Minnie Fisher Cunningham: A Suffragist's Life in Politics.

Minnie Fisher Cunningham: A Suffragist's Life in Politics. By Judith N. McArthur and Harold L. Smith. (New York and other cities: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. xiv, 266. $45.00, ISBN 0-19-512215-1.)

Judith N. McArthur and Harold L. Smith have written a well-researched account of the political activism of Minnie Fisher Cunningham from the early twentieth century until her death in 1964. Working under the leadership of Carrie Chapman Catt, Cunningham spearheaded the drive for woman suffrage in her native state of Texas and made important contributions to the national success of the movement as Congress passed and the states ratified the Nineteenth Amendment. The authors also explore Cunningham's later involvements in the League of Women Voters, the Democratic Party of Texas, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, and numerous liberal political organizations. On two occasions, Cunningham conducted precedent-setting but unsuccessful campaigns for high-ranking public office: the U.S. Senate in 1928 and the Texas governorship in 1944. Despite the thoroughness of the discussion of these activities, the book falls short of a full-fledged biography because of the dearth of information on Cunningham's personal life. McArthur and Smith are unable to determine the fate, or with certainty the names, of two children that Cunningham adopted after a devastating hurricane swept through Galveston in 1900. Nor can the authors explain the reasons for the separation of Cunningham from her husband, who apparently supported her political activism.

The strongest element of the book is the analysis of the tactics that Catt and Cunningham used to promote woman suffrage. The authors demonstrate that the tireless lobbying before Congress and state legislatures, the personal appeals to President Woodrow Wilson and other leaders, and the organization of constituents, all of which formed Cart's "Winning Plan," were far more important to securing the Nineteenth Amendment than the disruptive protesting of Alice Paul. Yet the authors appear uncomfortable with the conservative character of the arguments that Cunningham and her generation of suffragists embraced. Abandoning Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton's earlier condemnation of family life as a form of slavery that oppressed women, Catt and her followers insisted that the traditional role of women made them ideally suited to fulfill their responsibilities as voters and citizens. For McArthur and Smith, "the hallmark of Progressive Era suffragism" was "the emphasis on collective over individual good," not the reaffirmation of traditional family patterns (p. 30).

From this reviewer's perspective, the authors forsake critical historical analysis and turn to a celebration of "left feminism" and the "female political culture" (pp. 148, 109). Cunningham and other women activists, McArthur and Smith argue, favored the serious discussion of issues and the promotion of the larger public good as an alternative to men's preoccupation with partisan loyalty, self-interest, and vicious personal attack. The authors do acknowledge that Cunningham failed to live up to these elevated standards of womanly political conduct as she exploited the nativistic passions of World War I and its aftermath to attack the incumbent state superintendent of public instruction for his alleged ties to German-American brewery interests despite "flimsy" evidence for the charge (p. 65). Cunningham did run an issues-oriented campaign for the U.S. Senate in 1928, but by the 1940s she was attacking her conservative Democratic opponents as "fascists" (p. 169). This insistence on the superiority of women's approach to politics is only one dimension of the leftist perspective that unfortunately pervades the book--a perspective that identifies all liberal causes with the best interests of the "little people" and denigrates conservative arguments and causes as nothing more than instruments of social injustice (p. 188).

University of Texas, Arlington

EVAN ANDERS