discussed by scholars around the World. Though the gender gap in Western democracies is about to close but it still exists in all forms of participatory activities in developing countries including Pakistan. The issue of female under-representation has been governmental concern under certain international commitments but gender gap in participation has not been addressed properly either by government or scholars working in the field of gender and politics in Pakistan. The study contributes to the existing literature by identifying the main actor responsible for this stigma of low participation. ____________________

Democracy is still in the nascent stages in Pakistan and the country faces a very basic problem of disenfranchisement of women. In the national elections of 2008 held in Pakistan, there were 564 female polling stations where reportedly not even a single ballot paper was stamped. These polling stations were spread all over the country, and 85% of them were situated in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK). These were regions where there was collective opposition from the tribespeople, political and religious parties to the casting of votes by females. In order to prevent a similar situation arising again, the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP), civil society organizations and the media took the responsibility of voter mobilization and awareness raising on women’s political participation in these areas before the general elections of 2013. However, the outcome of these efforts cannot be assessed due to unavailability of polling station level results even twelve months after the general election. This brief details why there is an urgent need to publish polling station specific data, which is normally documented in Form XVI of the ECP. All by Returning Officers (ROs) at the constituency level are required to fill out this form and send it to the ECP, and the Commission thus has the data available. Unless this data is made public, it is not possible to assess if women were able to exercise their right to vote in all regions. Indeed, if this were not the case, it would call into question the validity of election results in certain constituencies.

Democracy is still in the nascent stages in Pakistan and the country faces a very basic problem of disenfranchisement of women. In the national elections of 2008 held in Pakistan, there were 564 female polling stations where reportedly not even a single ballot paper was stamped. These polling stations were spread all over the country, and 85% of them were situated in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK). These were regions where there was collective opposition from the tribes-people, political and religious parties to the casting of votes by females. In order to prevent a similar situation arising again, the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP), civil society organizations and the media took the responsibility of voter mobilization and awareness raising on women’s political participation in these areas before the general elections of 2013. However, the outcome of these efforts cannot be assessed due to unavailability of polling station level results even twelve months after the general election. This brief details why there is an urgent need to publish polling station specific data, which is normally documented in Form XVI of the ECP. All by Returning Officers (ROs) at the constituency level are required to fill out this form and send it to the ECP, and the Commission thus has the data available. Unless this data is made public, it is not possible to assess if women were able to exercise their right to vote in all regions. Indeed, if this were not the case, it would call into question the validity of election results in certain constituencies.

Ashley Barr

Assisted in statistical analysis, data visualization, and mapping of parallel vote tabulation results and analysis of election violence in this report and online constituency-level analysis. In 2013, FAFEN had no foreign technical assistance and increased the number of observers.

Abdul Rauf , Mr. Hasan Shah

In electoral studies understanding of voting behaviour at national level carry its own value, but there is a need to study the political behaviour at the micro level also. Turnout in elections is considered to be the measurement of the level of democratization. Pakistan being a third world country usually do not have good turnout in elections. Turnout in election is determined by various factors ranging from personal and group leverages to structural arrangements for the process of participation of the people in the election. The study is conducted in a rural region of Pakistan in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa not only to obtain the voters' opinion but an effort is made to analyse the data in the existing socio economic and political conditions. It is hoped that the study will add to the existing scarce literature available in Pakistan on voting behaviour of people and their political participation.

PAKISTAN SOCIAL SCIENCES REVIEW (PSSR)

Sher Muhammad

This study critically evaluates the different gender quota policies adopted by Pakistan and what have been the actors and factors responsible for such strategies. Although the constitution of Pakistan grants equal rights to women, but these constitutional provisions had not improved the status of women accordingly. The descriptive research mythology has been adopted for this paper. Study has found that gender quota has always been introduced in isolation. There looks complete alienation between civil society and political elites. In the absence of a favorable social structure and cultural traditions, only constitutional provisions of equality could not guarantee the provision of any rights to a marginalized segment of the society

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Article Contents

Postmodern critical theorizing, propositions of the theory of communicative (dis)enfranchisement, example analysis: cd for covid long-haulers, supplementary material, data availability, acknowledgments, theory of communicative (dis)enfranchisement: introduction, explication, and application.

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Elizabeth A Hintz, Kristina M Scharp, Theory of communicative (dis)enfranchisement: introduction, explication, and application, Journal of Communication , Volume 74, Issue 2, April 2024, Pages 89–100, https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqae002

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In this essay, we set forth the theory of communicative (dis)enfranchisement (TCD). The TCD is useful for exploring the ramifications of the hegemonic ideologies which constrain and afford our everyday lives, and which are constructed and reflected in disenfranchising talk (DT). The TCD also asks what communication mechanisms work to reify and resist these hegemonic ideologies. We first introduce the warrant for this theorizing, then overview the assumptions of critical postmodernism and propositions of the TCD. We offer guidance for using the TCD via example research questions, suitable contexts, methodological tools, and conclusions researchers can potentially render. We offer criteria for evaluating the TCD regarding its consistency with critical postmodernism, utility as a heuristic framework, and capacity for claims-making. We respond to potential critiques of the TCD by distinguishing the TCD from six related bodies of communication theorizing, and by addressing the purported opaqueness of critical theorizing. Finally, we offer an example analysis to illustrate the TCD in research practice.

Although often used to refer to the loss of the right to vote, the word disenfranchise is derived from “dis” meaning “lack of, not” and “enfranchiss” meaning to “grant the status or privilege of citizenship, admit membership…,” and together means to “deprive of civil or electoral privileges” ( Online Etymology Dictionary, 2022 , n.p.). Hence, disenfranchisement can be broadly conceptualized as the deprivation of rights or privileges ( Oxford Dictionary, 2022 ). Ray (1996a , 1996b ) and later others ( de Souza, 2021 ; Falnikar & Dutta, 2021 ; Kaur-Gill & Dutta, 2020 ; Yehya & Dutta, 2015 ) have argued that disenfranchisement could be brought about communicatively—that communication could catalyze the deprivation of rights/privileges via what we term disenfranchising talk (DT). Communicative disenfranchisement (CD), then, is the process by which communication results in deleterious outcomes, such as the deprivation of a person’s rights and privileges. Our focus on talk reflects our assumption that language constitutes reality, and therefore, that talk constitutes ideology. Hence the parentheses in the title for (dis)enfranchisement—if communication constitutes disenfranchisement, it is also an avenue for enfranchisement again. Consistent with prior writings on DT ( Hintz & Wilson, 2021 ), talk is construed broadly to refer to the ideological micropractices (e.g., interpersonal interactions, visual imagery, memes, and media messages) that constitute daily life and reflect informal, localized operations of power. The unit of analysis, then, is the turn in talk.

The purpose of this essay is to introduce the critical postmodern articulation of the theory of communicative (dis)enfranchisement (TCD)—a theoretical framework designed to examine disempowering messages, the conditions enabling them, and the consequences sustaining them. The TCD is important as it contributes to disciplinary movements toward critical theory and methodological expansiveness, interdisciplinary conversations about marginalized people, and methodological debates about how best to capture the process of marginalization. Specifically, the TCD asserts that ideologies are important sites for investigation, as they establish social norms, expectations, and policies with (im)material consequences. Theoretically, this critical postmodern theory connects the ideological to the material, a matter of practical significance as ideology has felt consequences. Thus, our rationale, though parsimonious, is powerful. Ideologies kill and maim people, and the TCD allows scholars to not only identify these ideologies but also tie those ideologies to the consequences that sustain them. Rather than studying the carnage (e.g., viewing disenfranchisement as an outcome or moderator), this communication-centered theory realizes the potential for excavating the conditions for, and consequences of ideology in everyday life, as well as exploring the communicative mechanisms that both reify and resist such ideologies. Indeed, instead of studying the outcomes of hate speech, for example, (i.e., a post-positivist approach), the ways people understand microaggressions (i.e., an interpretive approach), or the ways xenophobia catalyzes the marginalization of religious minorities (i.e., a critical modern approach), we attend to the ways communication can reinforce or dismantle the social norms that make DT possible.

