University of Georgia Press, 1996

For far too long historians accepted without serious question the idea that women’s political activism diminished and all but disappeared following the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Since the League of Women Voters enlisted only a small minority of suffragists, and American women did not vote as a bloc as some suffragists and anti suffragists had predicted, women’s political influence after 1920 and before the emergence of the modern “gender gap” has been largely discounted. Some historians, in fact, claim that women has more political influence before 1920 through separate women’s voluntary associations than they enjoyed after enfranchisement.