There are few things in America as universal as contraception. More than 99% of reproductive age women—and by extension, their partners—have used it at some point in their lives, to prevent pregnancy and for a whole range of other health reasons. This is true across religion, geography, age, and sexual orientation or gender identity. If measured by our behavior, contraception is something that we as a country have long agreed is an important and routine part of how we live our lives.

As a social scientist who has spent the past two decades studying how and why people use contraception, my work has been defined by a distinct tension. Slowly and methodically, more contraceptives—designed for more people with various needs and preferences—have become available. But as access to new methods has expanded, so too have the attacks on contraception and related health care. While these attacks are longstanding, today they feel more overt: I’m concerned that contraceptive access in the United States is on a precarious path.

Given the ubiquity with which Americans use contraception, these attacks seem paradoxical. But they are part of a much broader political strategy to limit bodily autonomy.

One consistent theme in my research is that federal and state restrictions that ostensibly target abortion have impacts far beyond abortion access. You cannot seek to restrict or regulate one aspect of sexual and reproductive health without tightening other types of care and people’s overarching reproductive freedoms. This reflects the realities of how people live their lives: It is impossible to silo one aspect of our health from our overall well-being.

The most popular methods of contraception in the U.S. among reproductive-aged women are permanent sterilization (“getting your tubes tied”), the birth control pill, condoms, and intrauterine devices, or IUDs. (While data collection often focuses on contraceptive users who identify as women—including most of the studies referred to in this piece—many users who are not women also rely on contraception.) At the same time, about one-fourth of current and prospective contraceptive users say they would rather be using another (or any) method of contraception. In other words, we know there is often a gap between the contraceptive methods people are using and the methods they wish they could be using. Abortion restrictions, and their numerous ripple effects, may be widening that gap.

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in 2022, there was a direct and immediate impact on abortion access.

Two years later, there’s a growing body of evidence documenting Dobbs’ far-reaching consequences on the delivery of other types of sexual and reproductive health care as well. Patients report lower quality contraceptive care following the decision, meaning their conversations with providers are less likely to specifically address their needs. They’re also having trouble accessing the methods that they want to use, due to insufficient clinic availability and cost, among other barriers. Meanwhile, providers in states with and without abortion bans report increases in patients seeking contraceptive care, and there are documented increases in people receiving long-acting reversible contraceptives, like IUDs and implants, as well as permanent methods of contraception, including vasectomies and tubal ligation. What we still don’t know is whether these changes reflect people’s true preferences or whether they represent constrained choices being made in an environment in which people recognize that their reproductive freedoms are threatened. 

The strategy behind those threats is one we’ve seen before; it mirrors the strategy used by the anti-abortion movement, which chipped away at abortion access piece by piece. These are both part of a campaign targeting bodily autonomy more generally, which includes access to gender affirming and infertility care.

Following the anti-abortion playbook, the campaign against contraception is intentionally aimed at restricting access for certain communities and methods. At the beginning of the summer, there were eight bills proposed in six states that would have limited young people’s access to contraception through requirements around parental consent; while most didn’t make it out of legislatures this year, in Texas and Tennessee, such laws are now in place. Some states are already reducing coverage for contraceptives through public programs like Medicaid, which provide insurance to many people with low incomes. And in states including Oklahoma and Indiana, bills reflect language falsely claiming methods like emergency contraception and IUDs facilitate abortions, despite clear scientific evidence that these methods prevent pregnancy, rather than terminate it. Lawmakers in these and other states are leveraging language in ongoing abortion bans to attempt to restrict these contraceptives.

Each of these individual attacks perpetuates and exacerbates longstanding inequities in who can access their desired contraception and whose reproduction—and health—American society values. In a recent study, we found that young people, sexual and gender minorities, people born outside the U.S., and lower income people were less likely to be using their preferred method of contraception post-Dobbs as compared to their less marginalized counterparts.

We also know that the way people are accessing sexual and reproductive health care is changing dramatically, from clicking through an app on their phones to select their contraception via telehealth to being able to purchase the first-ever over-the-counter birth control pill. But research tracking these changes—which delves into the most intimate aspects of people’s lives—is becoming increasingly challenging to conduct. People understandably worry about how their information is used and who has access to it, concerned that data related to pregnancy and menstruation could be used against them. This could be a harbinger of poorer quality data that, at best, capture only a narrow slice of the population, and, at worst, inaccurately represent people’s lived experiences.

