Introduction
The discussion in this paper is centered on women’s suffrage and examines the views of Professor Erika Kuhlman, Professor Laura Woodworth-Ney and Professor Eric Foner on this matter.
Women’s Suffrage
Erika Kuhlman and Laura Woodworth-Ney have expressed similar views on women’s suffrage. Their findings have cast a lot of light on various issues affecting women. Kuhlman has made a great contribution to the research work on the history of women’s roles in the society. She has garnered a lot of knowledge on the experiences that women underwent in the past.
Both Kuhlman and Woodworth-Ney have held the stand that women have rights to equality. This comes out well in their work with Kuhlman being more pronounced than Woodworth-Ney. Kuhlman, in one of her publications titled Of Little Comfort: War Widows, Fallen Soldiers, and the Remaking of the Nation after the Great War, has fiercely opposed the views that wars did not affect the home front.
She has argued that wars equally affected women in the same manner that soldiers in the battleground were affected. This has been viewed as a factor that gave women a right to actively engage in policy formulation through voting as elected leaders formulate policies which directly affect every person including women. Woodworth-Ney has expressed similar views as Kuhlman in regard to the role of women in building the nation.
In one of her books , Women in the American West, she has shown how women made substantial efforts to the progress of the nation. Specifically, she has argued that women played a significant role in building the nation and yet remained invisible to history. It was because of the contribution of women towards building the nation that voting rights for women had to be recognized.
In general, Kuhlman’s and Woodworth-Ney’s comments on women’s suffrage and equality in general are greatly similar. They have presented similar examples as factors in the enactment of women’s voting rights; these examples include the participation of women in wars at the home front and the contribution women made to build the society and the nation in general.
Kuhlman and Woodworth-Ney have described suffrage movements as movements that are growing in strength. This trend is best observed in their work on women roles in the society. They have given an outline which shows how women have progressed stepwise to become an increasingly strong force that shapes the society today.
Kuhlman, for instance, has talked about the potential of women to act as arbitrators between communities not in good terms with each other. The trend these scholars have described indicates that women’s suffrage movements are here to stay and their influence keeps on growing every day.
Apart from the right to vote, Kuhlman, Woodworth-Ney and Foner have presented the concerns for equitable representation of women on policy formulation and access to equal rights. These concerns are not fully addressed by suffrage. This is because voting is just a step towards the realization of comprehensive women rights.
However, some disparities cannot be addressed by this right. For instance, it is known that majority of the executives in business organizations are men. Unfortunately, the right for women to vote is not likely to address this disparity.
Granting women the right to vote was revolutionary. This right was realized as a result of radical changes which were undertaken progressively. Kuhlman, Woodworth-Ney and Foner have talked about the struggles that women underwent to air their grievances. Women continually pressed for their equal rights so it cannot be said that women’s suffrage was as a result of natural progression of governance.
Conclusion
Professors Kuhlman, Woodworth-Ney and Foner have made concerted efforts to air the experiences of women. Women’s suffrage was definitely an important step in this fight but more work needs to done to ensure that women are well represented in all the spheres in the society.