ABSTRACT
By the turn of the century the nineteenth-century woman movement had brought about major changes in American life, primarily by increasing women's access to endeavors from which they had been excluded, such as higher education, paid labor, business, the professions, and social reform. In addition, the suffrage cause was clearly on the verge of being won, and so women's greater political participation was imminent. But, as Cott argues, the culmination of the woman movement also revealed tensions or paradoxes that had been present but mediated, and to a certain extent reconciled, in the ideas and rhetoric of the movement itself. These paradoxes included a demand for political equality that appealed both to women's human subjectivity and to women's difference. Suffrage advocates, for instance, offered an identity-based challenge to sexism and male dominance in their argument that women are entitled to vote because of their equal human subjectivity and agency, that is, their equal possession of the capacity for rational autonomy. But they also made a difference-based challenge to individualism by arguing that women deserved the vote because, given their 'women's nature' or their specifically womanly experiences, their voting would make a uniquely feminine contribution to social improvement. Even when the woman movement demanded individual rights on the basis of women's equal subjectivity, it articulated this demand in terms of a group identity, thus implicitly highlighting women's difference. The demand for women's freedom of choice also recognized that specific women would make different choices of education, occupation, or other activities. Thus, the woman movement implicitly recognized differences among women, even as it insisted on the unity of women as a group.