There is no one best method of birth control or one best avenue for getting it. The more options we have and the more ways people have to access them, the closer we’ll get to closing the gap between the contraceptives people are using and those they want to be using. Systems-level solutions—like making sure that all forms of contraception are covered via public and private insurance plans and increasing funding to sexual and reproductive health care programs that center patients’ needs and perspectives—must be a key focus of efforts to close that gap.

Those efforts must also recognize that a threat to one aspect of sexual and reproductive health care is a threat to our entire ability to have autonomy over our bodies and to live the lives that we each desire. As a country, we’ve long shown that using contraception is routine, important, and ubiquitous. But it’s not enough for contraceptive use to be nearly universal. Contraceptive access—to whatever method desired—should be, too.

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Since April 19, the day general elections began in India, voters have queued up outside polling booths, braving a muggy, scorching heatwave. The mood appears mostly upbeat. Voters talk to TV news reporters. They articulate wishes for change or belief in the incumbent leader.

This year’s election is the largest, and longest, in India’s 60 years of increasingly fragile democracy. Nearly a billion people are eligible to vote, in seven phases, over 44 days.

In voting thus far, women have outnumbered men in several states, and have made up nearly half of the people at the polls. Women may be poised to match men’s influence at the ballot box. But how will they vote? In a country where women’s rights and opportunities are under pressure, it’s not clear that turning out for this election will make Indian women’s lives happier, safer, or more prosperous.

The 2024 election pits candidates aligned with current prime minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) against candidates from the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) led by Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi—the great-grandchildren, grandchildren, and children of former prime ministers.

Modi’s platform, communicated in sweeping speeches and vicious attacks on social and legacy media, emphasizes economic development and a traditionalist nationalism that privileges India’s Hindus over its Muslims and other minorities. The BJP’s most flagrant move to establish Hindu supremacy was the inauguration of a temple to the deity Ram at Ayodhya, at the site of the centuries-old Babri Masjid Mosque.

Alongside Ram, the hero of the Hindu epic the Ramayana, the BJP venerates his loyal wife, Sita—calling on Indian women to be sacrificial, devoted, modern-day domestic queens meant to serve the patriarchy. Modi plays on the idea that women are best seen in relation to men, as “maa, beti, and behen (mother, daughter, and sister).” And he cautions that their mangalsutra (the gold-and-bead necklaces married women wear) will be snatched by “them”—“infiltrators” or “ghuspaithiya,” a Hindi word meaning intruder that Modi recently used to describe members of India’s Muslim community.

Modi offers lofty promises about women’s futures. India should have “a women-led development,” which thus far seems to be a collection of government giveaways such as a recent effort to install liquid petroleum gas hookups in rural homes (that can no longer afford to refill their fuel canisters) and a drive for clean toilets (exposed as ineffective by the country’s embattled independent media outlets). At BJP rallies, the vague slogan “Nari Shakti”—which roughly translates to “Women Power”—roars out of microphones every time the government faces criticism about discrimination or violence against women.

There’s been plenty of both. The BJP has largely alienated India’s 181 million urban women, who could join the workforce but instead cook, clean, and care for families. Better employment is one of the top wishlist items for Indian women, who also tell reporters that they want safety in public spaces, a check on inflation, and better education and health facilities. But according to 2021 data from the World Bank and International Labor Organization, women comprise only 19% of India’s workforce, down from more than 40% in the early 1990s. In a nation with a tradition of strong women leaders, only 12% of this year’s remaining election candidates are female.

There has been gruesome violence, motivated by political aims and bias. One girl raped by a BJP legislator in Unnao, Uttar Pradesh, in 2017; another 8-year-old Muslim girl gangraped in Kathua, Kashmir, in 2018; a Dalit girl gangraped in Hathras, Uttar Pradesh, in 2020; hundreds of women assaulted, raped, or killed in the Manipur, a state in the northeast where ethnic clashes have led to unimaginable brutalities. Police investigations of these crimes have been slow and inconsequential. BJP members have celebrated when rapists have been released from jail, and they have lashed out at victims who publicly expose their attackers. Data from India’s National Crime Records Bureau revealed that on average, in 2021, 86 women were raped every day and citizens lodged 49 cases of crimes against women every hour; from 2014 to 2022, the bureau reported that overall crimes against women per 100,000 population increased from 56.3 to 66.4.

