Lady-like in her courtship of male support, Emma Smith DeVoe would become one of the leaders of the suffragist movement during the turn of the 20th century, stumping across the country, organizing support, raising money for the cause, and the powerhouse in engineering the successful woman suffrage campaign for Washington State in 1910. Jennifer M. Ross-Nazzall is a historian at the NASA Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas.

When the Declaration of Independence was signed by a group of wealthy white men in 1776, poor white men, African Americans, and women quickly discovered that the unalienable rights it promised were not truly for all. The Nineteenth Amendment eventually gave women the right to vote in 1920, but the change was not welcomed by people of all genders in politically and religiously conservative Kentucky. As a result, the suffrage movement in the Commonwealth involved a tangled web of stakeholders, entrenched interest groups, unyielding constitutional barriers, and activists with competing strategies. In A Simple Justice, Melanie Beals Goan offers a new and deeper understanding of the women's suffrage movement in Kentucky by following the people who labored long and hard to see the battle won. Women's suffrage was not simply a question of whether women could and should vote; it carried more serious implications for white supremacy and for the balance of federal and state powers—especially in a border state. Shocking racial hostility surfaced even as activists attempted to make America more equitable. Goan looks beyond iconic women such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to reveal figures whose names have been lost to history. Laura Clay and Madeline McDowell Breckinridge led the Kentucky movement, but they did not do it alone. This timely study introduces readers to individuals across the Bluegrass State who did their part to move the nation closer to achieving its founding ideals.

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Social purity in the anti-slavery tradition, struggled to prevent State-regulated prostitution in the 19th century and neo-regulation in the twentieth. Joining with Mid-Western and Far Western purity reform associations and with the vigilance societies formed to end the traffic in white slaves, the American Purity Alliance left those organizations to join the Rockefeller and physician dominated American Social Hygiene Association. Seen as old lights by Rockefeller, purity reformers and their feminist allies were pushed to the periphery of power. They struggled to maintain the environmental implications of social hygiene, but lost to the eugenic/hereditarian thought that narrowed the movement's implications. This study raises new questions about American feminism, Progressive reforms, public health, and the significance of women's suffrage. Rather than rescuing prostitutes, the movement resulted in their further criminalization, deportation, and detainment. Venereal disease rates, rather than declining as they had in Europe, rose dramatically in the 1920s as a result of policies implemented between 1900 and 1920. Ultimately, the repression of white slave traffic and the closing of the red light districts rivaled or exceeded the scope of Prohibition upon the nation. Pivar provides a comparative perspective often missing in other studies of policy toward prostitution and venereal disease.