One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement

Includes definitive writings by leading scholars that cover the full scope of the woman suffrage movement in the U.S., up to and including the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. This revised and expanded edition offers new material on the international influences for suffrage, race and racism, and regional issues that affected the suffrage movement and the struggles many women faced trying to vote — even after ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.

One Woman, One Vote was first published by NewSage Press in 1975 and is the companion book to the PBS American Experience documentary by the same name. This book continues to be the most comprehensive collection of writings — contemporary and historical — on the woman suffrage movement in America. The PBS documentary, produced by the Educational Film Center, has also been updated with an intro by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, for the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment.

The 23 essays in the Second Edition focus on aspects of the suffrage movement in greater depth with an extensive opening chapter on the overall suffrage movement, "How Woman Won." Many of these prominent contemporary scholars challenge widely accepted traditional theories and illustrate the diversity and complexity of the fight for the Nineteenth Amendment. Together, they tell the fascinating story of woman's suffrage from the failure of the Constitution to enfranchise women to the political engagement of women after 1920.

The authors of the essays are scholars in the fields of History, American Studies, Political Science, and Sociology, and they help readers “rediscover” the suffrage movement through their engaging writing, offering intriguing and often contradictory interpretations of historical accounts.

The editor, Marjorie J. Spruill, Ph.D., is a leading authority in women’s and Southern history, and has authored numerous books and essays related to woman suffrage and women's fight for equality. She speaks internationally on these topics and is well respected among historians. Her most recent book, Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women's Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics has been praised in numerous reviews, including "The New York Times," "The New Yorker," "The Nation," and more.

New material includes an insightful essay by Spruill on racism in the movement, “The Inhospitable South and the Struggle for Woman Suffrage.” She describes the long and often frustrating effort beginning in the 1890s by northern and southern suffragists to bring the Southern states into the movement—an effort thwarted by widespread ideas about white supremacy and states' rights among white Southerners who viewed the movement as an unwelcome offshoot of the antislavery movement.

Readers of One Woman, One Vote learn how the suffrage movement—from its beginning in 1848 to its conclusion in 1920, and beyond—changed over time in response to changes in American society and politics. In the Second Edition, two new chapters expand on international suffrage efforts as they relate to the U.S.

Readers also learn of the growing diversity of the suffrage constituency in terms of region, religion, race, class, ethnicity, and even attitude, and that the suffrage story included both a record of harmony and cooperation but also discrimination and betrayal. For many women of color the struggle to get the vote did not end in 1920, but continued for the next 100 years—and continues today.

Above all, Spruill emphasizes that the vote was not “given” to women when the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920: generations of suffragists labored long and hard to win the right to vote in the United States.

Marjorie J. Spruill is Distinguished Professor Emerita from the University of South Carolina, well known for her work on women and politics from the woman suffrage movement to the present.

Spruill is the author or editor of six books on woman suffrage including the first edition of One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement (NewSage Press), the companion volume to the PBS documentary One Woman, One Vote.

Most recently, Spruill wrote Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women's Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics (Bloomsbury 2017). In this book, she addresses the rise of the modern women's rights movement to a peak period of success, the mobilization of social conservatives in opposition, and the impact on American political culture. Other edited works on suffrage include VOTES FOR WOMEN! The Woman Suffrage Movement in Tennessee, the South, and the Nation (University of Tennessee Press).

Spruill is also the author of New Women of the New South: The Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States (Oxford University Press). She also co-edited a two-volume textbook on the history of the American South and two multi-volume anthologies about the "lives and times" of women in South Carolina and Mississippi. Spruill was the historical consultant for the HBO movie Iron Jawed Angels and has been an advisor to several museums, including the National Archives for its exhibit, "Rightfully Hers," celebrating the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.

Spruill's work has been supported by fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a research award from the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation. She spent a year at the National Humanities Center.

During her career, Spruill was a professor at the University of Southern Mississippi, Vanderbilt (where she was an Associate Provost) and the University of South Carolina. Recently retired, Spruill lives in South Carolina where she continues to write and consult on a variety of projects.