Violence is a major concern for Rajnita Chaudhury, a 21-year-old intern at a film production company in Mumbai who voted BJP in the last election but is reconsidering her vote this time around. “I want public spaces to be safe. I want to be able to travel by myself at night everywhere in India. Is that too much to ask?” she said. But she’s not optimistic. “What is killing my hope the most is how divided our college campuses are. Boys from Uttar Pradesh are going ‘Jai Shri Ram’ (Hail god Ram) for everything. I can’t relate to it.”

Sheetal Bachche, 38, a domestic worker at a suburban residential complex in Mumbai, migrated to the city newly married, about 15 years ago. “The women in my family were very hopeful when Modi first came because he talked a lot about what will help women,” she said. But most of his promises “went bust, [so] I am thinking of alternatives. And so are the women in my extended family.” She added, “But is there any alternative for Modi?”

The Gandhis and INDIA, with a platform promoting equality and sharply focused on unemployment and inflation, are trying to answer that question in the affirmative. Rahul Gandhi has visited girls’ colleges and spoken with 18 and 19-year-old girls in smaller towns and villages on the campaign trail.

But his counter-promises to women sound a lot like Modi’s. His recently announced Mahalakshmi scheme would deposit 100,000 rupees each year in accounts of “women in poor households.” Which category of poor, and whether all these poor women have bank accounts, is not clear.

The woman of the moment is Priyanka Gandhi, whose resemblance to her grandmother Indira has been a subject of discussion for decades. In the last election, she did not campaign. This time around is different. She embraces her role as a non-playing captain, bolstering her team by articulating the party’s focus on three primary issues: unemployment, capitalism-induced corruption, and rising inequality. She speaks a chaste Hindi, wears a wry smile, and makes humorous puns on Modi’s fear- and hate-mongering.

She speaks to women as individuals—not just as mothers, daughters, and sisters. At a recent rally in Nandurbar, Maharashtra, flailing, screaming crowds showed their support for her. Within the swell, the promise of change—if not in the outcome of these elections, for the future of women participating in politics and public systems, and finding their voices as individuals.

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Khakpour jumped in, asking Dagres to share some words about video compilations she put together of content Iranians had posted online. One featured 16-year-old vlogger Sarina Esmailzadeh living her life as a teenager—cooking and singing along to pop songs—and calling for more freedom. “We’ve also seen those in Los Angeles enjoying life to the fullest,” she says in Farsi in one clip, alluding to the way social media has connected her generation. “Freedom is loading.” Esmailzadeh was beaten to death by police forces while protesting in September.

“Social media is the only way for Iranians to be heard by the world,” Dagres said. Drawing on her research, she discussed how social media is used not only to document human rights abuses, but also as an accountability tool, to mock officials through satire, and draw attention to issues through hashtags. And because Iranians must make deliberate use of tech tools such as VPNs to circumvent the state’s control over the internet, Dagres explained that “what you see coming online, it’s because they want their voices to be heard.”

The current movement is a “social media uprising,” Dagres said, sparked by hashtags and viral images of a comatose Jîna Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman who died in state custody after eyewitnesses reported seeing her beaten by the Guidance Patrol also known as the “morality police.” That this movement is populated by the younger, born-digital Generation Z is of import, Dagres said. “They’re not going to settle and accept the living standards. They don’t want this for their future.”

The current movement is a multigenerational one, too, Mahdavi pointed out. While before there were the “children of the revolution,” who came of age after the 1979 Islamic Revolution and protested during 2009’s Green Movement, now there are the “children of the resistance.” Mahdavi noted that she sees schoolkids her daughter’s age bravely singing anthems, tearing pages out of textbooks, and saying “enough is enough”; they are supported by older generations. “They’ve inherited our intergenerational trauma and our intergenerational strength.”

By Soobin Kim.

In addition to the multigenerational element of the current uprising, it is important to center minorities “at the forefront” in the struggle, Ghorishi said. Citing Iran’s great diversity, she uses her art as revolution, and to bring attention to minoritized voices—of Kurds, LGBTQI+ people, and people with disabilities. “It is these people who are fighting,” she said. Khakpour agreed, “There’s a really inspiring language of inclusivity now that I feel personally has been missing a lot in different eras.”