Ultimately, the TCD is concerned with ideological power and its consequences, and how communication resists and reifies that power and those consequences. DT informs these processes of resistance and reification. Like other postmodern critical theories, we center ideology and recognize that not all ideologies hold the same amount of power. In contrast to postmodern critical theories such as RDT ( Baxter, 2011 ), however, our theory foregrounds the real consequences of ideology for people’s lived experience. In contrast to postmodern critical theory at large, we center communication as the mechanism by which resistance and reification manifest. Thus, the TCD shares the same fundamental assumptions about power and ideology as all critical postmodern theory (within and outside of the field) but diverges in its emphasis on communication and consequence in particular. Considering that postmodern critical theorists do not approach their research with ideologies pre-identified, the TCD might speak to any social norm which serves as the standard by which people are rendered deviant. Thus, the TCD draws attention away from individual perception (e.g., “bad apples”), and toward the upstream conditions (ideology; Fitch, 1994 ; Lannamann, 1991 , 1992 ; Parks, 1995 ) making disenfranchisement possible. Those consequences reify the ideologies (and sustain the disenfranchisement)—hence the TCD enables a researcher to examine how ideologies sustain themselves, and with what collateral ramifications. This assertion is theoretically generative, as postmodern critical work has been critiqued for being detached from outcomes (e.g., Moore & Manning, 2019 ).

Responding to disciplinary calls for increasing metatheoretical and participant diversity (cf. Braithwaite et al., 2022 ; Chakravartty et al., 2018 ), and building on earlier work ( Hintz & Wilson, 2021 ; Ray, 1996a , 1996b ), studies applying this nascent framework ( Gunning, 2023 ; Hintz, 2023 ; Thompson et al., 2023a ), and the potential to expose any social norm that inspires DT, we forward the TCD as a field-general theory with interdisciplinary potential. Consistent with our meta-theoretical assumptions, we argue that, if the goals of resisting and changing the status quo are to be realized, scholars must collectively study what today remains disciplinarily and theoretically fragmented. We therefore forward the TCD as: (a) a multi-faceted tool anyone (within or beyond the field) can utilize to study how communication brings about injustice (even if they are unfamiliar with critical theory) and as (b) a field-general theoretical heuristic for resisting hegemony. Before attending to the postmodern critical meta-theoretical perspective that informs the TCD, we forward a multi-paradigm vision for future TCD scholarship and the field.

The construct cosmos and paradigm planets

Before explicating our meta-theoretical assumptions, we first introduce our assertion that theoretical constructs can exist separately from paradigms. That is, we argue that theoretical constructs do not belong only to one paradigm. Using a simile (see Figure 1 ), theoretical constructs are like the sun, and paradigms are like planets orbiting the sun. All planets are inhabitable, but researchers can only visit one planet at a time (i.e., our assumptions and approach must be consistent within a study, but scholars can use different paradigms across studies to address a theoretical process). For instance, the theoretical construct of CD has already been studied on other paradigm planets (see Hintz et al., 2023 for measures of CD constructs, a proposed model, and example hypotheses for post-positivist applications of CD). Here, the TCD is the formal articulation of a critical postmodern theory (e.g., Gunning & Taladay-Carter, 2023 ). We utilize this simile to situate our paradigm planet around the construct of CD, the sun, rather than to explicate the theory across all paradigm planets. Future essays will explicate how researchers can study CD from other paradigms (see Thompson et al., 2023a ).

Although articulated as a critical postmodern theoretical framework hereafter, the TCD continues a tradition in which theoretical principles, such as the communication theory of resilience ( Buzzanell, 2010 ; Wilson et al., 2021 ), integrative theory of communication work ( Donovan & Hazlett, 2023 ), and the culture-centered approach ( Sastry et al., 2021 ) are adapted and utilized across paradigms. We contend that, to address wicked social problems and serve social justice ends, scholars must employ epistemological humility , endeavoring to ask and answer the best questions (for the community, for the theory, etc.), rather than pre-emptively delimiting the kinds of questions scholars can ask along a priori meta-theoretical lines, while still adhering to epistemological fidelity. Put simply, the kinds of wicked social problems the TCD centers require multi-paradigm solutions. What change do you seek to solicit? What claims do you desire to make? This consideration should drive which paradigm a researcher adopts. We introduce a critical postmodern articulation of the TCD and detail claims which can be made using this perspective. First, we: (a) review the assumptions of critical postmodern theorizing, (b) forward propositions of the TCD, and (c) offer guidance for using the TCD.

Unlike post-positivist theorizing (concerned with predicting or explaining), interpretive theorizing (concerned with understanding), and critical modern theorizing (concerned with the critique of structures of power toward emancipatory ends), critical postmodern theorizing aims to expose the taken-for-granted ideologies which harm certain groups of people, identify resistance and challenges to these ideologies, and reclaim and amplify marginalized voices ( Scharp & Dorrance Hall, 2024 ). The main difference between critical modern and postmodern research lies in their differing conceptualizations of power, where the former locates power in institutions of oppression (e.g., racism, sexism, etc.) and the latter locates power within the dominant ideologies which circulate in a particular culture (e.g., individualism, openness, etc.; Scharp & Dorrance Hall, 2024 ).

Before explicating propositions of the TCD, it is first necessary to review the ontological (concerned with the nature of being), epistemological (concerned with the recognition of knowledge), and axiological (concerned with the role of values within our inquiry) assumptions undergirding critical postmodern theorizing. The TCD is grounded in empiricism and celebrates the contributions of humanistic ways of knowing to our field ( Scharp & Thomas, 2019 ). First, when considering critical postmodern ontological commitments , scholars might question what they believe about the nature of the world around us. Ontologically, critical postmodernism assumes that language constructs our realities, but does not do so neutrally, as not all realities are privileged equally. Second, regarding epistemological commitments , scholars might question what counts as knowledge, and whose knowledge counts. Like interpretive and critical modern research, epistemologically, critical postmodernism assumes the existence of multiple, subjective realities. Ontologically and epistemologically, we reject the realism–relativism dichotomy (e.g., Braun & Clarke, 2013 ), instead arguing that what defines disenfranchisement is relative to the meanings that constitute it, but also that there are real-world consequences of CD. Finally, regarding the axiological commitments of critical postmodernism, scholars question what role values play in the research process. Axiologically, critical postmodernism exposes and dismantles taken-for-granted assumptions, offers new ways of viewing the world, and amplifies marginalized voices ( Scharp & Dorrance Hall, 2024 ). These onto-, epistemo-, and axiological commitments reflect quality criteria for the evaluation of theories like the TCD, next described.

We next offer definitions and warrants for three propositions of the TCD, building from prior work using the framework and simplifying its five initial assumptions (cf. Gunning, 2023 ; Hintz, 2023 ; Hintz & Wilson, 2021 ; Thompson et al., 2023a ). As previewed, our full articulation of the TCD more clearly de-centers the individual (i.e., the TCD is not about “bad apples”) and instead focuses the research attention on operations of ideological power—the conditions making DT possible. We are interested in talk, and, in our view, people are the entities that voice ideologies. We offer and unpack these three propositions below using examples from our own areas of health, interpersonal, and family communication research.

Proposition #1: Hegemonic ideologies are reflected and constructed in DT

DT both reflects and constructs hegemonic ideologies, which are themselves historical and processual, that constrain and afford everyday life.

A first proposition of the TCD reflects a Foucauldian approach to understanding ideology—namely, we assume that all knowledge is always already ideological, and that all people are possessed of ideologies whose operations have material ramifications ( Thompson, Hintz, et al., 2022 ). Ideologies are miasmatic, referring to “the mental frameworks—the languages, the concepts, categories, imagery of thought, and the systems of representation—which different…social groups deploy to make sense of…and render intelligible the way society works” ( Hall, 1996 , pp. 25–26). Ideologies are inherently tied to issues of power, as they “[shape] our reality and understanding of what exists, what is possible, and what is valued” ( Scharp & Dorrance Hall, 2024 , p. 26), but are taken for granted, as they masquerade as nothing more than common sense or human nature ( Thompson et al., 2023a ). Rather than primarily studying DT and perceptions of DT for individual interactants, a focus on ideologies sensitizes researchers to the “upstream” conditions making DT possible. Instead of focusing on the talk or behavior of “bad apple” individuals (e.g., physicians), the TCD recognizes that there are common societal factors (i.e., ideologies) creating room for DT to occur, and asks researchers to examine the operations of these factors toward catalyzing change in the status quo. Hence, like relational dialectics theory ( Baxter et al., 2021 ), the individual is de-centered in discussions of operations of ideological power in the TCD.

