Gender and Pluralism
The relationship between men and women became, in the early twentieth century, yet another subject for those who tried to understand the meaning of America. As was true throughout Europe at the turn of the century, women engaged in a fundamental rethinking of their roles in a modernizing society. How should they participate in the economic transformation? What rights should they demand? How should they rethink their private lives and private actions? Of course,as women reconstructed their social, intellectual, economic and political roles, inevitably men had to reconstruct theirs or fight to retain the status quo.
In many ways, this great rethinking in the United States began to focus upon one issue: the right to vote. Suffrage became something of a stand-in for broader issues, but it also had the effect of reducing the issue of the participation of women in a pluralistic society to a political matter. And political matters often mean bargains, as the rights of some women, especially blacks, might be sacrificed in the quest for the greater glory of the 19th Amendment.