All four panelists were in consensus that throughout the eras and various movements in Iran’s history, women led the charge. Mahdavi, partly responding to Dagres’ point about new media, noted that during the Islamic Revolution women smuggled in cassette tape recordings from an exiled Khomeini to spread the gospel of the revolution. Women, too, were at the forefront of the constitutional revolution in the first decade of the 20th century.

As the conversation came to a close, questions from both the online chat and in-person audience prompted the panelists to draw parallels to activism here in the U.S. Mahdavi urged people to think about the transnational context and how the seeds of social movements inform one another like “roots and branches strengthening each other.” She has heard from Iranians that BLM and the #MeToo movements, for example, were formative in helping find their voice and courage. Viral images of police brutality are another parallel. Mahdavi, too, brought up the notion of justice feminism—a topic she discussed as part of a 2021 Zócalo event on transnational women’s movements—which brings forward the idea of feminism’s intersectional roots and offers a means to share strategies across movements that can reverberate across the globe.

A final question from an in-person audience member prodded the panel to imagine what would happen if there were regime change in Iran from these protests: Then what? Who will our leaders be? Dagres took this one, noting Iran’s highly educated population and their experience with democratic processes like voting. “Don’t underestimate the people of Iran,” she said, “Just because [the movement] is leaderless doesn’t mean it’s meaningless.”

Just before the panelists left the stage, Ghorishi shared a somber and sobering slideshow that she and some collaborators had made to highlight the faces of those who had been killed during the uprising thus far. The faces and names of these mostly young protesters moved across the screen in memoriam. And throughout the evening, shows of solidarity—from the panelists, from the online chat, during the reception, and on a small altar that Ghorishi assembled outside the room dedicated to political prisoners, “freedom fighters,” and the rallying cry of the movement: “Women, Life, Freedom.”

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While women make up 51 percent of the U.S. population, they remain underrepresented across the board when it comes to positions of leadership in politics and across the public and private sector. The visceral shot of Wicks wearing a mask and a baby carrier seemed to cut directly to the heart of the evening’s central question: “Why Don’t Women’s Votes Put More Women in Power?”

The moderator for the discussion, Marisa Lagos, KQED’s California politics and government correspondent, recalled seeing Wicks and thinking about taking her own infant to the 2016 Democratic Convention. Is the pandemic pulling back the curtain on choices like those she and Wicks had to make, “a good thing in terms of power and convincing people you need to have a seat at the table—but you might need to have a high chair next to you?” Lagos asked the panelists.

“I really think women are fed up, and we’re in a moment of an awakening,” said panelist C. Nicole Mason, president and CEO of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. “We understand the issues,” she said, and the fact that systems are broken. “It’s the how: How do we get to a better place? How do we get to a workplace, a society, and an economy that values women as workers, as primary breadwinners in some cases, intellectual equals, powerful women, and leaders?”

California State Senator and author of the California Fair Pay Act Hannah-Beth Jackson, another panelist, shared that one of the reasons Wicks was on the floor that night was to vote on a bill that Jackson had put forward to expand paid family leave. The bill required a simple majority of 41 members to pass. “We got there only with three minutes literally left to spare in the legislative session,” Jackson said. More legislation, she argued, that is “reflective of the fact that women are indeed in the workforce and are valued in workforce” is needed to create a culture shift. “We have to change the laws. We have to change the mindset.” She added that it’s “having more women at the table in the room where it happens that’s going to help transform this.”

That’s a philosophy fellow panelist, Rosa “Rosie” Rios, the 43rd Treasurer of the United States, has worked hard to realize. As head of the Treasury Department during the Obama administration, Rios initiated and led efforts to place a woman on U.S. currency for the first time in more than a century.

Rios recalled her first days in the Treasury Department. “I walk in there, first female confirmed, and there’s no nursing room,” she said. “I’m started to notice women who were supposed to come back from maternity leave weren’t coming back. And I’m thinking, what century did I just walk into?” Rios ended up using her own budget to create a nursing space in the building (something that the Affordable Care Act of 2010, she pointed out, would eventually mandate for every federal facility).

The first step to making change is to recognize what’s missing, said Rios. “That was the beginning for me on this journey I continue on today in how every one of us can make a difference in how we think about facilitating a more inclusive environment,” she said.

Johns Hopkins University historian Martha S. Jones, author of Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All, brought a longer perspective to the night. Circling back to the image of Wicks—“a woman lawmaker in the 21st century bringing her child into the chamber”—Jones said it made her “think about enslaved women who were required to leave their children in order to care for the children of others. These are complicated, interwoven stories,” she said.