Relatedly, hegemony refers to the ongoing process of “intellectual and moral leadership” exercised by a society’s dominant class ( Gramsci, 2009 , p. 75). Calling something hegemonic (e.g., hegemonic ideologies) reflects the process by which the dominant class attempts to generate consent to the status quo ( Thompson et al., 2023a ). Put differently, hegemonic ideologies reflect the status quo—are dominant, influential, and embedded into a culture in its norms as a way of life. Ideologies create hegemonic social norms that pervade the experience of everyday life. Although people can voice ideologies explicitly (e.g., a political platform), hegemonic ideologies might seem to be “common sense, raw fact, or human nature” ( Thompson et al., 2023a , p. 178). For example, a hegemonic ideology surrounding what a family is, emphasizes (a) biological connection, (b) obligation, and (c) shared history in ways that make family estrangement at best, something people want to reconcile, and at worst, an unviable solution even in the face of significant abuse ( Scharp & Thomas, 2016 ). Hegemonic ideologies are also intertextual—connected over time both to what came before (historically) and what might come after. Intertextuality occurs when individuals reference certain texts in other texts to formulate particular meanings for an audience ( Baxter et al., 2021 ). For example, the family ideology referenced above is intertextual and manifests in people’s assumptions that family members have an ongoing positive relationship (i.e., historical) as well as estranged family member’s anticipation that their desire for distance will be met with attempts at reconciliation (i.e., projected response).

As is implied in the above, DT is a process , a patterned series of events (see Poole, 2013 ), unfolding across time and interactions. In contrast to variance approaches to examining process (e.g., structural equation modeling), process theories are useful for elucidating how unique cases (which might vary in length, sequence typologies, and by whom and in which contexts they occur) are united by a common process unfolding across time ( Poole, 2013 ). Scholars might consider tracing the critical events in which DT is embedded and consider what generative mechanism(s) or motors are spurring progression or change in such events ( Poole, 2013 ). CD is a socially regulated process, meaning that certain relationships, identities, and experiences which create vulnerability (or reflect an inborn vulnerability) rely upon being constituted as “real” (cf. Hameleers & Yekta, 2023 ; Railsback, 1983 ) for individuals to be able to access beneficial affordances and be shielded from disadvantages. For example, when ideologies constitute patients with poorly understood illnesses as not being “really” sick, they might be unable to access needed care and support. Hence, disenfranchisement occurs when the ideologies called upon in DT inhibit individuals’ exercise of rights and privileges (e.g., to be a knower of one’s own health concerns; Hintz & Tucker, 2023 ) to which they are otherwise entitled.

DT reflects and constructs hegemonic ideologies. People are the agents of ideologies, and their talk is a constitutive force for ideologies. What makes an ideology hegemonic is that people are complicit—that these social norms have become integrated into people’s expectations about how life works. Deviance from these social norms is punished. People’s relationships and identities, or their experiences and reactions to those experiences are potential “targets” of DT and sites for the operations of ideologies. The TCD asserts that DT: (a) discredits (i.e., contests the existence or experience of the target of DT); (b) silences (i.e., prevents or discourages a person subjected to DT from talking about the target of DT); and (c) stereotypes (i.e., reduces a person’s relationship, identity, or experience to overly simplistic explanations). For instance, Hintz and Tucker (2023) found that hegemonic ideologies contested the existence or nature of female patients’ chronic pain (discrediting), rendered them undeserving of referrals to further testing or care and time in their appointments (silencing), and stereotyped their reported symptoms on the basis of their age, gender, weight, mental illness, or purported malingering (stereotyping). Other functions of DT will be identified in future TCD research.

Proposition #2: There are (im)material ramifications of operations of ideologies

There are (im)material ramifications of DT in individuals’ daily lives which perpetuate the disenfranchisement.

A second proposition of the TCD helps us to better understand why DT is problematic and consequential. The TCD asserts that our day-to-day lives are the material and political lived consequences of hegemonic ideologies at work. Ideologies kill and maim people ( Hintz & Tucker, 2023 ). In other words, there are ramifications (materially and immaterially) of operations of ideologies through DT, and people are collateral damage for these operations. Materialism advocates for some consideration of “how objects and other non-human actants are constitutive of relationship and families” ( Moore & Manning, 2019 , p. 51)—“how matter comes to matter” ( Barad, 2003 , p. 801). These ramifications of operations of ideologies are a warrant for the utility of the TCD, addressing critical theorizing’s alleged detachment and abstractness ( Moore & Manning, 2019 ). As in the water cycle, like clouds, ideology rains down (precipitates) into (im)material consequences in people’s lives. Some people drown in a flooding ocean, others with privilege walk by idly holding umbrellas not even getting wet ( Figure 2 ).

Visual representation of sun and planets simile for multi-paradigm theoretical constructs

Note : We would like to thank Asmomarfaruk for the paid creation of this artwork. In this figure, the sun in the center of the construct cosmos reflects CD. The planets orbiting the sun represent different paradigms of communication research (i.e., critical postmodern, critical modern, interpretive, and post-positivist). CD is the central construct which can be utilized across paradigms in different studies.

Visual representation of water cycle simile for operations of ideological power.

Note : We would like to thank Asmomarfaruk for the paid creation of this artwork. In this figure, the clouds represent hegemonic ideologies (taken for granted systems of meaning). Ideologies precipitate (rain down) into (im)material consequences through DT, like the ocean, the stream, and the rain. In response to these (im)material consequences of ideology, some people are complicit in perpetuating the status quo—they are overwhelmed and drown. In these cases, the water meets the ground and is reabsorbed, reifying the ideology, and continuing it as additionally viable. Others do not feel the effects of ideology due to their privilege, like holding an umbrella to avoid getting wet from the rain. Others yet resist, taking the water and using for a transformative purpose—it to fill a swimming pool. This extended simile of the water cycle illustrates the ideological conditions and ramifications of operations of ideology, as well as examples of what mechanisms individuals might employ in response.

The disenfranchisement brought about by DT refers to the deprivation of a person’s rights or privileges, and the often-dire consequences of ideological power in individuals’ daily lives. Disenfranchisement can be understood, in one example context, as being realized in the deprivation of chronic pain patients’ right to needed care, support, and resources due to talk that contests the realness of patients’ illnesses by drawing upon ideologies about female patients which construct them as melodramatic, and pain patients as drug-seeking malingerers ( Hintz, 2023 ). The ideologies called upon in DT can also be motivated by intersections ( Boylorn, 2022 ; Crenshaw, 1991 ) of interactants’ identities (e.g., gender, bodily ability, and socioeconomic status). For instance, Black and/or poor female patients ( Pryma, 2017 ) might be accused of malingering to receive disability benefits or workplace accommodations due to racialized class stereotypes.

Disenfranchisement originates beyond the minds of interlocuters (i.e., comes from ideology, not merely human cognition ) and happens to people in the material sense—it is not something they merely “perceive” as being real. Studies using TCD have identified several categories of more immediate (proximal) consequences of operations of ideology through DT: (a) agency , where operations of ideology through DT render individuals less able to talk about the target of DT with others; (b) credibility , where operations of ideology through DT rouse suspicion as to whether those subjected to DT are trustworthy (see, e.g., Thompson et al., 2023b ); and (c) rights and privileges , where operations of ideology through DT deprive those subjected to DT of the ability to act as they wish without interference. We also assert that operations of ideology through DT negatively alter individuals’ perceptions of the goals (i.e., task, relational, and identity) they expect others to pursue in future similar interactions ( negative goal inferences ). People become awakened to the recognition that ideologies are omnipresent, as, across time and interactions, ideologies create friction and constrain their everyday lives and relationships. In turn, individuals subjected to DT increasingly begin to anticipate interference from ideology—the crush of disenfranchisement.

Proposition #3: Communicative mechanisms resist/reify hegemonic ideologies

Communicative mechanisms might resist and/or reify these hegemonic ideologies which operate through DT.

