With less than a week until a potentially historic U.S. presidential election that could see the first-ever woman elected to the post of commander in chief, a Kentucky-based historian says it’s important to look at the role women in the Bluegrass State have to play in the voting booth – and how they won the right to be there.
Melanie Beals Goan is a history professor at the University of Kentucky and the author of “A Simple Justice,” a book about Kentucky women’s fight for the right to vote.
Her book was initially published in 2020 – for the centennial of the 19th Amendment’s ratification. She said, a century on, it’s more important than ever that women’s voices be heard.
“If you look at both candidates, they're really trying to get the female vote and, with the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the Dobbs decision, women and their rights are much more at the center of a lot of policy debates that have been going on the last few years,” Goan said. “So getting those women voters out and to cast their ballots is going to be really important.”
In “A Simple Justice,” Goan traces the movements that led to women being able to play a voting roll in America’s democratic decision-making. The historian said that it’s important to consider the more than 70 years of suffrage protests, organizations, marches and speeches in Kentucky that led to what most Americans picture as a brief moment in time when women gained the right to vote.
“They kind of picture women out there marching in parades and then, hooray! They get the right to vote. That glosses over a very long and complicated history, and it certainly glosses over the contributions that women outside of New York or a few key states have made to the fight,” Goan said.
Goan writes that Kentuckians were fighting for women’s suffrage for more than 70 years, taking her readers from the 1838 decision to allow women to vote in school board elections – only in very specific circumstances – to the stripping of that right ahead of the 19th Amendment being ratified. She also examines the fight for the right to vote by Black Kentucky women, who were granted the right to vote at the same time as their white counterparts despite being mostly excluded from their political organizations.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that the battle for women to gain the right to vote would have been much shorter had race not complicated the issue in so many ways,” Goan said.
Goan also believes that Black women’s inclusion in the voting pool set Kentucky apart from other states in the immediate aftermath of the 19th Amendment’s passage.
“African-American women are going to vote in large numbers, starting in 1920 and then moving forward from there,” Goan said. “We can see that Kentucky looks different than even places like Virginia and Tennessee. Black women are going to vote and their votes will really, in some cases, be a deciding factor in elections across the state.”
According to the Kentucky Secretary of State’s Office, women now make up more than half of the Bluegrass State’s roughly 3.5 million voters.
Goan believes it’s important to reflect on the women who led the suffrage movement in the Bluegrass State. That includes figures she follows in “A Simple Justice,” like Laura Clay – the co-founder and first president of the Kentucky Equal Rights Association and a contemporary of Susan B. Anthony’s – and Madeline McDowell Breckenridge – a social reformer some credit with leading the charge for the state’s legislature to ratify the 19th Amendment.
“I like to think that women across the Commonwealth recognize the debt they have to these individuals who fought for the rights 100-plus years ago,” she said. “And as a recognition of the bravery that took, the tenacity, the continuing energy that went into securing these rights, hopefully Kentucky women today recognize that debt … I feel like we owe it to women who came before us to use the rights that they fought so hard to secure.”
History, for Goan, is always tied up in the present. The author and historian thinks that learning about Kentucky’s suffrage movement can change how people view issues today, even on things like the upcoming presidential election.
“All kinds of stories tied up in this right to vote for women, and so the complications of it really are very fascinating,” she said. “I would encourage people to go out there and learn more, especially as they're casting their own ballots this year.”
