On August 18th, 1920, the 19th Amendment was ratified by Tennessee, the last state that was needed to take the “Susan B. Anthony Amendment” across the finish line. On August 26th, 1920, it became the law of the land: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged … Continue reading
A Century of Votes for Women: American Elections Since Suffrage by Christina Wolbrecht and J. Kevin Corder We are less than two months away from the centennial of women’s suffrage in the United States.* I’ve been doing a lot of reading about suffrage history this year. So far, I have most enjoyed Why They Marched and The Woman’s … Continue reading
Why They Marched: The Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote by Susan Ware is a great read for this year, as the 100th anniversary of U.S. women’s suffrage comes up this August. I Ware does not treat the American suffrage movement as a monolithic, unified group of women, as … Continue reading
What a lovely, lovely, important book. Lighting the Fires of Freedom: African American Women in the Civil Rights Movement by Janet Dewart Bell includes interviews with nine black women about their work in the Civil Rights Movement, often emphasizing their focus on their intersectional experiences of race, gender, and class. In Lighting the Fires of Freedom, Bell has … Continue reading
This month, there was a flurry of press about the women being sworn into the House of Representatives, among them Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress; the first two Native American women elected to Congress, Deb Haaland and Sharice Davis; and Ilhan Omar, the first Somali-American woman elected to Congress, and one … Continue reading