A third proposition of the TCD asserts that, when ideology rains down on ( precipitates into) people’s lives, they might draw upon communicative mechanisms to resist (i.e., push back against in some transformative capacity) hegemonic ideologies. Continuing our water cycle simile, resistance is the labor-intensive process of collecting the falling rainwater and repurposing it toward a transformative end (e.g., to fill a swimming pool or create a water slide). If individuals do not resist, the rain meets the ground and then evaporates and becomes the cloud again (ideology is reified— reinscribed as normative, good, true; Denker & Knight, 2020 ; see Figure 2 ). For instance, illnesses talked about as being “normal” (e.g., chronic fatigue syndrome, endometriosis) or “fake” (e.g., fibromyalgia) do not receive the research and funding to discover otherwise, and a lack of formal medical knowledge is then a barrier to training medical providers to understand the illness and treat patients. This process of reification or resistance is accomplished via communicative mechanisms —the “motors” generating movement through the disenfranchisement process ( Poole, 2013 ).

For instance, implicit in some communication scholarship is the notion of a self-fulfilling prophecy (i.e., a statement about an expectation that later brings about that expectation as being true) as a mechanism which reifies hegemonic ideologies. Female chronic pain patients subjected to DT (e.g., that they are melodramatic), for example, might engage in actions (e.g., increased assertiveness, Lapinski & Orbe, 2007 ; self-education, non-compliance; Brashers et al., 1999 ) which might lead them to be seen as unreasonable, supporting this as a purported explanation for their symptoms. The self-fulfilling prophecy mechanism is like the idea of double binds ( Watzlawick et al., 1967 ) in which patients might find that the only available communicative options are disadvantageous ( Thompson et al., 2023b ).

These propositions—(a) DT reflects and constructs hegemonic ideologies, (b) operations of ideology have (im)material ramifications, and (c) communicative mechanisms might resist or reify hegemonic ideologies—together form the TCD’s simplified analytical framework. Toward elucidating and disrupting the status quo, scholars may, using this simplified analytical framework, name hegemonic ideologies and the consequences of those ideologies, as well as identify the communicative mechanisms that both reify and resist those ideologies.

Putting the theory to work

Now that the TCD’s propositions have been laid out, to increase the usability of the TCD, we next: (a) offer example research questions (RQs) for using the TCD, (b) offer example contexts well-suited for the TCD, and (c) propose methodological tools for addressing the RQs proposed.

Example research questions

Mapping onto the three guiding propositions of the TCD outlined above, we offer examples of research questions (RQs) researchers could ask using the TCD: ( RQ1 ) What hegemonic ideologies do specific features of DT reflect and construct? ( RQ2a ) How do hegemonic ideologies (dis)enfranchise people? RQ2(b) How do those (im)material conditions reify (dis)enfranchising ideologies? ( RQ3 ) What communicative mechanisms work to resist these hegemonic ideologies? Scholars need not feel limited to asking only these research questions, nor do scholars need to feel compelled to address all of these research questions in a single study.

Example contexts suitable for the TCD

Using this heuristic framework, we next outline productive ways researchers might illustrate the TCD’s concepts and assumptions. People’s relationships and identities, or their experiences are potential “targets” of DT. As the TCD presumes that individuals are constituted as being disenfranchised through talk (i.e., not that there are “disenfranchised” people), scholars need not limit the use of the TCD to only “marked” populations ( Yep, 2010 ). All individuals are likely to be disenfranchised at some point during their lives ( Ray, 1996b ). Scholars across the field of communication studies could employ the TCD. Interpersonal and intercultural scholars (e.g., Xu, 2013 ) could study victims’ experiences of racial discrimination, hate crimes, and microaggressions. Family scholars could examine how the idea of family becomes attached to various political and religious agendas ( Thompson et al., 2022 ). Health scholars could apply the TCD to examine operations of ideology in such diverse contexts as domestic violence and abuse, the disbelief of contested illnesses, or heteronormativity in LGBTQ+ patient-provider interactions. Organizational scholars could examine the reporting of sexual assault and sexual harassment on college campuses or the silencing of institutional whistleblowers. Mass communication scholars could employ the TCD to examine the erasure of LGBTQ+ and Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) populations in mediated representations of various topics, among others too numerous to list.

Methodological tools and analytical conclusions

Similar to relational dialectics theory ( Baxter, 2011 ), which has a corresponding method (contrapuntal analysis), we offer methodological guidance below for adopting the critical postmodern version of the TCD in research practice. Scholars are exploring how quantitative methods might be appropriate for addressing related research questions and other paradigm planets (see Scharrer & Ramasubramanian, 2021 ). Keeping this in mind, we first broadly suggest that researchers adopt an abductive approach , enabling them to move back and forth between a priori sensitizing theoretical constructs of the TCD and insights emerging from the data. Using the three examples of RQs posed above, we next walk readers through how each RQ (RQ1, RQ2a, RQ2b, and RQ3) could be addressed methodologically.

First, in addressing RQ1 (What hegemonic ideologies do specific features of DT reflect and construct?), researchers are challenged with answering questions such as: How do scholars find ideologies? And, how do scholars determine that an ideology is hegemonic? To address RQ1, scholars should conduct a reflexive thematic analysis (see Braun & Clarke, 2006 , 2021 ) and ask themselves some additional analytical questions. Researchers could borrow the Bakhtinian (1984) notion of unfolding (the first step in a relational dialectics theory analysis), where researchers, “Imagin[e] the larger conversation of which [an utterance] is a part…” ( Baxter, 2011 , p. 161) to establish the semantic precedent. Researchers can assume that people living in the world understand the social norms reflecting and constructing hegemonic ideologies. Addressing RQ1 requires a researcher to also ask questions like, “What are people saying?” “What are people implying?” “What are people doing?” and look for instances within a text corpus where people are stating, implying, or habituating through their reported behavior the presence of ideology, which can be named or unnamed.

Regarding RQ2a (How do hegemonic ideologies disenfranchise people?), this question can also be answered via reflexive thematic analysis ( Braun & Clarke, 2006 , 2021 ) without the need for additional analytical steps. Researchers should code for participants’ accounts of the material (e.g., related to texts, objects, the body) and immaterial (e.g., withdrawn social support, reduced frequency and quality of interactions) consequences of hegemonic ideologies in their daily lives (i.e., what happens to them as a result of DT). Addressing RQ2b (How do those (im)material conditions reify disenfranchising ideologies?), however, requires a researcher to then consider how the disenfranchisement coded for in response to RQ2a sustains these ideologies. Researchers could code for instances in which participants describe being complicit in the hegemony, and/or might be doubling down on or reiterating what is happening to them. Scholars might see this, as one example, when women who have received abortion services attempt to differentiate themselves as being “not like other women” who “use abortion as birth control.”

Finally, to address RQ3 (What communicative mechanisms work to resist these hegemonic ideologies?), researchers could employ methods such as critical thematic analysis ( Lawless & Chen 2019 ), a two-phase coding schema in which researchers: (a) first engage in open coding , in which they privilege participants’ experiences and identify commonalities across participants; and then (b) second engage in closed coding , in which they identify how the open codes are reflective of broader societal ideologies. Put simply, what do people say? And what does people say represent? To address RQ3, researchers might ask what things people say and do to disrupt the hegemonic ideologies. If language constructs reality, and therefore communication is the vehicle for disenfranchisement, it is thus also the vehicle for enfranchisement again ( Gunning & Taladay-Carter, 2023 ; Hintz & Wilson, 2021 ). Examples of communicative mechanisms include debunking misconceptions (e.g., childfree people calling themselves “jetski owners” to reject the notion that they are miserable; Reddit, 2024a ), renaming or reclaiming terms (e.g., reclaiming the term “fat” as empowering; Stewart & Breeden, 2021 ), or counter-emplotting knowledge (e.g., compiling information online about long COVID to assert the realness of patients’ illnesses; Thompson, Rhidenour, et al., 2022 ).

Strengths and limitations: Evaluating the TCD

Next, drawing from Littlejohn et al. (2017) , we discuss how the TCD meets the evaluative criteria for quality in theoretical development: (a) theoretical scope, (b) appropriateness, (c) heuristic value, (d) validity, (e) parsimony, and (f) openness.

