The Family-State Nexus in American Political Development: Explaining Women's Political Citizenship

The United States was a suffrage pioneer for eliminating restrictions based on class and race, but not for prohibiting the use of sex classifications as a voting qualification. This contribution focuses on the relationship between the family and the state to explain this discrepancy. In the context of America's liberal heritage, the family and the state are separated by virtue of being ruled by opposite principles: parental rule versus political rule. I argue that women's suffrage was delayed in the United States because women's identification with the family as an institution separated them from formal inclusion in the state. Reformers had to solve, therefore, the relationship between the family and the state in order to achieve women's political citizenship. Using a new data set that tracks family-state frames used by women's suffrage and women rights leaders from the founding of the American state to the addition of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, I show how configurations of the family and the state developed over time. It was when the family and the state were eventually conceptualized to be analogous, rather than opposite, institutions that women finally achieved the right to vote.