Reflections on a Transnational Project: Suffrage in the Americas

Suffrage is the most significant political development within modern Liberal states. Despite this fact, it is curious as to why suffrage movements have so little history. This article focuses on the creation of an edited volume that seeks to address the women’s suffrage story across the Americas. While the intellectual process of the project is discussed in some detail, this article is predominantly a reflection on the process of developing a collaborative project and the challenges inherent to a transnational approach. This project reveals both the significance of suffrage and simultaneously the fractured landscape within individual countries, suffrage movements and the body politics as countless individuals and groups were excluded from the concept of ‘citizenship.’ It has become clear at this juncture that although significant gaps within women’s history across the hemisphere remain, attempting to compile a hemispheric story such as this one would have been unthinkable even a few decades ago and this type of project could also have not happened much earlier in the historiography