Why They Marched
Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote
-
- $26.99
-
- $26.99
Publisher Description
“Lively and delightful…zooms in on the faces in the crowd to help us understand both the depth and the diversity of the women’s suffrage movement. Some women went to jail. Others climbed mountains. Visual artists, dancers, and journalists all played a part…Far from perfect, they used their own abilities, defects, and opportunities to build a movement that still resonates today.”
—Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, author of Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History
“An intimate account of the unheralded activism that won women the right to vote, and an opportunity to celebrate a truly diverse cohort of first-wave feminist changemakers.”
—Ms.
“Demonstrates the steady advance of women’s suffrage while also complicating the standard portrait of it.”
—New Yorker
The story of how American women won the right to vote is usually told through the lives of a few iconic leaders. But movements for social change are rarely so tidy or top-heavy. Why They Marched profiles nineteen women—some famous, many unknown—who worked tirelessly out of the spotlight protesting, petitioning, and insisting on their right to full citizenship.
Ware shows how women who never thought they would participate in politics took actions that were risky, sometimes quirky, and often joyous to fight for a cause that mobilized three generations of activists.
The dramatic experiences of these pioneering feminists—including an African American journalist, a mountain-climbing physician, a southern novelist, a polygamous Mormon wife, and two sisters on opposite sides of the suffrage divide—resonate powerfully today, as a new generation of women demands to be heard.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian and biographer Ware (American Women's History: A Very Short Introduction) crafts a smart, eclectic collection of 19 mini-biographies of Americans who worked for women's suffrage. Ware's take is fresh; she includes subjects in less-discussed locales (such as Massachusetts "farmer suffragettes" Molly Dewson and Polly Porter, or Utah Mormon suffragette Emmeline Wells), and analyzes cultural artifacts such as newspaper cartoons by women cartoonists and buttons worn by activists to highlight the various ways movement ideas were communicated. The first of the book's three sections, "Claiming Citizenship," opens with Susan B. Anthony voting in the 1872 election in Rochester, N.Y., justifying doing so with her interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment: as citizens, women had the right to vote. In the second part, "The Personal is Political," Ware's subjects illustrate how the suffrage movement changed women's private lives; Illinois activist Ida Wells-Barnett, for instance, backed a losing Chicago mayoral candidate in 1915, which cost her her job as a probation officer. The final section, "Winning Strategies," focuses on a new generation of suffrage supporters' dramatic tactics, as when, in 1909, Dr. Cora Smith Eaton climbed Washington's Mount Rainier to stake a "Votes for Women" banner. Though heavily reliant on stories of white women, Ware's excellent compendium expertly shows there are new ways to tell the suffrage story. This is a must-read for those interested in women's and American history. Illus.