U.S.Women Who Ran for Political Office Before 1920
 |
 Belva A. Lockwood |
 Jeannette Rankin |
 Anne Martin |
|
|---|
| Utopian fiction, written by women from the mid-nineteenth century onward was openly supportive of women's rights. Many such as Mary Bradley Lane's Mizora (1881) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's serial "Herland" first published in 1915, featured all-female societies where women created successful democracies or republican forms of government. Other utopian fiction featured male and female egalitarian societies in which women had equal rights, or near equal rights, to the franchise and political office. Well-known texts such as Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, and its sequel Equality, while supporting an expanded public role for women, hardly mention any role for them in political positions. Less well-known today, or in their own time, other authors of utopian novels and short stories explored this issue, at least mentioning that women hold political office. |
Unveiling a Parallel; A Romance, by Alice Ilgenfritz Jones and Ella Merchant (Two Women of the West) With an Introduction by Carol A. Kolmerton, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991, pp. 28-29.
In Unveilling A Parallel: A Romance, published in 1893, a nameless male narrator travels to Mars, where he discovers a world where women are the equals of men, fulfilling roles unimaginable to mainstream earthly society of the 1890s. The
Martians (human in form) are stunned to learn that on earth women have no part in voting, making the laws, or ruling the country in which they live:
|
"Do you tell me that you tax property, to whatever amount, and for whatever purpose, you choose, without allowing the owner her fractional
rights to decide about either the one or the other?"
"Their interests are identical with ours," I replied, "so what is the difference? We men manage the government business, and I fancy we do it
sufficiently well." . . .
"Do your women hold office, other than in the school board and the
council?" I asked.
"O, yes, fully half our offices are filled by women."
"And you make no discrimination in the kind of office?" "The law makes none; those things adjust themselves. Fitness, equipment, are the only things considered. A woman, the same as a man, is governed by her taste and inclination in the matter of officeholding. Do women never take a hand in state affairs on Earth?"
"Yes, in some countries they do,-monarchies. There have been a good many women sovereigns. There are a few now." "And are they successful rulers?" "Some are, some are not." "The same as men. That proves that your women are not really inferior." Another edition of Unveiling a Parallel is available on Google Books. |
|---|