Building a more equitable path forward requires taking centuries of diverse women’s experiences into account. “Early history reminds us that we have been here before, and we know how to do better,” Jones said. “I hope we take lessons from that past and the ways in which silences are often built into our stories to tell stories that are more inclusive and more reflective of who we are as a diverse community of women in the 21st century.”

As the night went on, the discussion roamed between past and present, Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm—the first woman and the first African American to run for the nomination of a major party for president—and Kamala Harris’s vice presidential nomination.

“There’s a question about how to measure or weight the significance of her nomination as one measure of women’s process,” said Jones. “In my view, it would be a mistake to suggest it took 100 years for a Black woman to ‘make it’ onto the Democratic party ticket as a vice president.” Considering that it’s only been 55 years since the Voting Rights Act, she said, “Harris’s rise to power is in part a reflection about how in a short half-century-plus, Black women, despite the impediments, have built an extraordinary degree of political power, political life, political force in this country.”

The historian added that it’s also notable that Harris was one of six Black women to be vetted seriously for the ticket. “Senator Harris is the candidate, but she alone doesn’t tell the story of how Black women get from 1965 to 2020 in such an extraordinary fashion.”

During a question and answer session with the audience, the panelists spoke about the need for building a women’s base that cuts across lines of race, class, gender identity, and sexuality.

“We all know when the doors of opportunity and access swing open, many of the women who face different kinds of barriers are the last ones to come through the door. The 19th Amendment is a prime example of that,” Mason pointed out, with a nod to the 100th anniversary of its passage, which inspired the When Women Vote series.

But there’s an opportunity in this moment, she said, to build a more inclusive coalition. “I’m optimistic as we think about the pandemic and the economy and working women and all of these things—Kamala Harris, and this moment,” Mason continued, “that we are able to find some of this common ground but not [lose] sight of those differences that are also important in shaping women’s lived experiences.”

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“When I think about women in politics, I’m not talking about the woman who’s holding the microphone on stage,” said panelist and UCLA gender studies professor Ju Hui Judy Han, whose research tracks the demonstrations on behalf of the so-called “comfort women” that have persisted every Wednesday for 28 years now in South Korea. “I’m looking at who sets up the microphone, who builds the stage, who prints the signs, who cleans up afterward.”

The evening’s moderator, Rinku Sen, co-president of the Board of the Women’s March, agreed. When it comes to women-led protests, she said that in her experience “longevity and logistics” are “two words that should be closely tied together.”

Sen recalled once separating organizers by their gender identities for a training session. While the men were done in half the time, with demands and a press plan made, the women didn’t even finish the exercise. “They were trying to figure out where’s the child care, how are we going to turn people out, what was the phone tree system going to be,” she said. In protest, like in many other situations, she said, women often take care of “the logistics and the hospitality and inclusion: the ways that feel like people are welcome and belong at this protest or this movement or this meeting.”

That sense of inclusion and cooperation transcends borders, said panelist Valentine M. Moghadam. “There’s always been this solidarity,” explained the Northeastern University sociologist, whose research focuses on transnational feminist networks that bring together women from two or more countries around a common theme or set of objectives. “We know [transnational collaboration] took place in the International Socialist Movement, which was worldwide. The Women’s International Democratic Federation, that was also worldwide. So we’ve always done this.”

USC labor historian and panelist Francille Rusan Wilson, who is also the co-curator of the Natural History Museum’s Rise Up L.A.: A Century of Votes for Women exhibition, agreed. “One of the things we don’t really pay attention to is just how long these transnational women’s networks have operated,” she said. Famously around 1906, she pointed out, the suffragist and civil rights leader Mary Church Terrell spoke at an international women’s conference in Berlin, where she was the only American woman to give her speech in English, German, and French.

Today, Moghadam said, technological advances have only heightened and accelerated such networks. Offering a recent example, Han drew attention to how Sojourner Truth’s famous “Ain’t I a Woman” speech was used in a queer activist rally in South Korea in 2015. “We see the lessons from Black feminism in a very significant and direct way,” said Han, explaining that in this context, Truth’s words were used to challenge a women’s rights agenda that was promoting gender equality at the expense of LGBT rights. But Han also cautioned that such transnational exchanges of ideas can also cause harm, as in the case of women’s role in global evangelical Christian networks that have shaped gender politics and sexual politics in South Korea.

