Looking beyond the national leadership of the suffrage movement, an acclaimed historian gives voice to the thousands of women from different backgrounds, races, and religions whose local passion and protest resounded throughout the land.
For far too long, the history of how American women won the right to vote has been told as the tale of a few iconic leaders, all white and native-born. But Susan Ware uncovered a much broader and more diverse story waiting to be told. Why They Marched is a tribute to the many women who worked tirelessly in communities across the nation, out of the spotlight, protesting, petitioning, and insisting on their right to full citizenship.
Ware tells her story through the lives of nineteen activists, most of whom have long been overlooked. We meet Mary Church Terrell, a multilingual African American woman; Rose Schneiderman, a labor activist building coalitions on New York’s Lower East Side; Claiborne Catlin, who toured the Massachusetts countryside on horseback to drum up support for the cause; Mary Johnston, an aristocratic novelist bucking the Southern ruling elite; Emmeline B. Wells, a Mormon woman in a polygamous marriage determined to make her voice heard; and others who helped harness a groundswell of popular support. We also see the many places where the suffrage movement unfolded―in church parlors, meeting rooms, and the halls of Congress, but also on college campuses and even at the top of Mount Rainier. Few corners of the United States were untouched by suffrage activism.
Ware’s deeply moving stories provide a fresh account of one of the most significant moments of political mobilization in American history. The dramatic, often joyous experiences of these women resonate powerfully today, as a new generation of young women demands to be heard.
Susan Ware, celebrated feminist historian and biographer, is the author of American Women’s History and Letter to the World, among other books. She is Honorary Women’s Suffrage Centennial Historian at the Schlesinger Library and general editor of American National Biography. Ware is serving as a historical consultant to American Experience for its upcoming four-hour suffrage documentary and advising singer-songwriter Shaina Taub on her forthcoming musical based on the life of Alice Paul.
Bernadette Dunne,winner of numerous AudioFile Earphones Awards, studied at the Royal National Theatre in London and the Studio Theater in Washington, DC. She lives in Brooklyn.
Table of Contents
Prologue: A Walk through Suffrage History 1
Part 1 Claiming Citizenship
1 The Trial of Susan B. Anthony and the "Rochester Fifteen" 15
2 Sojourner Truth Speaks Truth to Power 29
3 Sister-Wives and Suffragists 41
4 Alice Stone Blackwell and the Armenian Crisis of the 1890s 55
5 Charlotte Perkins Gilman Finds Her Voice 67
Part 2 The Personal Is Political
6 The Shadow of the Confederacy 83
7 Ida Wells-Barnett and the Alpha Suffrage Club 99
8 Two Sisters 111
9 Claiborne Catlin's Suffrage Pilgrimage 123
10 "How It Feels to Be the Husband of a Suffragette" 137
11 The Farmer-Suffragettes 151
12 Suffragists Abroad 165
Part 3 Winning Strategies
13 Mountaineering for Suffrage 181
14 Hazel MacKaye and the 'Allegory" of Woman Suffrage 195
