100 books like African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850-1920

This book is so good that other authors and academics often reference it. It provided us with great background and insight into Alice Paul and how/why she was able to accomplish what she did.

It does a great job of fleshing out the person behind the movement, which helped us humanize Alice in our musical.  

This provocative book examines the role and status of women in the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy and how 19th-century white feminists used them as role models in beginning their own fight for rights, including suffrage. It’s a quick read and kind of a life-changing one, really, especially if (like me) you’re completely ignorant of Native history and its relation to US history.  

Among other things, Haudenosaunee women had the right to choose and advise tribal leaders, and had far more control over their persons and their children than Euro-American women did. Wagner argues that close relationships with the Haudenosaunee influenced people like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage leading up to the famous Seneca Falls Convention in 1848.

This is a remarkable book about a remarkable chapter in the fight for women’s right to vote. The story of the suffrage fight throughout the Summer of 1920 in Tennessee is so incredible that it seems impossible.

And what is even more bonkers is how remarkably similar some of the issues and players are to those of today. We could have done an entire show based on what we learned in The Woman’s Hour!

When I began researching suffrage history I was captivated by the images I found, including illustrations the suffragists created. Yet most books written about the suffrage movement are nonfiction narratives, with only a handful of images. The suffragists were brilliant at using images to skewer the anti-suffragists’ ridiculous statements about how women voting would ruin families and society.

A graphic designer by trade, Cooney upended that model by gathering together a vast array of photographs, cartoons, and other images depicting both pro-and anti-suffrage sentiment. It’s a great gift to us, and to future generations, to have all of these images gathered together in one book. I love being able to match the names to the photos of these amazing women.

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.    

Painting a broad picture of African-American women’s political advocacy and activism, Martha S. Jones presents women fighting for a voice in our political system from the early days of the Republic through women’s suffrage to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Many of the women and their contributions to racial and gender equality were familiar to me. Others less so, including three generations of Jones’s own foremothers who worked for democratic participation in their day. Bringing home how very personal the political is, Jones finds Black women’s politics in parties, elections, government, and beyond. In churches and community institutions, in careers as teachers and journalists, they pursued an expansive vision of human rights and dignity.

It’s an informative, inspiring history, with hard-won gains contextualized with hard truths about our impaired democracy, and reminded me that the obligation to repair it belongs to us all.

I first read Cole’s novella in early 2017, when tensions between white women and women of color over planning the Women’s March were all over the news. This book helped me to understand those tensions in a way that nonfiction accounts simply hadn’t.

In early 20th century Harlem, Black whorehouse owner Bertha takes care to teach her employees how government works, so they’ll be ready to cast their ballots when New York finally grants women the vote. The “good” women of the Colored Women’s Voting League aren’t pleased by the wishes of “bad” Bertha and her girls to join their efforts, especially when Bertha calls out the racism of their purported white “allies.” Bertha’s budding romance with undocumented alien Amir, a Bengali Muslim, compellingly reinforces the larger political themes of the book.

This book, published first in 1965 and then revised and reissued, was required reading when I was in graduate school. With this intellectual history of women’s suffrage, Kraditor sparked my interest in how ideas spur and shape political and social movements. Arguments, tactics, and strategies originate in the ideas of participants, and these ideas have consequences for how and what is eventually achieved. My favorite chapter explained the two kinds of arguments suffragists used. The argument from “justice” asserted women’s equal humanity with men, while the argument from “expediency” affirmed the benefits of extending women’s domestic caretaking into politics. 

My takeaway was that movements need multiple arguments to convince different constituencies to join and support their cause. Kraditor refused to whitewash the women’s suffrage movement and recounted how white, middle-class, native-born women also used ethnocentric and racist arguments to claim access to the ballot. 

Written to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, this lively, exciting book provides a fresh and comprehensive history of the fight for women’s suffrage. DuBois is a leading scholar who presents her expertise in prose that appeals to scholars and general readers alike. There are lots of books on the long history of women’s suffrage—this is the best.

This was the first book I read on women’s suffrage, and it was a revelation. I’d had a hazy impression of cartwheel-hatted women in London chaining themselves to railings as a protest. Huge marches, campaigners travelling round the country, ink in pillar boxes and acid on golf greens, forcible feeding and vigils outside prisons defiantly singing Scots wha hae (can’t be arrested for singing the national anthem!), census refusal—the courage and determination of my countrywomen left me breathless with admiration.