Civil rights was the most successful formative movement in American history, which stretched from the campaign against lynching in the early 20th century to the alliance with the labor movement in the New Deal to becoming a mauor component of the New Deal coalition and the Great Society. But as the movement grew, it also diversified and triggered a counter-movement in the form of white citizens’ Councils, Klan violence, and Nixon’s southern strategy.

Chapter 4 presents the historical case of women’s suffrage. Though prior to the Nineteenth Amendment women were deemed unsuited for citizenship at the national level because their designated role was exclusively within the private sphere of the home rather than the public sphere of politics, they nevertheless attained the right to vote in local elections in many places because the municipality was itself perceived as a private, home-like sphere dedicated to quotidian functions like the care of children that fell squarely within women’s sphere. Granting women the right to vote in local elections was thus consistent with the idea that local citizenship was qualitatively distinct from national citizenship.