"Too Pure for Politics?": Women, Nonpartisanship, and the Hughes Campaign Train of 1916

During the 1916 presidential election, a group of notable women from varied political backgrounds raised money and traveled the country by train stumping for Charles Evans Hughes. Though he was the Republican nominee, the women framed Hughes as a reformer who transcended party. The train was intended to showcase the power of nonpartisanship as a better way to engage the public, women in particular, in electoral politics. The train was seen as a colossal failure at the time. The public generally dismissed the organizers' argument that women demanded a different, purer kind of politics. Yet the influence of the train and the idea of women's difference did have long term impact on women's progress as politicians. First, the train's existence helped push male leaders to regularize women's status inside the parties and to promote selected women as party leaders. Second, and somewhat less positive, was that the male leaders reconfigured the debate about women's political differences to justify keeping them in separate divisions, thereby complicating women's future pursuit of insider political power.