August 17, 2020 | Maria Firkaly
Suffragette – Celebrating 100 years of Voting Equality for Women
Reading Suggestions for all ages
We are celebrating the Ratification of the 19th Amendment, granting women the right to vote. On August 18, 1920 women in the United States were finally granted the right to voting equality. The 19th amendment guarantees all American women the right to vote. Achieving this milestone required a lengthy and difficult struggle; victory took decades of agitation and protest.
In appreciation of their sacrifices and tenacity, join us in reading about the strong women who changed the future for women in our country. If you need help placing a hold on items or using the Overdrive, Libby, or Hoopla applications on a device, we are here to help.
Children’s Books
How Women Won the Vote: Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, and Their Big Idea by Susan Campbell Bartoletti (Picture Book)
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Full of gorgeous illustrations, photographs, timelines, and voting memorabilia, this immersive read is great for older elementary to middle-grade readers. Bartoletti centers the narrative around the Women’s March of 1913 in Washington, D.C., and the two women who organized it, Alice Paul and Lucy Burns. These women and this march were integral to the eventual passing of the 19th amendment, and this text is a fun and fascinating way to introduce young readers to the movement.
Friends for Freedom: The Story of Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass by Suzanne Slade (Juvenile Nonfiction)
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No one thought Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass would ever become friends. The former slave and the outspoken woman came from two different worlds. But they shared deep-seated beliefs in equality and the need to fight for it. Despite naysayers, hecklers, and even arsonists, Susan and Frederick became fast friends and worked together to change America.
Suffrage Sisters: The Fight for Liberty by Maggie Mead (Juvenile nonfiction)
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Elizabeth Cady Stanton spoke before an eager crowd in Seneca Falls, New York, on a hot July morning in 1948. She began her speech with words that were familiar to American ears: But the ideas that followed were radical. “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men and women are created equal” Stanton went on to boldly demand equal rights for women–including suffrage, the right to vote. It took more than 70 years from that moment before all American women could vote in American elections. The fight was led by several generations of courageous women who devoted their lives to liberty and equality. This is their story.
Marching with Aunt Susan: Susan B. Anthony and the Fight for Women’s Suffrage by Claire Rudolph Murphy (Picture Book)
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Not allowed to go hiking with her father and brothers because she is a girl, Bessie learns about women’s rights when she attends a suffrage rally led by Susan B. Anthony.
Young Adult Books
The Downstairs Girl by Stacey Lee
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By day, seventeen-year-old Jo Kuan works as a lady’s maid for the cruel daughter of one of the wealthiest men in Atlanta. But by night, Jo moonlights as the pseudonymous author of a newspaper advice column for the genteel Southern lady, “Dear Miss Sweetie.” When her column becomes wildly popular, she uses the power of the pen to address some of society’s ills, but she’s not prepared for the backlash that follows when her column challenges fixed ideas about race and gender. While her opponents clamor to uncover the secret identity of Miss Sweetie, a mysterious letter sets Jo off on a search for her own past and the parents who abandoned her as a baby. But when her efforts put her in the crosshairs of Atlanta’s most notorious criminal, Jo must decide whether she, a girl used to living in the shadows, is ready to step into the light. With prose that is witty, insightful, and at times heartbreaking, Stacey Lee masterfully crafts an extraordinary social drama set in the New South.
The Cure for Dreaming by Cat Winters (YA fiction)
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Olivia Mead is a headstrong, independent girl—a suffragist—in an age that prefers its girls to be docile. It’s 1900 in Oregon, and Olivia’s father, concerned that she’s headed for trouble, convinces a stage mesmerist to try to hypnotize the rebellion out of her. But the hypnotist, an intriguing young man named Henri Reverie, gives her a terrible gift instead: she’s able to see people’s true natures, manifesting as visions of darkness and goodness, while also unable to speak her true thoughts out loud. These supernatural challenges only make Olivia more determined to speak her mind, and so she’s drawn into a dangerous relationship with the hypnotist and his mysterious motives, all while secretly fighting for the rights of women. Winters breathes new life into history once again with an atmospheric, vividly real story, including archival photos and art from the period throughout.
Things a Bright Girl Can Do by Sally Nicholls (YA fiction)
Through rallies and marches, in polite drawing rooms and freezing prison cells and the poverty-stricken slums of the East End, three courageous young women join the fight for the vote.
