100 books like A Suffragette My Own Story

This was the first book I read on North Korea.

North Korea is a combination of the Soviet Gulag and Auschwitz. Under the reign of the three Kims (grandfather, father, and son), North Koreans have endured malnourishment and starvation since the 1990s. Most of this would been avoidable if the government hadn’t had ridiculous economic policies forbidding private enterprise, and also imprisoned anyone who criticized the Kims’ rule. 

Remick is a journalist who introduces North Korea to a general audience by interviewing six refugees.  I “assigned” this book to one of my ladies’ book clubs and they found it very interesting and easy to read.

We, the Karens, call our land Kawthoolei, which means "a land without evil." When I first came to the UK, Ben gave me a copy of his book, A Land Without Evil. After reading this book, I felt so much pain that I couldn't stop my tears because all of the suffering of my people that Ben wrote in his book were all true, and it brought back all the memories of our sufferings. For decades, my people have been brutally attacked by Burmese governments, but the world didn't know and pay attention in order to help us. 

When I was born, my father, Padoh Mahn Sha Lah Phan, named me after Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya. When he was a student at Rangoon University, he read about Zoya and her brother Shura resisting Nazi Germany’s invasion of Russia. Both Zoya and Shura were killed by the Nazis. My father was inspired by Zoya's story and he wanted me to help resist the Burmese government's violence against his Karen people. 

I knew Saw Ralph and Naw Sheera when we were in Manerplaw, which used to be the headquarters of the Karen resistance, in Burma. As a little girl, I often followed my mother Nant Kyin Shwe to her workplace and remembered seeing Naw Sheera in the office of the Karen Women's Organisation. When I read her book, it reminds me of all the places and the people, and my beautiful childhood in, Kawthoolei, Burma. 

Purple, white, and green are the colours of the WSPU regalia. Suffragette ephemera fascinates me, especially their merchandising (soap, chocolate, board games, chinaware - all sorts of things). I first heard of it at a presentation by Diane Atkinson. This book is the catalogue of an exhibition she put together when she was a curator at the Museum of London. An excellent resource, it's full of images with pointers for where to find more. Ephemera is great for giving a sense of period, so I asked the artists on the graphic novel to cram in all they could.

The three main Pankhurst players in the Suffragette movement – Emmeline and two of her children, Christabel and Sylvia – all wrote accounts of the era. But Sylvia’s is arguably the most comprehensive and objective. The book starts out as a memoir of the Pankhurst family’s early life – their humble beginnings, their journey to political activism – and Pankhurst does not shy away from the gory details of militant suffragette activity. But she is also not afraid to chronicle divisions in the movement, both among the different factions of the WSPU, and between the WSPU and the Labour party, who eventually chose to support working men’s rights above those of women. Sylvia Pankhurst has emerged from the period as the most egalitarian of its heroines, after leaving the main WSPU branch to focus on the cause of working-class women. It’s a tome, but a worthy read.  

This amazing account of the Edwardian struggle for women's suffrage was published in 1911, in the thick of it. While doing research for Sally Heathcote Suffragette, I discovered a review of it in Votes for Women, the official paper of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). It weaves the stories of three fictional women into what were then very recent events in suffrage history, bringing them to life. The Sally in the title, like my Sally, is a maid-of-all-work A coincidence? Yes, but not really surprising. Domestic service was the most likely form of employment for a woman of no means before the First World War; Sally (from Sarah) was a common name then and it alliterates well with ‘suffragette’.

This is the handbook that is literally by my hand as I sit at my desk. It’s not only authoritative but every page is bursting with fascinating passages of biography and quirky histories. It’s one of those reference books to be read, that I return to again and again.

I love how this book describes what Ida B. Wells was like as a young child, as well as her parents. Ida learned about standing up for what’s right from them. Dinah Johnson effectively weaves this theme throughout the whole book.

I think kids can learn so much from this story of courage. Page by page, kids will see how Ida wasn’t afraid to write newspaper articles about Black people being lynched so that she could bring attention to racism and injustice. Kids will also see how she wasn’t afraid to step forward in the Women’s March of 1913.

I was especially drawn to the back matter of this book, which includes rare pictures of Ida with her family from the 1900s and a comprehensive timeline of her life.

This is the biography of the author’s grandmother, Adella Hunt Logan (1863-1915), a teacher at Tuskegee.  W.E.B. DuBois, who challenged Booker T. Washington’s vocational vision for Black Americans, gave her the title princess. Like Terrell, Logan could “pass” for white, but rarely did: to travel safely north and to have kidney surgery in a white hospital. Unlike Terrell, she was the product of her mother’s and grandmother’s longstanding, consensual relationships with slaveholders. Logan’s life was confined by racism, sexism, marriage, and motherhood, yet she urged reluctant Black women to pursue suffrage, lobbied for equal pay, and espoused reproductive rights, before her tragic death. She was the only Black lifetime member of the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association and the only member enrolled from Alabama. The author incorporates public records, family archives, stories handed down, and African myths to choreograph this compelling tour de force.