Synopses & Reviews
Both a page-turning drama and an inspiration for every reader — Hillary Rodham Clinton
Soon to be a major television event, the nail-biting climax of one of the greatest political battles in American history: the ratification of the constitutional amendment that granted women the right to vote.
Nashville, August 1920. Thirty-five states have approved the Nineteenth Amendment, granting women the right to vote; one last state — Tennessee — is needed for women's voting rights to be the law of the land. The suffragists face vicious opposition from politicians, clergy, corporations, and racists who don't want black women voting. And then there are the Antis — women who oppose their own enfranchisement, fearing suffrage will bring about the nation's moral collapse. And in one hot summer, they all converge for a confrontation, replete with booze and blackmail, betrayal and courage. Following a handful of remarkable women who led their respective forces into battle, The Woman's Hour is the gripping story of how America's women won their own freedom, and the opening campaign in the great twentieth-century battles for civil rights.
Review
"Weiss renders the conflict so suspensefully that it is easy to see why Steven Spielberg's Amblin Television has already bought the rights to the book. The book grippingly recounts the twists and reversals that took place in the weeks leading up to the suffrage victory, but it is even more thrilling in its presentation of ideas--both those of the suffragists and those of the people who opposed them...The Woman's Hour animates the past so fully that its facts feel anything but fated." Casey Cep, The New Yorker
Review
"Stirring, definitive, and engrossing...Weiss brings a lucid, lively, journalistic tone to the story....The Woman's Hour is compulsory reading." NPR.org
Review
"Weiss is a clear and genial guide with an ear for telling language ...She also shows a superb sense of detail, and it's the deliciousness of her details that suggests certain individuals warrant entire novels of their own...Weiss's thoroughness is one of the book's great strengths. So vividly had she depicted events that by the climactic vote (spoiler alert: The amendment was ratified!), I got goose bumps." Curtis Sittenfeld, The New York Times Book Review
About the Author
Elaine Weiss is an award-winning journalist and writer whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Harper's, The New York Times, and The Christian Science Monitor, as well as in reports and documentaries for National Public Radio and Voice of America. A MacDowell Colony Fellow and Pushcart Prize Editor's Choice honoree, she is also the author of Fruits of Victory: The Woman's Land Army in the Great War (Potomac Books/University of Nebraska Press).