Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"Brings together finely researched, developed, and argued essays--and thus multiple perspectives--about the campaigns for suffrage that ultimately conclude in 1930 with the 19th Amendment with these."--CHOICE
"designed to introduce undergraduates to some of the current work on the subject.... a fine volume for that purpose. The Viewpoint on American Culture Series is billed as a 'sensible guide to knowledge in a scholarly field,' and this volume certainly live up to that."--H-Net
"[V]otes for Women serves as a complete history of America's longest reform movement and would be excellent supplementary reading in many introductory American history and women's studies classes."--History: Reviews of New Books
Review
"Finely researched, developed, and argued essays...offering a better understanding of the complexity of American politics and society during the mid-19th and early-20th centuries."--Choice
Synopsis
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.
About the Author
Jean H. Baker is Professor of History at Goucher College. She is the author of
Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography and
The Stevensons: Biography of an American Family, among other books.