The significance of right-wing women’s movements, including the danger of conflating feminist movements and women’s movements and whether the gap between progressive and conservative women activists can be bridged, was also discussed, along with the importance of women in protest whose work has long been overlooked.

On the centennial of the passage of the 19th Amendment, Rusan Wilson added that there is much work to be done to address the many people whose stories have still been left out of the suffragist narrative in the U.S.

“We hear about Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Alice Paul, but we don’t hear about the Black, brown, Indigenous women, the Chinese women, the other Asian American women, who also joined the struggle to vote and did not get the right to vote in 1920,” said the historian. “This is a time for us to think about who got the right to vote and who was excluded.”

Later, during a Q&A session with audience members, the panel reflected on how the struggle continues when it comes to women’s representation in U.S. politics today.

“We have a long way to go in our own country,” said Rusan Wilson, “about why we—including women—judge women and men so differently.”

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That Shaw, who was president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, had come to a Midwestern state like South Dakota was not unusual; the region had a rich but contentious history with woman suffrage. The familiar narrative of women’s struggle to win the vote places national leaders like Shaw, Susan B. Anthony, and Carrie Chapman Catt on the East Coast, marching in parades in New York City or Washington, D.C. And that narrative defines their fight as a matter of women’s rights, based on calls for liberty and equality. But looking more closely at Shaw’s speech reveals the regional complexity of the movement—which was nationwide, and entangled in complicated local and regional issues that were not purely about justice. Shaw’s riveting address combined the struggle for woman suffrage with a broader debate about immigration in the region that ultimately asked difficult questions about a person’s “fitness” to vote.

Midwestern states like South Dakota had large immigrant populations, the majority from Germany, who tended to view woman suffrage with a mix of skepticism and hostility. Often living on farms in isolated ethnic enclaves, some opposed the cause because they espoused conventional gender roles and thought politics too corrupt for women. Others feared that women voters would seek to curtail cherished cultural practices like drinking, and argued that suffragists merely wanted the ballot to institute prohibition.

Indeed, many Midwestern suffragists had come to support woman suffrage through the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, or WCTU. These Midwestern suffragists were also often Yankees, either born in the Northeast or to parents from the region—and mostly white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant—who saw the ballot as necessary to protect their homes and communities from corruption caused by vices like drunkenness. But by the early 1910s, most Yankee suffragists in the Midwest had begun to distinguish their work in the WCTU from their work for suffrage. State associations elected new leaders with no formal ties to the WCTU, hoping to send a message that their desire to vote had nothing to do with Prohibition.

Still, immigrants opposed the cause, and Midwestern suffragists grew increasingly frustrated. They began to disparage their foreign-born neighbors as stubbornly and irrevocably ignorant. “They probably know little of our American ideals,” declared one Iowa suffragist.

By 1914, the suffragists’ frustration had turned to outright prejudice—and Shaw expertly tapped into those long-simmering fears. World War I had just erupted in Europe, and while the United States did not join the flight until April 1917, the conflict weighed heavily on the people in her audience. Native-born Americans were suspicious of South Dakota’s large German population, and as Germany invaded Belgium and northern France, many in the state—men and women—had begun to cast Germans as lawless aggressors. At the podium at the Congregational Church, Shaw amended her usual pro-suffrage lecture to unveil a novel argument: that citizenship was a civic responsibility, that the vote was a duty rather than just a right, and that politically-active native-born women were more deserving of the franchise than their ignorant male immigrant neighbors.

Shaw began her talk by reviewing some well-worn assumptions about gender and citizenship. During the 19th century, she said, government seemed like “some subtle thing beyond the reach of the inexperienced [woman]”—a mysterious force that citizens, and especially disenfranchised women, only felt distantly. During the early 20th century, however, women had grown close to politics and, as Shaw put it, “should be a part of the government.” Civic virtue had long been a hallmark of Midwestern political culture. Yankees were the first group to settle in large numbers in the region after the Civil War, often donating their land, money, and time to develop infrastructure and public institutions. Later generations, in turn, venerated Yankee pioneers’ activism, which demonstrated what they saw as steadfast resolve in the face of hardship and loneliness.