Theoretical scope

Theoretical scope refers to the notion that a theoretical explanation for a given phenomenon should extend beyond a single observation ( Littlejohn et al., 2017 ). The TCD asserts that hegemonic ideologies constrain and afford our everyday lives. Hence, using the TCD will illuminate what hegemonic ideologies are present and the collateral damage they cause through DT in a particular context. Although the examples applying the TCD herein primarily emerge from interpersonal and health communication contexts, the TCD could be applied both across communication subfields and across disciplines when scholars are interested in examining the content and consequences of ideologies in individuals’ daily lives, as we have illustrated.

Appropriateness

Appropriateness pertains to whether the meta-theoretical assumptions are appropriate for the RQs posed ( Littlejohn et al., 2017 ). The RQs proposed above are logically consistent with postmodern critical work given that they decenter the individual in favor of exploring how hegemonic ideologies (power) constrain and afford our daily lives, and with what consequences. They also orient the researcher toward an analysis of the communicative practices which construct multiple, subjective realities. Furthermore, the TCD specifically centers the process of disenfranchisement, scrutinizes the status quo, and amplifies the voices of those subjected to DT.

Heuristic value

The TCD’s framework offers heuristic value ( Littlejohn et al., 2017 ). A heuristic is, “a general set of assumptions, concepts, and models a researcher uses to discover the particular meanings and practices within a social context” ( Baxter & Babbie, 2004 , p. 61). Using the TCD’s three propositions (and concepts within these propositions, such as the silencing, discrediting, and stereotyping functions of DT identified in the extant literature thus far) and building from previous literature, one can begin with an open—but not empty—mind ( Janesick, 2015 ), using ideology, DT, and the types of (im)material consequences, for instance, as a sensitizing framework when examining data and exploring operations of hegemonic ideologies, and the consequences of and communicative responses to those operations.

To illustrate its heuristic value, we further point out existing contexts that DT could productively inform. For example, institutions silence victims of sexual harassment (e.g., Ford et al., 2021 ), media produce racialized depictions of news topics (e.g., Ramasubramanian & Banjo, 2020 ), racial microaggressions cause stress and harm (e.g., Davis & Afifi, 2019 ; Harris et al., 2019 ), others trivialize and ignore children’s food allergies ( Bute et al., 2022 ), and family members question patients’ health complaints ( Thompson & Duerringer, 2020 ; Thompson, Rhidenour, et al., 2022 ). Furthermore, Doka (1999) wrote about disenfranchised grief , grief that others do not openly acknowledge or support (e.g., a smoker who gets lung cancer). Therefore, theorizing suited for equipping researchers (both within and beyond our field) with conceptual tools from critical theory (see Thompson, Hintz, et al., 2022 ) to capture the consequences of DT not only unifies a fragmented body of literature but provides a roadmap for future scholars to ask particular questions and make particular claims.

One limitation of postmodern critical theorizing broadly lies in its assumption that people are not agents; therefore, understanding resistance and change can be challenging. If ideology has real consequences for people, understanding how people respond is important. Should the TCD even attempt to wade into this intellectual territory? Despite this limitation, to further the TCD’s heuristic value, we consider how researchers might distinguish it from related concepts: (a) relational dialectics, (b) disconfirmation, (c) gaslighting, (d) stigma, (e) uncertainty, and (f) relational distancing (marginalization/estrangement). We differentiate the TCD from these other bodies of theorizing in Supplementary Appendix A , and describe each line of research, its paradigms(s), and similarities and differences in Supplementary Table 1 .

Validity refers to the “truth” value of a theory ( Littlejohn et al., 2017 ), here referring not to broad generalizability, but rather value , or the utility of the theory. Researchers employing the TCD can do away with pseudo-value neutrality and make and support explicitly political claims. Toward this aim, several kinds of particular conclusions can be rendered using the TCD. Using the TCD facilitates the visualization and naming of the harms of operations of ideology through DT in people’s lives, as well as how these consequences sustain the hegemonic ideologies—and the resultant disenfranchisement. Using the TCD will also reveal how certain communication mechanisms reify or resist the hegemonic ideologies which operate through DT. Answering the proposed RQs (or other, new RQs) will help scholars excavate what is going wrong, how people can work to change the conditions making harm possible, what ideologies are problematic, what types of alternatives are possible, and the real lived experience of those ideologies.

Openness refers to the extent to which a theory is open to other possibilities ( Littlejohn et al., 2017 ). As the TCD is inherently contextual as a critical postmodern theory, our articulation of the construct cosmos and paradigm planets also meets this criterion for openness, as it charts possibilities for examining the construct of CD in other meta-theoretical territories. For instance, post-positivist examinations of CD could draw upon the measures and theoretical model which have been developed and validated (see Hintz et al., 2023 ) to examine the dimensions of DT and quantitatively illustrate its deleterious consequences. Interpretive scholars might explore how participants (or participant communities) experience disenfranchisement and come to understand what it means to be disenfranchised. Critical modern researchers might examine how CD is informed by and attached to systems of oppression (e.g., racism and sexism), as well as what structural and institutional factors (e.g., the healthcare systems, lax workplace sexual harassment policies) make CD possible, and with what inequitable outcomes. These examples serve as only starting points for possibilities for future CD research within and beyond our field.

Parsimony , or logical simplicity ( Littlejohn et al., 2017 ), is of great concern for postmodern critical theorizing, especially given that such theorizing is often criticized for being opaque, detached, and abstract (see Moore & Manning, 2019 ). Like post-positivist research, which is predicated on the scientific method and often includes variables and statistics, all meta-theoretical perspectives require a foundational understanding ( Miller, 2005 ). Being familiar with a given paradigm and its meta-theoretical commitments is essential for conducting research with epistemological fidelity (i.e., research which is faithful to its meta-theoretical commitments, in part, in terms of research design, study execution, and claims-making). Toward these ends, we have explicated the TCD’s meta-theoretical commitments above and have illustrated example research questions as well as how they align with these meta-theoretical commitments. The TCD is parsimonious given its few key propositions anyone could apply. To add further clarity and illustrate how researchers can use the propositions of the TCD in research practice, we next offer an example analysis.

We next present a case study to demonstrate the TCD’s utility. Scholars across communication subfields care about disenfranchisement, and scholars in allied fields are also studying this communication process. Our case study, which focuses on operations of hegemonic ideologies for COVID-19 long-haulers, is a timely issue of interest to global stakeholders. Scholars across communication subfields (e.g., health, political, and media) and disciplines (e.g., nursing and anthropology) are interested in examining the experiences of COVID long-haulers.

Long COVID patients’ struggle for legitimacy

One in three patients who contracted Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) (SARS-CoV-2) experience symptoms of Post-Acute Sequalae of COVID-19 (PASC), also called “long COVID,” (coined by Perego, 2020 ) for 6+ months after the acute infection ( Logue et al., 2021 ). These patients, “COVID long-haulers,” experience symptoms such as difficulty breathing, fatigue, brain fog, and cough ( Logue et al., 2021 ). Most COVID-19 cases were first thought to be “mild,” and like other contested illnesses ( Conrad & Barker, 2010 ), reports of long-COVID challenged understandings of disease symptomology and progression and were initially met with skepticism ( Ballard, 2021 ) and psychological explanations for the origin of symptoms ( Rubin, 2020 ).

In response, COVID long-haulers have “claimed epistemic authority” ( Callard & Perego, 2021 , p. 3), sharing their experiences online, which were then reported by the media and the World Health Organization, and appeared in peer-reviewed studies in July 2020 ( Callard & Perego, 2021 ). COVID long-haulers have been recognized for their experiential expertise, earning seats on task forces to guide policy development ( Rushforth et al., 2021 ). Unlike most contested illnesses, however, due to quarantines, long haulers did not rely on providers to witness their persistent symptoms ( Rushforth et al., 2021 ), rather organizing on sites like Reddit ( Thompson, Hintz, et al., 2022 ) to develop and evaluate knowledge claims about long COVID.

Long COVID as a case study in communicative (dis)enfranchisement

RQ1 : What hegemonic ideologies do DT, as recounted by COVID long-haulers on Reddit, reflect and construct? RQ2a : How did hegemonic ideology (dis)enfranchise COVID long-haulers? RQ2b: How did those (im)material conditions reify (dis)enfranchising ideology? RQ3 : What communicative mechanisms worked to resist hegemonic ideology?

Before data were collected, the Institutional Review Board determined that this study was not Human Subjects Research because the data sampled were publicly available and deidentified.

