Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited

by Jean H. Baker (Editor)

In Votes For Women , Jean H. Baker has assembled an impressive collection of new scholarship on the struggle of American women for the suffrage. Each of the eleven essays illuminates some aspect of the long battle that lasted from the 1850s to the passage of the suffrage amendment in 1920. From the movement's antecedents in the minds of women like Mary Wollstonecraft and Frances Wright, to the historic gathering at Seneca Falls in 1848, to the civil disobedience during World War I orchestrated by the National Woman's Party, the essential elements of this tumultuous story emerge in these finely-tuned chapters. So too do the themes and historical controversies about suffrage and its leaders, including Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, and Alice Paul. Contributors focus on how the suffrage battle was interwoven with constitutional issues at the federal and state level and how the suffrage struggle played out in different regions, especially the West and the
South, as well as the activities of opponents to women's voting. Baker's introductory essay sets the stage for revisiting suffrage by making explicit the similarities and differences in interpretations of suffrage and shows how the movement intersected with other events in American history and cannot be studied in isolation from them. This volume is essential reading for those interested in American politics and women's formal participation in it.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Feminism, United States, American History, Historical, Womens

216 pages, Paperback

First published March 14, 2002

About the author

Jean H. Baker is a professor of history at Goucher College. A graduate of Goucher College, she earned her doctorate at Johns Hopkins University.

Reviews

[Carolyn Fagan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The perfect way to wrap up our Votes For Women! discussion group. Each essay examined a different point, issue or time of the fight for women suffrage.

[Kristal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Done for a class, an interested read. The different essays in it were definitely a more in depth look at the suffrage movement that definitely gave me a different thought about such an important part of American Women History.

[Monique · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extraordinary compilation of historical essays combined with modern ideas that uncovers the struggle for suffrage. I plan to assign this book to my women in politics class. Well done.

[Olivia Eaton · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good read. It gives tidbits of insight to a variety of aspects of the woman suffrage movement from different historians.