more sensitive to women’s roles, however, they refused to define them from a political aspect except via their role as shoppers and consumers in line with their domestic role. The Republicans also shifted their ideological paradigm with respect to women. Instead of arguing their laws protected family values because of a superior morality on behalf of women, they now argued for the same protection of these values from an economic standpoint.
This era also represented a time of political experimentation, and some groups formed as third-party alternatives. Some of these third-party organizations, like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union-backed Prohibition and Home Protection Party and the Populists called for woman suffrage in the case of the former and for egalitarian roles for men and women in the case of the later. The Populists were successful in having some states grant women full suffrage, but their victories would be short-lived as the turn of the century would represent a backlash against Populism and women would have to alter their political strategies and agenda in order to expand their political role. However, even though men and women searched for absolute definitions of manhood and womanhood during the Gilded Age, women were not a separate power or political group. Instead, until they became disillusioned by and excluded from party politics after the 1890s, they worked well within the existing boundaries of the political machinery. They adopted partisan politics and worked with the men who held similar views.
Nonetheless, women soon learned that suffrage and women’s issues had to compete inside the machinery of partisan politics with other issues on the agenda, such as racial equality, labor laws and aid for farmers. Between 1897 and 1910 women became excluded from and disillusioned with partisan politics. Because of this decade of virtual non-advancement, women became more non-partisan as a group with...