American Women's Suffrage
Voices from the Long Struggle for the Vote 1776-1965 (LOA #332)
by Susan Ware
ebook
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With a record number of female candidates in the 2020 election and women's rights an increasingly urgent topic in the news, it's crucial that we understand the history that got us where we are now. For the first time, here is the full, definitive story of the movement for voting rights for American women, of every race, told through the voices of the women and men who lived it. Here are the most recognizable figures in the campaign for women's suffrage, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, but also the black, Chinese, and American Indian women and men who were not only essential to the movement but expanded its directions and aims. Here, too, are the anti-suffragists who worried about where the country would head if the right to vote were universal. Expertly curated and introduced by scholar Susan Ware, each piece is prefaced by a headnote so that together these 100 selections by over 80 writers tell the full history of the movement—from Abigail Adams to the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 and the limiting of suffrage under Jim Crow. Importantly, it carries the story to 1965, and the passage of the Voting and Civil Rights Acts, which finally secured suffrage for all American women. Includes writings by Ida B. Wells, Mabel Lee, Margaret Fuller, Sojourner Truth, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Frederick Douglass, presidents Grover Cleveland on the anti-suffrage side and Woodrow Wilson urging passage of the Nineteenth Amendment as a wartime measure, Jane Addams, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, among many others.
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Release date
July 7, 2020 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781598536652
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781598536652
- File size: 13524 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Starred review from July 1, 2020
Rotten eggs, jail terms, and ridicule were among the hazards faced by suffragists, according to a compendium from the general editor of American National Biography. Amid the flood of books marking the centennial of women's suffrage, this anthology stands out for its scope and authority. In a season sure to bring paeans to movement foremothers, Ware deromanticizes their fight by gathering 90 pro-, anti-, or proto-suffrage documents--articles, speeches, pamphlets, and other nonfiction along with a few poems and humorous sketches and a play by Charlotte Perkins Gilman--all written or delivered between 1776 and the months after Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Many entries reveal tactical or ideological conflicts among leaders like Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Lucy Stone, none more fateful than whether to try to enfranchise women state by state or push for the federal law that became the 19th Amendment. Other pieces give voice to the rank and file, to men, and to American Indians, Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, and Chinese immigrants. With endearing good cheer, the Massachusetts suffragist Florence Luscomb describes traveling around her state by trolley, toting a 6-foot banner inscribed "Votes for Women," only to arrive in a country town and end up "talking to the air, three assorted dogs, six kids, and the two loafers in front of the grocery store just over the way." The most startling item comes from the Mississippi suffragist Belle Kearney, who--with no apparent shame--urged Southerners to support women's suffrage because it would ensure "immediate and durable white supremacy," given that educated white female voters would outnumber "all the illiterate voters, white and black, native and foreign--combined." Some entries have more historical than literary or human interest, but this is essential for libraries and a go-to book for anyone seriously interested in women's suffrage in America. An unusually diverse mix of top-down and bottom-up views of the fight for votes for women.COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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