Citizen Nation

For Monday 10/15 please read (or re-read) the Jeanette Wolfley article which was Wednesday’s reading, “Jim Crow, Indian Style” (if a link is ever broken like that again, someone please alert me!), as well as Keyssar, Right to Vote Chapters 5 and 6. On Monday we will discuss women’s suffrage campaign and how the right to vote for (mainly white) women was achieved in by 1920.

Reminder – if you haven’t written me a paper topic proposal (1-2 paragraphs), please do so and send that along by email post-haste, or drop it in my history inbox. This is 5 points of the research project grade and was due on 10/10.

For Wed 10/17 – read Linda Kerber, “The Meanings of Citizenship” (PDF). Kerber is one of the preeminent scholars on the history of how citizenship has changed and what it has meant in different eras, and the author of No Constitutional Right to be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship, among other books. As we’ve talked for several class sessions about citizenship and participation in democratic/political institutions up to about 1900, her article gives us an opportunity to stand back and reflect on how these different story threads (towards universal white male suffrage + granting of black male suffrage but its severe restriction by 1900 under state laws & customs + the glimmerings of a movement for women’s suffrage + the Native American catch 22) come together by the turn of the 20th century.

Update: A response paper is due on Wed 10/17 – you can base it on the Kerber or Wolfley readings. Use this paper to demonstrate what you’ve learned in the course so far. Some questions you could consider:

What did Kerber mean when she said citizenship’s meaning was “destabilized”? (She wrote the essay in 1997)
How did gender, race, and class inform the meaning of citizenship by 1900?
Why is the reality of the history of citizenship so different from the myth? How did that myth become so entrenched?
Kerber questions the need for citizenship. Is her skepticism justified? How was that need perceived or constructed by the end of the 19th century? What might people have made of her argument 100 years ago?