The most recommended books about suffrage movements

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.

When, in the course of my research for my book, I first came across a newspaper article from 1939 reporting on the work of physicist Florence Bell with the stunned headline "Woman Scientist Explains," I think it took me about 5 minutes to recover from laughing. It’s a pity that the local press were more interested in the fact that Bell was a woman rather than her actual science, because only a year earlier she had shown for the first time how X-rays could reveal the regular, ordered structure of DNA. And as an undergraduate of Girton College, Cambridge, Bell’s talents as a physicist should have come as no surprise. For as historian Patricia Fara shows, Girton and the other all-female college, Newnham, were both intellectual crucibles from which emerged a generation of distinguished scientists such as physicist Hertha Ayrton, campaigning chemists Ida Smedley and Martha Whiteley, to name but… show more.

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."

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.

One of the shocking discoveries I made while researching my book was that China was the only Allied power to appoint a female delegate to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. Readers of Edwards’s book will be less surprised. While British suffragists of the early twentieth century were busy planting bombs in postboxes, Chinese women were taking up arms to overthrow the Qing dynasty and smashing the windows of the newly opened parliamentary chambers to demand their nation codify citizens’ political rights “regardless of sex.” This book tells their story and puts the lie to the myth that women’s rights only became a priority in China decades later, when Mao Zedong proclaimed that women “hold up half the sky.”

The stories in this book all take place on the same day in 1915, when over a million women marched in New York for the right to vote. Stories like this appeal to me because so many of the women who worked tirelessly for this achievement are not familiar names. These stories give them a voice. One of my own ancestors was a suffragette. Maybe she was part of this march!

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.

All authors regretfully leave some things out of their books. If I had written a seventh chapter to mine, it would have focused on Indian feminists like Sarojini Naidu and Herabai and Mithan Tata who conducted a full-throttled campaign for the British Parliament to endorse women’s political rights in the 1919 Government of India Act. Fortunately, Mukherjee’s book tells this story in compelling detail. Based on research into previously ignored sources, this book follows Indian feminists’ battles as they pressed for women’s suffrage, initially within the constraints of the British empire and later, as anticolonial battles intensified, side-by-side with Gandhi and other nationalists fighting for Indian self-determination.

It’s hard to find a new way into a well-known subject but Jill Liddington does it here with an entire book about just one day, census day 2 April 1911 when radical women disrupted the census by refusing to be enumerated by a state which gave them no rights. Overnight they filled dancehalls, private houses and camped on common land to evade the census takers. This is history as adventure story.

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.