While conventional ideas about gender reinforced distinct roles for the men and women who settled the vast prairies, Midwestern women often transcended these boundaries, stepping in when towns lacked basic municipal services, starting garbage collection services, establishing public parks, and raising funds for public schools. Most of these women were Yankees, and many spoke of themselves as virtuous citizens who sacrificed on behalf of their communities. By 1914, Progressivism, a reform movement that promoted government action and direct democracy, was flourishing throughout the United States, and native-born women in the Midwest heeded its call. For example, in Clay County, Iowa, one group of women focused on “pure food” initiatives to promote sanitary conditions in meat processing facilities and end the sale of adulterated foods by sponsoring a film series and articles in local newspapers.

In contrast, Shaw suggested, South Dakota’s naturalized male immigrants were taking advantage of naturalization and its benefits without giving back. She alleged that foreign-born men—mainly Germans—were filing papers to become citizens, and thus gain the vote, at a remarkable rate. This may not have been true: the National Archives reports that 25 percent of all the foreign-born individuals listed in the census from 1890 to 1930 had not become naturalized or even filed their first papers. But the system was certainly haphazard and disorganized, and for generations had allowed noncitizen immigrants to assert voting rights with great ease. In 1914, a number of Midwestern states, including South Dakota, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio, had allowed or still allowed male foreigners to vote before becoming citizens.

Shaw suggested that naturalization was a nightmare because it was wrongly assumed that “any person, upon arriving at the age of 21 years, if he be male, is fully capable of assuming the responsibilities of government.” Instead, Shaw suggested, many foreigners were too ignorant to be good citizens. At one citizenship hearing, she told her audience, a “foreigner appeared…and after going through the usual form, was asked the question, through an interpreter: Who is the president of the United States? He very promptly and intelligently answered, ‘Charles Murphy.’”

Shaw’s shocking story struck a nerve with her audience; one observer remarked that she left a “favorable impression” because she presented “undeniable truths.” When Shaw commented that foreigners “all over the country today on account of the war in Europe” were “very anxious to take out their first papers of citizenship,” she pandered to growing fears that Germans had plotted to take advantage of the chaotic naturalization process as a means of undermining their adopted nation.

Shaw’s speech to the Congregational Church in the fall of 1914 reflected how powerful nativism was becoming as a political force in the Midwest. She surely hoped her remarks about citizenship, including her not-so-veiled nativist anecdote, would convince voters to support woman suffrage. But her speech also rang an ominous tone that resonated well beyond the 1914 campaign.

Despite Shaw’s efforts, voters in South Dakota defeated the 1914 amendment by about 12,000 votes. Newspaper reports indicated that voters still believed either that suffragists only wanted the ballot to enact temperance legislation or that woman suffrage was far too radical. Undeterred, state suffrage leaders secured another amendment bill in 1916, but defeat again dashed their hopes. Nativist ideas percolated, and by 1916, suffrage leaders across the Midwest were commonly targeting the right of immigrants to vote.

In South Dakota and Iowa, state officials produced propaganda and issued post-election reports that accused Germans of seeking to commit electoral sabotage as part of elaborate terroristic plots. In one case, press directors in South Dakota created a map that indicated in black the counties in which residents had defeated the 1916 amendment. A note above the map read that “the ‘German’ counties are all black,” meaning that those counties that defeated suffrage in 1916 had majority German populations. The message was clear—Germans had masterminded the defeat of woman suffrage.

Nativist fear built into outright hysteria, and Midwestern suffragists began recasting decades of foreign resistance to assimilation as treason. They argued that to protect democracy, only those citizens who understood civic responsibility should vote. By 1917, when the United States entered World War I, suffragists crystallized their message. In South Dakota, propaganda warned of the untrustworthy “alien enemy” while celebrating patriotic suffragists who sacrificed “so deeply for the world struggle.” Another message deemed the “women of America…too noble and too intelligent and too devoted to be slackers” like their German counterparts.

That rhetorical maneuver finally gave woman suffrage the political leverage it needed to achieve victory. In November 1918, voters in South Dakota passed a woman suffrage amendment to the state’s constitution with an impressive 64 percent majority. Of the first 15 states to ratify the 19th Amendment, about half were in the Midwest—a startling shift for a region that had seemed permanently opposed to woman suffrage.

While Shaw’s speech was meant for an audience living in an important historical moment and place, it also resonates today. Suffragists had no qualms about using nativism to open democracy to women. They were willing to skewer immigrants in their decades-long quest for political equality. Shaw’s remarks also remind us how many assumptions Americans have made—in 1914 and today—about the rights and responsibilities that accompany citizenship.

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