"Selling the City on Citizenship: Politics and Consumer Culture in 1920s Grand Rapids" is sponsored by Grand Valley State University's General Education Program, Department of History, and Department of Political Science, as well as the Grand Rapids Historical Commission, Grand Rapids Historical Society, Greater Grand Rapids Women's History Council and the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum.
Local campaigns were part of a major but now forgotten national effort to address the decline in presidential voting that began in the 1920s and characterized much of the twentieth century. During the 1920s, turnout of eligible voters in presidential elections fell below fifty percent for the first time in a century.
Why did voter participation decline? How did citizen groups, including the League of Women Voters chapter in Grand Rapids, attempt to "sell" Americans on citizenship and voting? Professor Gidlow's answers are revealing, leading us to consider not only the decline of popular politics but also the paradoxical effects of the enfranchisement of women (resulting from passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920), the important role that advertising and consumer values were beginning to play in the nation, and the anxiety many Americans felt about mandating equality in citizenship.
Gidlow is the author of "The Big Vote: Gender, Consumer Culture, and the Politics of Exclusion" (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), which was based in part on research done in Grand Rapids. She is an expert in American political history, public policy, and women's history. Prior to earning her Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1997, she was a legislative staffer in the U.S. Congress and Ohio Senate. She is the recipient of a Berkshire Conference Fellowship at the Bunting Institute for the Study of Women at Harvard University.
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