Data collection

Social media sites serve as epistemological communities for COVID long-haulers. Hence, to answer our RQs, we sought out online narratives. We selected Reddit, one of the most popular websites globally ( Similarweb, 2024 ), because it boasts subreddits wherein COVID long-haulers share longform stories. We selected r/COVIDLongHaulers ( Reddit, 2024b ), the largest COVID long-hauler subreddit (51,800 subscribed users). Following best practices for using Reddit ( Hintz & Betts, 2022 ), in September 2021, we scraped r/COVIDLongHaulers using three keywords (to capture accounts of users’ health care interactions), “Doctor” ( n  =   14,370 comments) “Dr,” ( n  =   7,280) and “Appointment” ( n  =   5,748). A total of 27,398 comments were initially collected. After removing duplicate posts ( n  =   26,766), and users ( n  =   144), 488 posts remained in the final sample. Posts were assigned a random ID# to which they are referred.

Data analysis

We followed the six phases of reflexive thematic analysis (see Braun & Clarke, 2006 , 2019 ). Starting with referential adequacy ( Lincoln & Guba, 1985 ), we split the dataset in half ( n  =   244) before (re)reading this half of the dataset ( data immersion ). We identified initial codes , units of meaning of interest to the researcher ( Braun & Clarke, 2006 ) using MAXQDA. We collated initial codes into themes , patterns of meaning ( Braun & Clarke, 2006 ), adhering to Owen’s (1984) criteria (recurrence, repetition, and forcefulness), and keeping an audit trail ( Lincoln & Guba, 1985 ) of our analytical decisions. We then recalled the second half of the data (completing referential adequacy ) and compared our initial thematic schema to see whether it required modification. We identified no new substantive findings. We then reviewed the thematic schema to ensure it accounted for 100% of the data ( negative case analysis ) before selecting representative and provocative exemplars ( exemplar identification ; Lincoln & Guba, 1985 ). In sum, we employed five procedures—data immersion, referential adequacy, audit trail, negative case analysis, exemplar identification—to enhance the trustworthiness of our findings.

Then, we employed additional steps to answer RQ1, RQ2b, and RQ3. Namely, we adopted the second phase of Lawless and Chen’s (2019) critical thematic analysis, closed coding , where we considered how the codes we identified were reflective of broader societal ideologies. How specifically we accomplished this differed for each RQ, respectively. For RQ1 (identifying ideologies), we looked for places where COVID long-haulers were stating explicitly or alluding to the presence of ideology. For instance, we found that patients’ symptoms were often dismissed as being “anxiety,” which reflects an impulse to offer a psychogenic explanation and an inability or unwillingness to consider that available means of testing might be inadequate to understand diseases like long COVID. To answer RQ2b (reification), we looked for COVID long-haulers’ complicity in the hegemony. For example, we found that participants sought out medical testing to “prove” to their doctors and families that they were “really” sick; thus, they sought out the same tools used against them in the past. Finally, for RQ3 (resistance), we looked for what COVID long-haulers said and did to disrupt the hegemonic ideologies. For example, we found that COVID long-haulers organized online to counter-emplot their own local knowledge about COVID-19 and resist assertions about the illness’ acute nature.

Researcher positionality

We next briefly position ourselves in relation to these data. Both authors are heterosexual cisgender women. Elizabeth is white and lives with multiple chronic illnesses, and Kristina is a person of color who does not experience chronic illness. These diverse lived experiences sensitize us to these data as we witness participants’ (dis)enfranchisement.

Ideologies reflected and constructed in COVID long-haulers’ accounts of DT

Doctors dismiss things they don't understand and say don't trust Dr. Google…yet those who go to Google know more shit than they do…[my] doctor wasn't aware that COVID can cause eye problems…we're always on top of the latest research and they can barely acknowledge that long COVID even exists. (ID#375)

Privileging of formal, medical knowledge also appeared when doctors’ dismissals became reasons for others to dismiss patients’ concerns, “My family doctor doesn't take me seriously, therefore everyone I know thinks it's all in my head or I’m making this stuff up” (ID#483). By establishing what knowledge “counts” and what evidence is “real,” ideologies are constructed and reified in DT and constrain the care-seeking experiences of COVID long-haulers.

Ramifications of operations of ideology

In answering RQ2a, we found three types of ramifications: (a) physical and mental health, (b) material, and (c) perceptual. First, patients experienced worsening physical and mental health . Patients discussed how their suffering was exacerbated by negative interactions with their doctors, as one patient explained, “I’ve stopped pursuing medical treatments since the disappointment of visiting doctors just to be waived away becomes as bad for my mental health as being sick in the first place” (ID#245). Second, patients experienced an onslaught of negative material ramifications , such as being unable to drive, work, attend school, care for children, or leave the house or bed; having lost housing, income, and jobs; and being separated from family. As one patient described, “I was institutionalized to a psychiatric facility (involuntarily) by my husband and parents because I thought I was going crazy from these long-haul symptoms” (ID#5). Finally, perceptual ramifications reflected patients’ disillusionment with the healthcare system, for instance, “I have no faith in the medical community” (ID#94) and “I stopped believing in medicine. It’s better going to sorcerers or shamans” (ID#135). This skepticism also fed patients’ vaccine hesitancy. As one patient whose long COVID had been dismissed by their doctor explained, “I am terrified to get the vaccine. I don’t know what to do” (ID#5). These ramifications reflect how people are the collateral damage for operations of ideology.

Ideological reification

A positive test result would make me feel like I can question what I’m feeling without being labeled crazy or a hypochondriac. I’m doing an antibody test and I pray it comes back positive so I can have some ground to stand on . (ID#367)

Second, patients described beginning to doubt themselves after being dismissed by others, “This is the worst condition I’ve ever been in. All my tests are NORMAL. It's making me feel psychotic” (ID#97). Similarly, another patient who was later hospitalized recalled, “I convinced myself that my doctor might have gotten it right, so I was treating it like a mild case of COVID” (ID#165). By doubling down on the need for testing and internalizing others’ skepticism, the hegemonic ideologies constraining patients were reinscribed as being good and true.

Communicative mechanisms of resistance

In addressing RQ3, we found three communicative mechanisms which resisted the hegemony: (a) solidarity, (b) counter-emplotment, and (c) acknowledging uncertainty. First, identification and solidarity resisted hegemonic ideologies. Patients referred to other COVID long-haulers as “friends” and “family” (e.g., ID#5) and sought to advance a common goal, “We need long haulers to get involved and present their case to the medical community. There will be solutions for us, but we have to keep pressing our case” (ID#54). Second, counter-emplotment resisted the hegemony by generating local knowledge about long COVID. As one patient reported, “I posted earlier asking if COVID could cause MS….you guys called it. There’s no MS” (ID#204). Other patients turned to the community to articulate their symptoms (e.g., “I don’t have the words to describe a symptom—help please?”; ID#168) and compare their experiences (e.g., “I wanted to write everything out for others to compare”; ID#143). Finally, acknowledging uncertainty appeared when physicians highlighted the overall dearth of knowledge about COVID-19, for instance, “[Doctor] did tell me, ‘We don’t understand everything about [COVID]” (ID#165) and “A rheumatologist said, ‘This is post-COVID syndrome! We don’t know how to treat it’” (ID#218). Communicative mechanisms of solidarity, counter-emplotment, and acknowledging uncertainty resisted the hegemony by generating alternative knowledge and illuminating the limitations of existing knowledge about COVID-19.

Example analysis discussion

This study has illustrated the utility of the TCD’s theoretical heuristic, assumptions, and proposed RQs and methods. In our case study in the context of COVID long-haulers, we identified two themes illustrating how hegemonic ideologies are reflected and constructed DT (i.e., what is observable is real, formal knowledge > local knowledge), three types of ramifications (health, material, and perceptual), two forms of reification (i.e., testing as “proof,” self-dismissal), and three mechanisms of resistance (i.e., solidarity, counter-emplotment, and acknowledging uncertainty). Beyond highlighting the utility of the TCD’s heuristic framework, we have excavated the ideologies plaguing COVID long-haulers’ interactions with others, the ramifications of operations of ideologies for patients, as well as how ideologies are both reified and resisted communicatively by COVID long-haulers and their medical providers. COVID long-haulers sometimes reified ideologies. For instance, although a lack of affirmative test results was used to deny the existence or nature of their illness, and COVID long-haulers were growing disillusioned by the health care system, they persevered in requesting tests to “prove” that they were “really” sick. Our findings point to the emerging consensus on the importance of acknowledging the presence of diagnostic uncertainty ( Bontempo, 2023 ). This mechanism resists the notion that a lack of affirmative test results indicates a feigned illness. We next outline limitations and future directions.

