Suffrage, Ellen Carol DuBois
Suffrage, Ellen Carol DuBois
List: $26.99 | Sale: $18.89
Club: $13.49

Suffrage
Women's Long Battle for the Vote

Author: Ellen Carol DuBois

Narrator: Cynthia Farrell

Unabridged: 12 hr 20 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 02/25/2020


Synopsis

Honoring the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment to the Constitution, this “indispensable” (Ellen Chesler, Ms. magazine) book 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 Ellen Carol DuBois

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.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Teri on May 05, 2020

This book is a comprehensive look at the American suffrage movement from pre-civil war to 1920 and beyond. Within its 300+ pages, Ellen Carol DuBois gives an overall look at the women who championed the effort for equal voting rights for women and also for African-American men, while also looking at......more

Goodreads review by Flannery on May 26, 2020

I’m in between a 4 and 5 rating for this book. It is written in a way that shows pride in the women who fought for the right to vote, but also acknowledges the struggles that they had within and outside of their own groups. It sometimes gets bogged down in names of people and organizations that slow......more

Goodreads review by David on March 22, 2020

On the one hand, I learned a lot from this book. On the other hand, I urge anyone seeking to read a book on the history of women's suffrage to find something else. I don't even have another recommendation, but there HAS to be something better. The book probably suffers first and foremost from trying......more

Goodreads review by Keith on April 26, 2020

Suffrage. Women's Long Battle for the Vote. Ellen Carol Dubois. Simon and Schuster, 2020. This is an excellent overall history of the whole history of women's suffrage. It traces the history including the earliest generation of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton down to Alice Paul and Carrie......more

Goodreads review by Brooke on June 17, 2021

Comprehensive (well into modern history) and well researched history of US women's suffrage (with some mention of the UK). Once AGAIN I am made aware of the sad abandonment from intersectionality that the suffrage movement made at its onset and from which it's never fully recovered. Overall an inter......more


Quotes

"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."