My title is a gloss from Everett Dirksen, the long-time, now-deceased U.S. senator from Illinois who encouraged his party “to get right with Abraham Lincoln.” As Republicans drifted away from acknowledging their partisan connection to the sixteenth president, Dirksen appreciated how Lincoln could serve as an invigorating, unifying theme for Republicans in the post-Civil Rights Era. The analogy, of course, is that suffrage history has been similarly marginalized, submerged even within the limited space given to women's history by attention to Progressive Era associations and service groups such as the General Federation of Women's Clubs, the PTA, women's literary clubs, as well as the settlement house movement and the Women's National Republican Club.

In 1884, a twenty-five-year-old Theodore Roosevelt attended the Republican National Convention in Chicago as a delegate-at-large from New York. There, he and his new friend, Massachusetts delegate Henry Cabot Lodge, backed George Edmunds of Vermont against their party's overwhelming choice, the “Plumed Knight,” James G. Blaine. Despite their energetic efforts, which received national attention, Blaine easily secured the nomination, and both Lodge and Roosevelt eventually backed the party's choice. For Lodge biographers, the Chicago convention represented Lodge's “personal Rubicon,” the “turning point” of his career, leading to “the greatest crisis of Lodge's political life.” Roosevelt historians also see the convention as “one of the crucial events of Theodore's life,” “the great and deciding moment of TR's life,” leading to “the most agonizing dilemma of his political career.” The usual story of the convention is that by backing Blaine against the wishes of other Independent Republicans, both Lodge and Roosevelt did great damage to their immediate careers by alienating their natural allies. This led to Lodge losing his race for Congress that same fall and to Roosevelt fleeing west to his Dakota ranch with his political future uncertain. Moreover, Roosevelt's decision is often depicted as the moment he became a professional politician. David McCullough writes that the convention “marked the point at which he chose—had to choose—whether to cross the line and become a party man, a professional politician,” while John Morton Blum asserts that by campaigning for Blaine, “Roosevelt declared not only for Blaine but also for professionalism.”

In 1907 the New York Court of Appeals considered a bindery company's challenge to a night work law passed by New York's legislature in 1898 and amended in 1903. The statute stated that “no female shall be employed, permitted, or suffered to work in any factory in this state before six o'clock in the morning, or after nine o'clock in the evening of any day.” The outcome of the case was preordained, for New York's highest court was famous for advocating the legal “freedom of contract” principle, which negated state efforts to limit workers' hours. From 1878 through 1904 the Court of Appeals had held that any restriction on laborers' hours was unconstitutional. The only exception, Lochner v. New York, had been reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court on appeal.