There is currently much interest in the southern suffrage movement, yet historians have no comprehensive history of the woman suffrage fight in the South. Wheeler has elected to focus on eleven of the movement's most prominent women at the regional and national levels. She explores the range of opinions within this group on many subjects, with a particular emphasis on race and state's rights. These are the women who created and guided the movement and were primarily responsible for its tone, tactics, and strategy. Although Wheeler discusses these women as suffragists, she also sees them as reformers, feminists, political theorists, and strategists.By focusing on the southern movement's leadership, Wheeler establishes the larger feminist agenda of the suffrage leader - they offered woman suffrage as a way of eliminating black voting strength. While demanding an end to discrimination against women, many leading suffragists promoted woman suffrage as a means of preserving white supremacy and systematic discrimination against blacks. The author also emphasizes the relationship between the northern and southern leaders, which was one of mutual influence. The northern suffragists did not just permit, but encouraged and hoped to profit from, the exploitation of the race issue in the South.The study of the southern suffrage movement is essential to a full understanding of the history of woman suffrage, of American women, of the South, of the Progressive Era, and of American reform movements.
