WINNING THE VOTE IN THE WEST

Abstract

When Congress passed the 19th Amendment in 1919 granting women voting rights, 13 western states had already adopted woman suffrage. Only 2 states outside the West had done so. Using event history analysis, the authors investigate why woman suffrage came early to the western states. Alan Grimes's hypotheses, that native-born, western men were willing to give women the vote to remedy western social problems and to increase the number of women in the region, receive little support in our analysis. Rather, this study finds that woman suffrage came to the West because of the mobilization of the western suffrage movements and because of political and gendered opportunities existing in that region.