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Woman suffragists in the early-twentieth-century United States rarely engaged in militant activities, striving instead to win support through persuasive arguments. These arguments were of two types: justice arguments and reform arguments. In using the justice argument, suffragists relied on democratic ideals that had permeated the culture since America's revolutionary years. They cited the Declaration of Independence, claiming that women had the same inalienable or natural right to political liberty as did men. But as suffragists drew on these ideals, they also redefined the rules of democracy by introducing a set of oppositional ideas: they argued that women should have the same political rights as men, a notion not widely accepted at the time. As these suffragists called for an end to male dominance and female dependence in politics, they argued that democracy itself was inherently harmed by the exclusion of women.

The reform rational, on the other hand, was made not on the grounds that women were equal to men but, rather, on the grounds that women and men were different and that this difference justified women's participation in politics. Suffragists making this argument claimed that women took a more nurturing approach to those around them, especially children and the poor. In this sense the reform arguments were more conservative than justice arguments in that they were based on traditional gender roles. But they, like the justice arguments, also had oppositional elements. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the far-reaching impact of urbanization and industrialization had resulted in a growing role for government, which increasingly entered what had been regarded as “women's sphere" by regulating aspects of life that directly affected the home, such as food production, water purity, public sanitation, and education. The suffragists who made reform arguments contended that these changes necessitated a new political role for women, but in their traditional capacities as mothers and wives. As one early- twentieth-century suffragist put it, “The whole progress of this century has been to put the home within the government... When the government touches [a woman], should [she] not have a share in [government]?”, The reform argument, then, not only espoused a traditional view of women's place in the world but simultaneously modified that view. It expanded women's sphere to include politics, because politics had changed. Excluding women and their special insights from politics then, would not harm the integrity of democracy so much as it would harm the home and the lives of children and families.