The Fifth Star: Ohio's Fight for Women's Right to Vote by Jamie C. Capuzza (review)

Reviewed by: The Fifth Star: Ohio's Fight for Women's Right to Vote by Jamie C. Capuzza Anita Morgan The Fifth Star: Ohio's Fight for Women's Right to Vote By Jamie C. Capuzza (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2023. Pp. 344. Paperbound 28. 00; e-book 28. 00. ) Jamie C. Capuzza's The Fifth Star joins recent books about state-level woman suffrage movements in Indiana (2020), Kentucky (2020), and New York (2017) and earlier ones about Illinois (1986) and Wisconsin (1993) to examine how suffragists in those states acted politically before they had the vote. Her goal "is to situate the state of Ohio in its rightful place within the history of the women's rights movement and the fight for voting rights" (p. 21). Historian Melanie Beals Goan has called state-level suffrage a "messy process, " and Capuzza's book does an admirable job of making Ohio's process clear. Part of the clarity comes from comprehensive biographical information about suffragists, which Capuzza skillfully relates without blocking the flow of the narrative. Personal information is deployed at the appropriate time and provides context for the actions of well-known (then and today) woman's rights advocates like Betsey Mix Cowles, Frances Dana Gage, and Harriet Taylor Upton. She extensively covers African American suffragists like Carrie Williams Clifford, to whom many readers will be introduced for the first time, and skillfully explains questions of how race and class were addressed in Ohio. Finally, Capuzza demonstrates Ohio suffragists' skill at working with male politicians in the state to achieve their goals. Ohio was a center of presidential politics for much of the suffrage era; suffragists had access to important political leaders and used that to their advantage, gaining municipal and school board suffrage before some other states. Capuzza's evidence places Ohio in lockstep with suffrage events taking place at the same time in New York and Indiana. Indiana's woman's rights advocates, for example, first officially met in 1851, and adopted their formal name, the Indiana Woman's Rights Association, at their next meeting in October 1852. The group held yearly meetings throughout the 1850s. Ohio's woman's rights advocates first met in 1850, with the Ohio Woman's Rights Association first meeting in May 1852 and continuing throughout the 1850s. Both groups grew out of the temperance and abolition movements, concerns about property laws for married women, and the rewriting of their state constitutions in the early 1850s. African American women joined the suffrage movement in each state as well and held separate meetings from their white counterparts while also interacting with them in state meetings and other suffrage activities. Suffrage groups in both states had to determine when and how tightly to bind the growing temperance movement to their cause. Women from both states served as officers in national suffrage organizations and temporarily won End Page 81 and then lost the vote due to state court decisions in 1917. On the other hand, Ohio gained some municipal and school board suffrage well before Indiana, but after their common border state of Kentucky (1838 for school board suffrage). Ohio was the fifth state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment; Indiana was the twenty-sixth. More state-level research will likely uncover more continuities between their respective movements. The book is grounded in primary sources, but some secondary sources are problematic. Standard secondary works on woman's suffrage are supplemented with podcasts and websites whose primary sources cannot be identified and are therefore less helpful to future researchers. Regardless, The Fifth Star is a fine addition to state-level suffrage research and will hopefully inspire research into additional states. Anita Morgan Indiana University, Indianapolis Copyright © 2024 Trustees of Indiana University