Historical Causes and Consequences of Women’s Political Inclusion and Exclusion

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel collectively centers women in our understanding of historical political development in Europe and the US. Examining major junctures in western political development –including democratic revolutions, the tumultuous and reform-filled interwar period, and the fall of soviet communism—the authors probe the relationships between on the one hand women’s political rights and participation, and on the other, regime formation, regime stability, and the state’s provision of social services and welfare.

Stretching back to the 18th century, Carissa Tudor explains how the 1789 French Revolution, known for its radical expansionary politics, paradoxically brought the elimination of political rights that some women previously enjoyed, marking the complete political exclusion of women for the first time in centuries. Over one hundred years later, women in France remained excluded even long after many of its Western counterparts had granted women the vote. Taking up this puzzle, Charlotte Cavaille (with Victor Gay and Dawn Teele) explain the French exception of failed suffrage extension to women after World War I. The authors argue that while the war brought great social and demographic upheaval, this reinforced rather than disrupted the exclusionary pre-war political equilibrium.
Looking at post-War transformations across the pond, Nuannuan Xiang, examines welfare successes and failures that were fueled in part by mobilization efforts by newly enfranchised women. Although women leveraged their newly acquired voting right to advance legislation for both maternity and infancy protection and succeeded in reducing infant mortality, the campaign to reduce maternal mortality failed—Xiang explains why. Investigating the inverse relationship between social welfare and services and suffrage, Øyvind Søraas Skorge (with Johannes Lindvall and Valeriya Mechkova) demonstrates the importance of mass education reforms to women’s enfranchisement in Norway. They show how women’s large-scale entrance into the teaching profession — a publicly visible position— fueled female political mobilization for suffrage in Norway. Digging further into the relationship between public service provision and women’s political participation, Valeria Umanets studies women’s special role in the Soviet municipal councils, showing how women deputies’ responsiveness in delivering essential welfare constituted the local foundations of authoritarian regime endurance and stability. She further shows how this important political role of women was a source of continuity amid the chaotic political transformation of the 1990s and up through the present day.

Sub Unit

• Division 7: Politics and History

Individual Presentations

• Revolutionary Exclusion - Carissa L. Tudor, University of Amsterdam

• Caught in the Crossfire: WWI and the Failure of Women’s Suffrage in France - Charlotte Cavaille, For School of Public Policy; Victor Jean Gay, Toulouse School of Economics and Quantitative Social Sciences; Dawn L. Teele, Johns Hopkins University

• The American Campaign to Protect "Mothers of the Race" after World War I - Nuannuan Xiang, Columbia University

• Teaching for Suffrage: How Teachers Spurred Women's Suffrage Activism in Norway - Johannes Lindvall, University of Gothenburg; Valeriya Mechkova, Varieties of Democracy, Gothenburg University; Øyvind Søraas Skorge, Oslo Metropolitan University

• Municipal Responsiveness in Autocracies: The Soviet Union and Putin's Russia - Valeria Umanets, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Chair

• Nuannuan Xiang Columbia University

Discussants

• Robert Mickey University of Michigan

• Wenkai He Hong Kong University of Science and Technology