Limitations and future directions

Despite the many strengths of this case study, we next discuss several limitations. First, although the decision to collect Reddit data followed best practices and was theoretically warranted, no demographic data were available. Hence, although DT is argued to be attached to various intersections of participants’ identities, the findings we present are unable to speak to this point. Future studies should collect demographic data including race/ethnicity, gender identity, and class, and incorporate these features into the data analysis process. Second, these data reflect only COVID long-haulers who engaged with Reddit, omitting the experiences of lurkers (i.e., readers who do not post) and COVID long-haulers not using Reddit. Finally, given the online data, we could also not probe to flesh out participants’ experiences. Synchronous or solicited forms of data collection could, in future research, ask explicit questions of theoretical interest.

Antithetical to the purported opacity and abstractness of critical theorizing, this essay has provided researchers with a roadmap—all knowledge and tools necessary to begin using the TCD in their research. We began by discussing that the construct of CD can be studied on multiple “paradigm planets.” Then, we laid out the ontological, epistemological, and axiological assumptions of critical postmodernism paradigm. Next, we offered three propositions which form the TCD’s analytical framework. We offered guidance for using and evaluating the TCD in research practice, responded to potential critiques of the TCD, and offered an example analysis using the TCD. We hope that this essay spurs more critical research about the conditions, content, and consequences of communicative (dis)enfranchisement within and beyond our field.

Supplementary material is available at Journal of Communication online.

All data are incorporated into the article and its online supplementary material.

Conflicts of interest : The authors declare no conflict of interest.

The first author would like to thank Dr. Steven R. Wilson (Professor, University of South Florida) for his extensive feedback and guidance in refining earlier versions of this manuscript, as well as additional committee members Drs. Patrice M. Buzzanell (Professor, University of South Florida), Marleah Dean Kruzel (Associate Professor, University of South Florida), and Maria K. Venetis (Associate Professor, Rutgers University) for their support and guidance on the dissertation on which this manuscript is partially based. Dr. Timothy Betts (Assistant Professor, Texas Christian University) is also acknowledged for his assistance in scraping the Reddit data used in the example analysis.

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Jude Bellingham Brilliance Papers Over Cracks In England's Euro 2024 Case

Another embarrassing exit for english football at a major tournament was looming in gelsenkirchen until bellingham's acrobatic effort in the 95th minute broke slovak hearts..

England's quest to end 58 years of hurt at Euro 2024 remains alive thanks to one moment of Jude Bellingham brilliance, but the Three Lions failed to look like future European champions in sneaking past Slovakia 2-1. Another embarrassing exit for English football at a major tournament was looming in Gelsenkirchen until Bellingham's acrobatic effort in the 95th minute broke Slovak hearts. A minute into extra-time, Harry Kane then completed the comeback to set up a meeting with Switzerland on Saturday in the quarter-finals.

However, any excitement among the England fan base at ending up on the perceived weaker side of the draw was drained away by another turgid performance from Gareth Southgate's men.

England arrived in Germany hyped as pre-tournament favourites thanks to a squad stacked with attacking talent.

Slovakia coach Francesco Calzona insisted on the eve of the game that Southgate is working with "the best squad at the Euros".

But a team featuring the Bundesliga's top scorer Kane, the Premier League's player of the year Phil Foden and a recently crowned Champions League winner in Bellingham has been laboured in possession and easy to defend against.

Until Bellingham's late intervention, England had scored just two goals in four games, while the deficiencies of a makeshift back line were also exploited by Slovakia early on.

The side ranked 45th in the world had already spurned two big chances before Ivan Schranz strolled through the heart of the England defence to slot home his third goal of the tournament on 25 minutes.

England fans dominated all but a small section of the 50,000 capacity AufSchalke Arena and made their disillusionment heard as boos greeted the half-time whistle.

Southgate's men marginally improved after the break but bar a header Kane sent wide from a free-kick and a Declan Rice shot from distance that came back off the post, they had created little as Slovakia sat deep to defend their lead.

After a 0-0 draw against Slovenia that had guaranteed top spot in Group C, Southgate had bemoaned an "unusual atmosphere" as he was pelted with empty beer cups by disgruntled supporters.

'Scoring goals is my release'

The England manager and his players were braced for an even more severe outpouring of rage until Bellingham produced a moment of brilliance that allowed him to answer his critics after two underwhelming performances against Denmark and Slovenia.

"Playing for England, it's a lot of pleasure but you also hear a lot of people talk a lot of rubbish. It's nice when you deliver you can give them a little bit back," said the Real Madrid star of his goal celebration.

"For me playing football, being on the pitch, scoring goals is my release and it's maybe a message to a few people."

Southgate was more understanding of the wave of criticism that is still set to come his side's way before they face the Swiss in Duesseldorf.

"We're putting a plaster over things and giving young players opportunities," said Southgate.

"We're somehow finding a way. I can imagine how everyone is going to react even though we've won but we are still in there. The one thing that cannot be questioned is the desire, the commitment, the character."

The spotlight is on Southgate to find a solution over the next six days to avoid failing again to deliver major tournament glory at his fourth attempt.

Switzerland made light work of beating holders Italy 2-0 on Saturday and are a significant step-up in quality from Slovakia.

The England boss hailed the impact of his substitutes. 

Eberechi Eze and Ivan Toney played a part in Kane's winning goal, while Cole Palmer added some thrust from midfield.

However, the fact it took 66 minutes for Southgate to make any changes and his stubbornness in starting 10 of the same 11 in all four games so far has left his judgement open to question.

Bellingham's intervention ensures Southgate will take charge of his country for the 100th time in the quarter-finals.

But England will need to be much improved if he is to stay in his job beyond the century mark.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

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Environmental Factor

Your online source for niehs news, papers of the month.

Intramural By Janelle Weaver and Shruti Somai

How personal care products may affect health of Black young adult women

Young adult Black women who are more frequent users of a combination of personal care products (PCPs) are more likely to have higher socio-economic status (SES), and lifestyle and health behaviors with positive health implications, according to researchers from the Division of Translational Toxicology and the Division of Intramural Research.

Compared to White women, Black women in the United States are exposed to higher and more hazardous concentrations of endocrine-disrupting chemicals, which are found in PCPs. This may contribute to differential health outcomes in Black women, such as increased risk of breast cancer, cardiometabolic outcomes, adverse birth outcomes, and uterine fibroids. However, previous smaller studies lacked a comprehensive assessment of PCP use among a large cohort of Black women.

To address this gap, the researchers focused solely on Black women, grouped individuals together based on their complex patterns of PCP use, and examined differences in socio-demographic characteristics across these distinct groups. The participants for this study included 1,562 reproductive-aged Black women living in Detroit, Michigan. Researchers identified six distinct subgroups of PCP use which included: (1) lower overall PCP use, (2) lower overall PCP use except for higher use of nailcare products, (3) lower overall PCP use except for higher use of skin creams, (4) overall moderate PCP use, (5) higher use of makeup, hair care, and skin creams, and (6) higher overall PCP use. Participants with less frequent use of all PCPs, and those with only high use of nailcare products, were more likely to report lower SES, be current smokers, have a body mass index of more than 35 kg/m2, and have given birth to three or more children.

In comparison, participants with average and more frequent use of PCPs were more likely to report higher SES and ever use of oral contraceptives, be nonsmokers, and never have given birth to a child. According to the authors, this work demonstrates the importance of considering PCP exposures concurrently with other socio-demographic characteristics, lifestyle factors, and health behaviors when modeling health risks. ( JW )

Citation : Taylor KW, Co CA, Gaston SA, Jackson CL, Harmon Q, Baird DD. 2024. Frequency of personal care product use among reproductive-aged Black individuals and associations with socio-demographic characteristics . J Expo Sci Environ Epidemiol [Online 29 May 2024].

