The best books to read about the history of women’s rights
Content originally published here.
Who am I?
I have been writing about the history of women’s rights and women’s suffrage for over fifty years. Suffrage: Women’s Long Battle for the Vote offers a comprehensive history of the full three-quarters of a century of women’s persistent suffrage activism. I began my work inspired by the emergence of the women’s liberation movement in the 1970s and this most recent history appeared in conjunction with the 2020 Centennial of the Ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. My understanding of the campaign for full citizenship for women repeatedly intersects with the struggles for racial equality, from abolition to Jim Crow. Today, when American political democracy is under assault, the long history of woman suffrage activism is more relevant than ever.
I wrote…
Suffrage: Women’s Long Battle for the Vote
By Ellen Carol DuBois
What is my book about?
Suffrage explores the full scope of the movement to win the vote for women through portraits of its bold leaders and devoted activists. 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.
This 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.
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The Books I Picked & Why
The Feminist Promise: 1792 to the Present
By Christine Stansell
Why this book?
I am recommending this book because it is a beautifully written, originally argued overview of women’s rights long history. Stansell organizes her compelling history of women’s rights around the shift from mothers’ perspectives (nineteenth-century feminism) to daughters’ perspectives (twentieth century). She writes beautifully and sweeps over this long tradition without minimizing the disagreements, shifts, and changes, all the while emphasizing the consistent theme of women’s individual freedom and collective struggle.
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My Life on the Road
By Gloria Steinem
Why this book?
I am recommending this as the most personal of Steinem’s books. No list of books on the history of women’s rights would be complete without something about and by the most courageous, most consistent spokeswoman for feminism over the last half-century. Here Steinem tells the tale of her family, focused – surprisingly – on her eclectic and wandering father. The reader will be left with even great appreciation for Steinem and for the many and various routes women take to find their way to feminism and their full, true selves.
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Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences 1815-1897
By Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Why this book?
I am recommending this autobiography of the great nineteenth-century feminist intellectual and activist. Eighty Years and More is one of the great autobiographies in American history, up there with that of Frederick Douglass and Henry Adams. Stanton told the account of her early years, her path to becoming a reformer, and the epic battles in which she fought for women’s rights in an engaging writing style that still speaks to women today. Readers who only know of Stanton through the controversies over her racism and elitism will be well served by learning about the many, path-breaking facets of her life and career. Postscript: go online to read Stanton’s great late-life speech, The Solitude of Self.
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Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All
By Martha S. Jones
Why this book?
I am recommending this exciting, new, comprehensive history of the important role of African American women in the history of women’s rights. All women of color, and most notably African American women, were omitted from original histories of women’s rights, and that omission has carried over into modern histories of the feminist tradition. The author has done a great deal to remedy this problem, telling the stories of individual black women activists and groups of African American women, from the earliest years of women’s rights activism in the 1820s up to and past formal constitutional enfranchisement, from which black women were often excluded. Vanguard balances heroic stories of activism with troubling accounts of racism in the suffrage movement. As the subtitle indicates, these were the women who realized the full extent of equal rights for all women.
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Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement
By Katherine M. Marino
Why this book?
I am recommending this book as a history of women’s rights that extends out from the United States to the sister republics of Central and South America. Women’s rights has been a genuinely international movement and the author explores the links between veterans of the U.S. suffrage movement and women from Mexico to Chile, working to establish equal rights in their countries. Beginning as protégés of U.S. women, they eventually become independent leaders of their own movements, surpassing the tendency of their mentors to limit themselves to formal legal rather than expansive social and economic rights. The subtitle indicates the crucial role that these Central and South American feminists played in broader human rights struggles up to the founding of the United Nations.
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