Honoring the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment to the
Constitution, this exciting history explores the full scope of the
movement to win the vote for women through portraits of its bold leaders
and devoted activists.
Distinguished historian Ellen Carol DuBois begins in the pre-Civil War
years with foremothers Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B.
Anthony, and Sojourner Truth as she explores the links of the woman
suffrage movement to the abolition of slavery. After the Civil War,
Congress granted freed African American men the right to vote but not
white and African American women, a crushing disappointment. DuBois
shows how suffrage leaders persevered through the Jim Crow years into
the reform era of Progressivism. She introduces new champions Carrie
Chapman Catt and Alice Paul, who brought the fight into the 20th
century, and she shows how African American women, led by Ida B.
Wells-Barnett, demanded voting rights even as white suffragists ignored
them.
DuBois explains how suffragists built a determined coalition of moderate
lobbyists and radical demonstrators in forging a strategy of winning
voting rights in crucial states to set the stage for securing suffrage
for all American women in the Constitution. In vivid prose DuBois
describes suffragists' final victories in Congress and state
legislatures, culminating in the last, most difficult ratification, in
Tennessee.
DuBois follows women's efforts to use their voting rights to win
political office, increase their voting strength, and pass laws banning
child labor, ensuring maternal health, and securing greater equality for
women.
Suffrage: Women's * Long Battle for the Vote* is sure to become the
authoritative account of one of the great episodes in the history of
American democracy.