Genital talc use may be associated with an increased risk of ovarian cancer

Using talcum powder as an intimate care product may be associated with an increased risk of developing ovarian cancer, according to NIEHS researchers and their collaborators.

Douching and the use of talc in the genital area are two common intimate care practices that may adversely affect reproductive health. Both may contain chemicals such as phthalates, parabens, and bisphenols, which have been reported to disrupt natural hormone levels. And talcum powder may additionally contain asbestos, a known carcinogen. Exposure to these chemicals could potentially increase the risk of developing hormone-related diseases such as breast, ovarian, or uterine cancer. Previous studies examining the relationship between genital talc use and ovarian cancer have been limited by potential reporting biases.

To overcome this limitation, the researchers incorporated a statistical method known as quantitative bias analysis to correct potential biases that might have affected the results reported in previous studies. Their study involved 50,884 women from the Sister Study, all of whom had a sister diagnosed with breast cancer. The findings showed a strong and consistent association between genital talc use and ovarian cancer, especially for frequent users and for use during the reproductive years. Douching was also associated with ovarian cancer. No significant associations were found between either intimate care product and breast or uterine cancer.

Together, these findings provide valuable insights into current discussions concerning the safety of intimate care products. According to the authors, further research is needed to identify specific chemicals in intimate care products that may affect cancer risk. [Read related article .] ( SS )

Citation : O'Brien KM, Wentzensen N, Ogunsina K, Weinberg CR, D'Aloisio AA, Edwards JK, Sandler DP. 2024. Intimate care products and incidence of hormone-related cancers: a quantitative bias analysis . J Clin Oncol JCO2302037.

Measuring environmental phenols in infants

Some infants may be exposed to higher levels of parabens than older children, according to NIEHS researchers and their collaborators. Higher levels of exposure were observed in a diverse U.S. cohort of healthy infants compared to those reported in national biomonitoring data of children ages 3 to 11 years old.

Parabens and other phenols are potentially endocrine-disrupting chemicals that are used in personal care and consumer products. Data on infant exposures are limited despite heightened sensitivity to endocrine disruption during this developmental period.

The researchers examined the distributions and predictors of urinary phenol concentrations among healthy U.S. infants. They measured concentrations of seven phenols in urine samples collected from 199 infants who were aged 6-12 weeks and were enrolled from 2010-2013 in the Philadelphia region.

The results revealed widespread exposure to measured environmental phenols among this population, including much higher paraben concentrations compared to those reported for U.S. children. This finding supports the importance of expanding population-based biomonitoring programs to infants and toddlers. According to the authors, studies are needed to identify products and behaviors contributing to infant exposures to environmental phenols in the U.S., where there are few restrictions on use.

In addition, the results showed differences in most urinary phenol concentrations by race. These differences may inform the design of future studies of infant exposure sources and aid in developing targeted interventions to reduce the burden of chemical exposures in vulnerable populations. ( JW)

Citation : Goldberg M, Adgent MA, Stevens DR, Chin HB, Ferguson KK, Calafat AM, Travlos G, Ford EG, Stallings VA, Rogan WJ, Umbach DM, Baird DD, Sandler DP. 2024. Environmental phenol exposures in 6- to 12-week-old infants: The Infant Feeding and Early Development (IFED) study . Environ Res 252(Pt 4):119075.

Quantifying mixture effects of environmental exposures

New findings may guide researchers on carefully choosing methods for environmental mixtures analysis to accommodate exposure measurements that lie below the limit of detection (LOD), according to NIEHS researchers and their collaborators.

Identifying the impact of environmental mixtures on human health is an important topic. However, there are challenges when exposure measurements lie below the LOD. Several statistical approaches have been used to accommodate values below LOD for a single exposure. But the impact of these approaches on downstream mixture analysis results when multiple correlated exposures are subject to LOD has not been thoroughly investigated.

To fill this knowledge gap, the researchers examined the performance of five popular LOD accommodation approaches for three mixture analysis methods. Extensive simulations favored the use of truncated multiple imputation (MI) and censored accelerated failure time (AFT) models to accommodate values below LOD for the stability of downstream mixtures analysis. By contrast, certain methods that are frequently used in environmental health studies due to their easy implementation, such as excluding incomplete measurements and substituting missing data with LOD divided by the square root of 2, can have quite unstable performance.

According to the authors, quantifying the impact of mixtures of environmental exposures is becoming increasingly important for identifying disease risk factors and developing targeted public health interventions. Their study provides insight into various LOD accommodation approaches in downstream mixture analyses, enhancing the quality and reliability of environmental health studies. ( JW )

Citation : Lee M, Saha A, Sundaram R, Albert PS, Zhao S. 2024. Accommodating detection limits of multiple exposures in environmental mixture analyses: An overview of statistical approaches . Environ Health 23(1):48.

How inhibiting inflammation affects response to SARS-CoV-2 infection

The cytokine storm is primarily responsible for morbidity and mortality in mice infected with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), according to NIEHS researchers and their collaborators.

SARS-CoV-2 infection involves an initial viral infection phase followed by a host-response phase. The latter phase includes an eicosanoid and cytokine storm — an uncontrolled and excessive release of these cell signaling molecules — lung inflammation and respiratory failure. Although vaccination and early antiviral therapies are effective in preventing or limiting the initial viral phase, the latter phase is poorly understood with no highly effective treatment options.

To address this problem, the researchers used a mouse model of SARS-CoV-2 infection to investigate the effect of inhibiting soluble epoxide hydrolase (sEH) to increase levels of anti-inflammatory molecules. Within days, SARS-CoV-2 induced weight loss, clinical signs, an eicosanoid and cytokine storm, and severe lung inflammation with ~50% mortality. Treatment with the sEH inhibitor delayed weight loss but did not alter clinical signs, lung inflammation, or overall survival of infected mice. The sEH inhibitor significantly reversed the eicosanoid storm but had no effect on the cytokine storm.

Others have proposed inhibition of eicosanoid pathways to attenuate severity of SARS-CoV-2 infection. According to the authors, the suppression of the eicosanoid storm by the sEH inhibitor without corresponding changes in lung cytokines, lung inflammation, morbidity, or mortality suggests that the cytokine storm is primarily responsible for morbidity and mortality in this animal model. ( JW )

Citation : Edin ML, Gruzdev A, Graves JP, Lih FB, Morisseau C, Ward JM, Hammock BD, Bosio CM, Zeldin DC. 2024. Effects of sEH inhibition on the eicosanoid and cytokine storms in SARS-CoV-2-infected mice . FASEB J 38(10):e23692.

(Janelle Weaver, Ph.D., is a contract writer for the NIEHS Office of Communications and Public Liaison. Shruti Somai, Ph.D., is a visiting fellow in the Genome Integrity and Structural Biology Laboratory.)

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India Wins Cricket World Cup, Sealing Its Domination of the Sport

In India, cricket has become immensely profitable and a destination for the world’s best players. But a tournament victory had eluded it for many years.

By Mujib Mashal

Reporting from New Delhi

India won the men’s Cricket World Cup on Saturday, defeating South Africa to end a dry spell in tournament victories that had lasted over a decade, even as the nation was dominating the sport globally in other measures like talent, cash and influence.

The tournament was played across several Caribbean islands, with a few of the matches hosted in the United States, including at a pop-up stadium in New York. When the final, in Barbados, ended with India declared the champion, it was close to midnight back home, where joyful crowds poured into the streets across several cities.

“Maybe in a couple hours it will sink in, but it is a great feeling,” said Rohit Sharma, India’s captain, who took a tour of the stadium with his daughter propped on his shoulders to thank the crowd. “To cross the line — it feels great for everyone.”

It was a closely fought match, and a deeply emotional one for India, in part because many of its senior players, including Sharma, 37, were near the end of their careers. India last won the World Cup in T20, the shortest format of cricket, in 2007, when Sharma was just getting started. The top prize had also evaded Virat Kohli, 35, one of cricket’s most recognized icons. Rahul Dravid, India’s coach, had never won a World Cup during his long and illustrious career as a player.

All three men ended the night on a happy note, with Sharma and Kohli announcing their retirement from the fast-paced short form of the game. Dravid, who finished his stint as India’s coach, is normally a quiet, stoic presence. But after the win, he was screaming and celebrating.

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