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Suffrage

Women's Long Battle for the Vote

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About The Book

Honoring the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment to the Constitution, this “indispensable” book (Ellen Chesler, Ms. magazine) 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 Sojurner Truth as she “meticulously and vibrantly chronicles” (Booklist) 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 to 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.

“Ellen DuBois enables us to appreciate the drama of the long battle for women’s suffrage and the heroism of many of its advocates” (Eric Foner, author of The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution). 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 a “comprehensive history that deftly tackles intricate political complexities and conflicts and still somehow read with nail-biting suspense,” (The Guardian) and is sure to become the authoritative account of one of the great episodes in the history of American democracy.

About The Author

Photograph by Scarlett Freund

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.

About The Reader

Product Details

  • Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio (February 25, 2020)
  • Runtime: 12 hours and 20 minutes
  • ISBN13: 9781797102443

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Raves and 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."

– AudioFile Magazine

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