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’sLong Battle for the Vote is sure to become the authoritative account of one of the great episodes in the history of American democracy.
Ellen Carol DuBois is Distinguished Research Professor in the History Department of UCLA. She is the author of numerous books on the history of woman suffrage in the US. She is the coauthor, with Lynn Dumenil, of the leading textbook in US women’s history, Through Women’s Eyes: An American History with Documents and coeditor, with Vicki Ruiz, of Unequal Sisters: In Inclusive Reader in US Women’s History.
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
1 The Sacred Right to the Elective Franchise, 1848-1861 6
2 Now Let Us Try Universal Suffrage, 1861-1869 47
3 Are Women Persons? 1869-1875 79
4 The Great Primitive Right from Which All Freedom Originates, 1876-1893 106
5 New Women, 1893-1906 130
6 A Political Cause to Be Carried Politically, 1907-1915 166
7 How Long Must Women Go On Fighting for Liberty? 1915-1917 205
8 Enemies Died Hard, 1918-1920 239
9 The Afterstory 281
Appendix A Declaration of Sentiments, 1848 305
Appendix B Declaration of Rights of the Women of the United States, July 4, 1876 311
Appendix C Nineteeth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution 317