New Perspectives on Female Suffrage

Abstract

By focusing on the history and historiography of Mexican women's acquisition of the right to vote between the 1920s and 1950s, this article uses Mexico as a case study to point to broader trends in scholarship on female suffrage. The author argues that the symbolic or representational value (the meaning) of women voting has carried more weight historically than how women actually voted (the act of female voting). Nonetheless, women's presumed effect on elections, through the act of voting, has shaped the rhetoric and history of female suffrage. By examining female suffrage through the lens of gender politics and gender history, one can see how and why often problematic, and even fallacious images, meanings, or symbols of women as inept political actors have been constructed.