Middle-Class Movement.

In 1910 the decades-old fight for women's suffrage was led by middle-class women who subscribed to the progressive agenda for social reform. The movement benefited from progressive organizing and the popularity of the progressive movement in the 1900s. The most prominent national organization, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), grew from seventeen thousand members in 1905 to seventy-five thousand members in 1910. Despite resistance to suffrage in eastern states — where it was linked to the Prohibition movement — many western states passed forms of suffrage legislation between 1910 and 1915. In 1912 the Progressive Party, led by Theodore Roosevelt — who had long vehemently opposed women's suffrage — endorsed the suffragist position; when that party dissolved, Republicans and Democrats began to support voting rights for women in order to woo former Progressive Party members. Even proponents of women's right to vote feared the consequences of extending the franchise to...