Primary Source
Woman Suffrage and Politics: The Inner Story of the Suffrage Movement by Carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Rogers Shuler.
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1926.
Era: Post-Suffrage Era | Media: Book-Non-Fiction
Carrie Chapman Catt, a founder of the League of Women Voters, and Nettie Rogers Shuler, a secretary for the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), provide a close view of the women’s suffrage movement in their book Woman Suffrage and Politics: The Inner Story of the Suffrage Movement.
Both Catt and Shuler were heavily involved in the fight to secure a federal amendment granting women the right to vote, and in the book they chronicle the long struggle to get there.
Of particular interest to readers of this site is Catt’s and Shuler’s examination of how the press covered the suffrage movement. They reference various newspaper reports and women’s periodicals to flesh out their insider’s history of the women’s voting rights movement.
This is a summary of the book:
Every serious student of woman suffrage must take account of this vital contemporary document, which tells the story of the struggle for woman suffrage in America from the first woman’s rights convention in 1848 to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Originally published in 1923, it gives the inside story of this remarkable movement, told by two ardent suffragists: Carrie Chapman Catt (of whom the New York Times wrote, ‘More than anyone else she turned Woman Suffrage from a dream into a fact’) and Nettie Rogers Shuler. Writing from vivid recollection, the authors offer some of their own ideas about what caused the United States to be the twenty-seventh country to give the vote to women when she ought ‘by rights’ to have been the first.
The book is available for free via the Library of Congress. Click the link below to access the PDF of the book.
