Suffrage: Women's Long Battle for the Vote

by Ellen Carol DuBois

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501165160
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	02/25/2020
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

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

Acknowledgments 319

Notes 323

Additional Reading 349

Illustration Credits 355

Index 357

Editorial Reviews

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.)

Publishers Weekly

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."

Vivian Gornick

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.

Gloria Steinem

"Timely and thorough, Dubois’ book analyzes the suffrage movement with passion and perspective, inspired by fervor for freedom."

Richmond Times-Dispatch - Jay Strafford

"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."

Martha S. Jones

"What is most provocative about this book, however, is how contemporary it feels. It’s shocking to read about women being arrested merely for picketing, or attacked while marching peacefully down Pennsylvania Avenue — but maybe not that shocking."

The Providence Journal - Betty J. Cotter

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.

Lillian Faderman

"Compelling. . . . The complex circumstances of the suffrage fight are difficult to disentangle and judge fairly; DuBois, an academic trailblazer in women’s history, brings vast knowledge and insight to the task. This accessible new volume provides an indispensable resource as we celebrate the women’s suffrage centennial."

Ms. Magazine - Ellen Chesler

[DuBois] delivers colorful portraits of the many heroines of American suffrage. . . . Comprehensive and thoroughly sourced.

The Columbus Dispatch - Nancy Gilson

"Ellen Carol DuBois has written a comprehensive history that deftly tackles intricate political complexities and conflicts and still somehow reads with nail-biting suspense."

The Guardian - Clara Bingham

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.

Eric Foner

"DuBois meticulously and vibrantly chronicles every phase of this arduous, complicated, cross-country battle. . . . [She] breaks through the dull casings that have calcified around the best-known suffragists, including Susan B. Anthony, and brings them forward as complex and compelling individuals."

Booklist

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.

Kirkus Reviews

Narrator Cynthia Farrell's pace and energy engage listeners with this riveting history of the women's suffrage movement from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. DuBois's accomplished writing and Farrell's magnetic performance capture the accelerating momentum of this national cause as women began leaving the domestic sphere to enter the workforce in increasing numbers. Farrell carries listeners through the movement's evolution from the formation of suffrage associations through affiliations with trade unions and temperance societies to political protests, labor strikes, arrests, and participation in national and state political parties. The grit, determination, sacrifice, and struggle of leaders such as Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, Alice Paul, and Carrie Chapman Catt come through in Farrell's narration, as does the dynamic spirit of the movement itself. M.J. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

MARCH 2020 - AudioFile

Narrator Cynthia Farrell's pace and energy engage listeners with this riveting history of the women's suffrage movement from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. DuBois's accomplished writing and Farrell's magnetic performance capture the accelerating momentum of this national cause as women began leaving the domestic sphere to enter the workforce in increasing numbers. Farrell carries listeners through the movement's evolution from the formation of suffrage associations through affiliations with trade unions and temperance societies to political protests, labor strikes, arrests, and participation in national and state political parties. The grit, determination, sacrifice, and struggle of leaders such as Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, Alice Paul, and Carrie Chapman Catt come through in Farrell's narration, as does the dynamic spirit of the movement itself. M.J. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

MARCH 2020 - AudioFile