12/02/2019
UCLA history professor DuBois (coeditor, Unequal Sisters) delivers a comprehensive and well-paced account of the 75-year campaign for women’s voting rights in the U.S. Disputing claims that women’s suffrage was a “single issue” crusade marred by the “fatal flaw” of racism, DuBois details the movement’s roots in the temperance and abolitionist causes; highlights suffragists’ advocacy for trade unions, birth control, and other social justice issues; and contextualizes the exclusion of black women from the mainstream suffrage movement in the Jim Crow era. She documents Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony’s leadership of the first national universal suffrage campaign in the 1850s and details the schism within the movement that developed during debates over the enfranchisement of free black men after the Civil War. At the turn of the 20th century, suffragist leaders focused on changing state voting laws, while antilynching activist Ida B. Wells and others fought to desegregate the movement. In 1912, Quaker reformer Alice Paul launched the constitutional campaign that led to the ratification of the 19th amendment in 1920. DuBois rightly focuses on the colorful personalities that defined the distinct eras of suffragism, and effectively marshals a wealth of source material. This thorough, evenhanded presentation offers valuable lessons for readers interested in women’s rights and the history of progressive activism in America. (Feb.)
"Suffrage takes us along the troubled road to votes for women, guided by Ellen DuBois, one of the best historians of the movement. Getting to a woman's suffrage amendment in 1920 was no straight path, and DuBois courageously wades into the fraught politics of pro- and anti-suffrage, chronicles moments of hope and despair, and turns deep research into a page-turner of a saga. This is no simple story about heroes—DuBois is honest about how racism limited the movement's scope and its influence. Still, the women of Suffrage teach essential lessons for our own time about how vision, vigilance, and risk-taking have always been the life-blood of the nation's best ideals. Their work of ensuring women's equality, DuBois makes plain, is not yet done."
This book is a treasure! A wealth of material is gathered here on behalf of the stirring, seventy year struggle for the political enfranchisement of American women. Others have written about it before, but none as thrillingly, as freshly, and as comprehensively as does Ellen Dubois in this book. Suffrage deserves a permanent place on the ever-growing shelf of distinguished feminist history."
Suffrage reads like an exciting novel. Ellen DuBois presents her well-researched history of women’s long battle for the vote through superb story-telling, in which the major personalities in the struggle to enfranchise women come alive in all their complexity. Though we know the story will end in the victory of the 19th Amendment, Suffrage is a page-turner.
This is a great American story, beautifully told. Ellen DuBois enables us to appreciate the drama of the long battle for women's suffrage and the heroism of many of its advocates, as well as the movement's imperfections. At a time when many of our constitutional rights are under assault, this is an especially relevant piece of our national history.
Ellen DuBois tells us the long drama of women’s fight for the vote, without privileging polite lobbying over radical disobedience—or vice versa. In so doing, she gives us the gift of a full range of tactics now, and also the understanding that failing to vote is a betrayal of our foremothers and ourselves.
11/01/2019
DuBois (Feminism and Suffrage) provides a digestible overview of the history of women's suffrage in America, making this book a good choice for those who are familiar with the basics of the movement but who want a deeper understanding of the ways the pieces fit together. Beginnning with the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention—the first women's rights meeting in the country—DuBois explores major leaders in the movement, notably Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Ida B. Wells, and Alice Paul. DuBois concludes with the ratification of the 19th amendment, explaining the many national and local organizing tactics women used to advocate for the vote and the barriers they encountered along the way. While the information gathered here is not new, the writing is easy to follow and helps readers develop a comprehensive picture of the movement as a whole and a better understanding of why it progressed the way it did. VERDICT This book will be a strong addition to a variety of nonfiction collections, and is appropriate for hobbyists with an interest in women's activism and for those who are newer to American history.—Sarah Schroeder, Univ. of Washington Bothell
2019-10-06
Commemorating the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which finally recognized women as participants in democracy, historian DuBois (History/UCLA; co-author: Through Women's Eyes: An American History With Documents, 2018, etc.) offers a lively, deeply researched history of the struggle for suffrage.
From 1848, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott convened a women's meeting in Seneca Falls, New York, to Aug. 26, 1920, the official date of ratification, the political and social climate of the nation changed, as did the suffragists' leadership, membership, and strategies. "The Declaration of Sentiments," issued at Seneca Falls, modeled after the Declaration of Independence, attested to women's "social and religious degradation" and deprivation of legal, civil, and economic rights. Nearly 30 years later, at the nation's centennial celebration, Susan B. Anthony, Stanton, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, representing the National Women's Suffrage Association, issued an even stronger statement, the "Declaration of the Rights of the Women of the United States," enumerating the "Articles of Impeachment," the major injustices—such as the right of trial by a jury of one's peers—resulting from disenfranchisement. By 1876, suffragists had been so thwarted in achieving a constitutional amendment that they decided to work state by state, succeeding first in Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah; by 1911 in Nevada and Arizona; and by 1914 in Oregon and Montana. In 1917, Montana voters made Jeannette Rankin the first woman seated in Congress. DuBois animates her well-populated history with vivid portraits: Victoria Woodhull, "the most scandalous, disruptive, and transformative figure to enter the suffrage ranks"; "society queen" Alva Belmont, whose largesse funded much suffrage work in the early 1900s; beautiful young pacifist Inez Milholland Boissevain, whose death, at age 30, elevated her to martyrdom; and the defiant Alice Paul, whose prison hunger strike brought wide attention to the suffragists' tenacious fight against virulent opposition from "conservative clergy, stubborn congressmen, nasty newspaper coverage, and the many women who feared venturing beyond their homes."
An authoritative, brisk, and sharply drawn history.
