We Demand the Right to Vote: The Journey to the 19th Amendment

Meneese Wall‘s new book, recently published on August 3, 2020, presents the 72-year-long struggle of achieving women’s suffrage in the United States in an approachable, conversational tone, accompanied by gorgeous illustrations. Giving an overview of the movement that is accessible to readers of all ages, especially given that women’s suffrage is an area of American history often forgotten, ignored or underrepresented in school curricula. It looks ahead to a future era when women’s history is recognized as the essential pillar of U.S. history that it is, examining American women’s journey toward gaining the right to vote through a national lens.

Buy the book today!

AUDIO and ARTICLE: FROM DOWDY TO DAZZLING: LESSONS FOR WOMEN TODAY FROM THE SUFFRAGISTS

In an interview with Joan Michelson, Brooke Kroeger delves into the lessons for women today from the strategies of the suffragists in the 1910s, the run-up decade to victory.

Read on the Forbes.com blog: “From Dowdy to Dazzling: Lessons for Women Today from the Suffragists”

And listen on Green Connections Radio: “Strategies for Women’s Rights: Brooke Kroeger, Professor, Author, ‘The Suffragents”“

BOOK: SUFFRAGE: Women’s Long Battle for the Vote

From the publisher:

“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.”

Ellen Chesler reviewed Du Bois’s book in MS. magazine, excerpted here.

Earlier, DuBois provided this commentary to the Washington Post.

VIDEO: JANE MARCELLUS ON DISCOURSES ON MASCULINITY IN THE NASHVILLE PRESS

In Chapter 8 of Front Pages Front Lines Prof. Marcellus of Middle Tennessee State, offers a close reading of a crucial state in 1920, when the entire country was watching to see if Tennessee would become the 36th and final state to ratify the 19th Amendment.The relatively liberal Nashville Tennessean, roughly aligned with the progressive “New South” view, supported ratification; the “Old South” Nashville Banner remained opposed. Offering a counterpoint to the usual emphasis on competing versions of womanhood, Marcellus contends that instead, for both newspapers, competing views of southern white masculinity were at stake.”

VIDEO: SHERILYN COX BENNION ON THE WOMEN’S EXPONENT OF UTAH

In Chapter 3 of Front Pages Front Lines, Bennion shows how the prosuffrage arguments of the Women’s Exponent, published for Mormon women, were reformulated in response to regional political shifts, using various rationales to counter attempts to disenfranchise polygamous women.

VIDEO: LINDA STEINER ON NINETEENTH-CENTURY SUFFRAGE JOURNALS: INVENTING AND DEFENDING NEW WOMEN

In Chapter 2 of Front Pages Front Lines, Prof. Steiner argues that the suffrage and women’s rights papers of the nineteenth century created and experimented with very different versions of the new woman, and then dramatized and celebrated these identities.

VIDEO: TERI FINNEMAN ON A COUNTERMOVEMENT ON THE VERGE OF DEFEAT: ANTISUFFRAGIST ARGUMENTS IN 1917 PRESS COVERAGE

In Chapter 7 of Front Pages Front Lines, Prof. Finneman draws on US news coverage to examine the rhetorical strategies of the anti-suffragists in representing themselves and their adversaries in 1917, when they began to lose significant ground with journalists as the progressive arguments of the suffragists gained more traction with journalists.

VIDEO: CAROLYN KITCH ON MEMORY, INTERRUPTED: A CENTURY OF REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING THE STORY OF WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE

In Chapter 11 of Front Pages Front Lines, Prof. Kitch analyzes how cover stories in Time, Life, and Newsweek, in the context of reporting on the so-called second wave of the women’s movement, both remembered and forgot the women’s suffrage movement and alternated between or combined celebration and dismissal of feminism, using suffrage memory at both ends.

VIDEO: LINDA LUMSDEN ON HISTORIOGRAPHY: WOMEN’S SUFRAGE AND THE MEDIA

In Chapter 1 of Front Pages Front Lines, Prof. Lumsden offers a comprehensive historiography of suffrage and the media that highlights the near one-dimensionality of much of the early scholarship. She analyzes what historians, journalism studies researchers, and sociologists have found—and what they have ignored—beginning in the 1970s, when feminist scholars began to look back at both suffrage editors and mainstream news media coverage of the campaign.

VIDEO: MAURINE BEASLEY ON AFTER SUFFRAGE: AN UNCHARTED PATH

In Chapter 1 of Front Pages Front Lines, Prof. Beasley examines how suffrage organizations and their new outlets shifted their policies, positions, and philosophies in the 1920s, analyzing the after-enfranchisement efforts of suffrage activists to decide whether to enter the existing male power structure or concentrate on women’s advancement outside of it.