100 books like The Right to Vote

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.

This recent book tells the dramatic story of Tennessee’s ratification of the 19th Amendment. Thirty-six states were required for ratification, and by July 1920 it all came down to Tennessee. The fate of women’s suffrage, decades of struggle, hung in the balance. I love how Weiss brings the context, characters, and events in the drama to life. She vividly portrays the public proceedings and plotting behind-the-scenes for a victory that almost didn’t happen and can’t be taken for granted. Yet, in terms of race, it was a hollow victory. Weiss shows how the suffrage debate in Tennessee, a former slave state, inextricably interrelated with Black voting rights. 

As antisuffragists played the race card—women’s suffrage endangered racial disenfranchisement—white suffragists responded with their own version: white women outnumbered and could outvote African Americans, plus racial disenfranchisement would remain. Betrayed by the “suffrage sisterhood,” Black suffragists fought on.

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. 

Ari Berman picks up the voting rights story in 1965, with the Voting Rights Act’s transformative impact on Black electoral participation and office-holding, especially in the South. Designed to enforce the 15th Amendment, the Voting Rights Act removed barriers to voter registration, like literacy tests, and required states and localities with histories of racial disenfranchisement to seek “preclearance” for changes to their voting and election laws. These and other measures succeeded in greatly expanding American democracy. 

Yet, as Berman documents, opposing forces sought to return to the states the power to restrict access to the ballot, and their own success came with Shelby v. Holder (2013), which ended preclearance. A raft of restrictive regulations immediately rolled out and have intensified today. In this book, since, and joined now by many others, Berman warns that American democracy is at great risk, a warning I deeply feel we need to heed.

Based on a series of public lectures by a notable political scientist, this book documents the fact that the “political class” has grown increasingly disconnected from ordinary Americans. Written in an accessible way, it is full of simple tables and charts that build the case. In our hyper-partisan world, it offers an important antidote to the common belief that the problems with democracy can be solved simply by defeating the other party at the polls—the challenges are much deeper than that.

Although established in the late 1700s, the United States didn’t really become a recognizably modern democracy until the middle of the 1800s. This classic history book describes in detail how this happened in response to public pressures that were populist in nature. The story of this transformation over the 19th century reveals that populism is a recurring feature of American politics, and it has often led the country to improve its democratic practices. This is not an easy read, but offers significant rewards to the persistent reader.

This unconventional book contains a series of business-school-style case studies about critical episodes in American democracy that forms the basis for a class taught by the author at Harvard Business School. The cases are interesting and an enjoyable way to learn history—but more than that, by putting the reader in the shoes of key decision-makers in each episode, they build an appreciation for the complexity of real political decisions, in contrast to public discourse these days which too often treats our policy challenges as black and white issues.

This political science classic explains why it is impossible to create a voting system that reliably reveals citizen preferences; all systems can be manipulated by those who frame the questions and timing of elections. What this implies, Riker argues, is that democracy’s strength is not allowing citizens to micromanage policy; its strength is allowing the people to remove elected officials that don’t serve their interests. This is a scholarly work—not for the casual reader—it offers illuminating examples contains illuminating examples that illustrate key principles, and is accessible to an educated reader with some effort.

The United States of America has a proud but checkered tradition of freedom. This book gives kids nuance about the past while celebrating expanding access to freedom. The text rhymes and is satisfyingly rhythmic. A refrain carries us through the sweep of history: “We heard ever louder/ Equality’s call:/ A right isn’t right/ Till it’s granted to all.” The illustrations show the slow accumulation of more and more people gaining access to civil rights, culminating in an image of people of all genders, colors, and abilities celebrating their right to vote. The trim size of this book about equal rights is, like my book, a perfect square: 4 perfectly equal sides physically reminding the reader who holds it of the theme of the book.

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.