The most recommended books about suffrage movements

Dick J. Reavis was a white teenager from Texas when he joined the Civil Rights movement in 1965. If White Kids Die is his clear-eyed, unsentimental memoir of his experiences in Alabama for the Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee. It’s a fascinating, grassroots view from a foot soldier of the movement, someone far removed for the glamorous leadership positions.

Following his stint with SNCC, Reavis later joined SDS and became a prominent anti-war protester in Austin. During his time in the Movement, Reavis endured beatings, jailings, denunciations, and poverty. All of that, as it turned out, was good preparation for his eventual career: a life in journalism. He has since become a legendary journalist in Texas, famed for his tough and daring reporting. He once told me: “I knew Spanish, knew how to live poor, knew how to lie to bosses."

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!

As a professional historian for 40 years, I enjoy books that transform my understanding of our nation’s past. I also love strong female characters who are not well known but who contributed powerfully to social and political change.

Cahill provides a lively and beautifully crafted story of six women of color who fought for ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment and then continued their efforts as federal and state governments sought to exclude women of color from the ballot box after 1920.

Although these Native American, Spanish American, African American, and Chinese American suffragists embraced common goals, they employed distinct arguments and strategies. Their complex relationships are revealed here by placing them in conversation not only with white suffragists but also with each other.

Until relatively recently the American suffrage movement was told only from the White perspective; Black women’s contributions were minimized -  when they received any mention at all. Terborg-Penn’s groundbreaking work challenged that viewpoint through her extensive original research that revealed the stories of Black women activists who worked for suffrage within their own clubs when they were discouraged from joining the mainstream white organizations. 

This book is a bit dry and academic but is well worth a read because it brings to light amazing women such as Mary Church Terrell or Frances Ellen Watkins Harper who fought both racism and sexism in their efforts to win voting rights for all American women.

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. 

This book tells the tale of the 1913 National Union of Women’s Suffrage Society (NUWSS) pilgrimage. I’ve always been irked by how the suffragettes and their arson campaign captured the headlines.

So here’s the other story. Suffragist pilgrims walked from all corners to London: down from Carlisle, up from Land’s End. This book takes you with them, mile by mile—all for Votes for Women! Would you have taken part in 1913?

Doris Stevens’ book is one of the very few published about Alice Paul and the suffrage fight during the era itself. Her firsthand accounts of the trials, tribulations, strategies, suffering, and eventual victory had a great impact on us.

Historically, not a lot was written about the subject, so we appreciated this book immensely! 

It’s easy to forget that many women, as well as men, actively opposed women’s suffrage. Susan Goodier details the anti-suffrage movement in New York State, but her analysis of its motives, victories, and ultimate defeat reveals much about the philosophies and implications of conservative movements nationwide. This is a fascinating study of the women who joined together in a political movement to keep women out of politics. A highlight is how these women fared after the vote was won.

Taking place in New York City after the Civil War, this novel is filled with fascinating historical information about the beginnings of the woman suffrage movement with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, the life of free love advocate Victoria Woodhull, and the challenges a Jewish immigrant woman faced making a living selling condoms. At the same time, this book provides a great deal of context in which to understand how Antony Comstock, as a special agent of the U.S. Post Office, succeeded on March 3, 1873 in banning birth control, contraceptives, abortifacients, and other items he determined to be obscene. 

When talking with younger writers, sooner or later I ask them to name a writer or a book they can point to and say, “That’s the goal. That’s what I care about. That’s what I want to do.” If I asked myself this question, one of my answers would be Karen Joy Fowler’s first novel, a pitch-perfect account of 19th-century America and the mysterious title character, a weird woman whose weirdness confirms how weird everything else already is.