Secondary Source

Fighting Chance: The Struggle Over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America

Faye E. Dudden. Fighting Chance: The Struggle Over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Era: Post-Suffrage Era | Media: Book-Academic, Book-Non-Fiction

In Fighting Chance, Faye E. Dudden writes about the controversies around the struggle for women’s right to vote and black suffrage.

About the book:

The advocates of woman suffrage and black suffrage came to a bitter falling-out in the midst of Reconstruction, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton opposed the 15th Amendment because it granted the vote to black men but not to women. How did these two causes, so long allied, come to this?

Based on extensive research, Fighting Chance is a major contribution to women’s history and to 19th-century political history—a story of how idealists descended to racist betrayal and desperate failure.

Of particular interest regarding suffrage and the media is Chapter 6, Revolutionary Journalism and Political Opportunism, in which Dudden writes about the history of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony’s women’s rights newspaper, the Revolution, and its political impact.

ISBN: 9780199772636

Excerpts of the book are available through GoogleBooks and Amazon. You can buy a hardcover copy or an e-version of Fighting Chance from its publisher, Oxford University Press. University and public libraries are also likely to hold copies of the book; check WorldCat to see if there is one near you.

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