Evelyn is seventeen, and though she is rich and clever, she may never be allowed to follow her older brother to university. Enraged that she is expected to marry her childhood sweetheart rather than be educated, she joins the Suffragettes, and vows to pay the ultimate price for women’s freedom.
May is fifteen, and already sworn to the cause, though she and her fellow Suffragists refuse violence. When she meets Nell, a girl who’s grown up in hardship, she sees a kindred spirit. Together and in love, the two girls start to dream of a world where all kinds of women have their place.
But the fight for freedom will challenge Evelyn, May and Nell more than they ever could believe. As war looms, just how much are they willing to sacrifice?
General/Adult Books
The Woman’s Hour: the great fight to win the vote by Elaine Weiss (Nonfiction)
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Nashville, August 1920. Thirty-five states have ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, twelve have rejected or refused to vote, and one last state is needed. It all comes down to Tennessee, the moment of truth for the suffragists, after a seven-decade crusade. The opposing forces include politicians with careers at stake, liquor companies, railroad magnates, and a lot of racists who don’t want black women voting. And then there are the ‘Antis’–women who oppose their own enfranchisement, fearing suffrage will bring about the moral collapse of the nation. They all converge in a boiling hot summer for a vicious face-off replete with dirty tricks, betrayals and bribes, bigotry, Jack Daniel’s, and the Bible.
Following a handful of remarkable women who led their respective forces into battle, along with appearances by Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding, Frederick Douglass, and Eleanor Roosevelt, The Woman’s Hour is an inspiring story of activists winning their own freedom in one of the last campaigns forged in the shadow of the Civil War, and the beginning of the great twentieth-century battles for civil rights.
She Votes: how U.S. women won suffrage and what happened next by Bridgett Quinn (Nonfiction)
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She Votes is an intersectional story of the women who won suffrage, and those who have continued to raise their voices for equality ever since.
From the first female Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation to the first woman to wear pants on the Senate floor, author Bridget Quinn shines a spotlight on the women who broke down barriers.
This deluxe book also honors the 100th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment with illustrations by 100 women artists.
• A colorful, intersectional account of the struggle for women’s rights in the United States
• Features heart-pounding scenes and keenly observed portraits
• Includes dynamic women from Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Audre Lorde
She Votes is a refreshing and illuminating book for feminists of all kinds.
Each artist brings a unique perspective; together, they embody the multiplicity of women in the United States.
Sisters in Spirit by Sally Roesch Wagner (Nonfiction)
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Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) women fired the revolutionary vision of early feminists by providing a model of freedom for women at a time when EuroAmerican women experienced few rights. Women of the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy possessed freedoms far beyond those of their white sisters: decisive political power, control of their bodies, control of their own property, custody of children they bore, the power to initiate divorce, satisfying work, and a society generally free of rape and domestic violence. The thoughts of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage were shaped by their involvement with indigenous women neighbors in upstate New York.
Intrepid historian Sally Roesch Wagner recounts the compelling struggle for freedom and equality waged by women in the United States and documents the influence and inspiration Native American women gave to this dynamic social movement. The personal and political changes unleashed by the Iroquois/feminist relationship continue to transform our lives.
Lifting as we climb: Black Women’s battle for the ballot box by Evette Dionne (Nonfiction)
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An eye-opening book that tells the important, overlooked story of black women as a force in the suffrage movement–when fellow suffragists did not accept them as equal partners in the struggle.
Mr. President, how long must we wait? : Alice Paul, Woodrow Wilson, and the fight for the right to vote by Tina Cassidy (Nonfiction)
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This dual biography of Alice Paul and Woodrow Wilson manages to be both well-researched and narratively compelling. When most suffragists practiced polite activism, Alice Paul took up a militant approach to her protests. She learned this approach in England, and after England’s women won the right to vote, she came back home to the United States to practice what she’d learned. She became a thorn in Woodrow Wilson’s side as she picketed the White House and demanded face to face meetings with him. Her activism kept the movement in the press and eventually helped lead to the passing of the 19th amendment.
Roses and Radicals: The Epic Story of how American Women Won the Right to Vote by Susan Zimet (Nonfiction)
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The United States of America is almost 250 years old, but American women won the right to vote less than a hundred years ago.
And when the controversial nineteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution – the one granting suffrage to women – was finally ratified in 1920, it passed by a mere one-vote margin.
The amendment only succeeded because a group of women had been relentlessly demanding the right to vote for more than seventy years. The leaders of the suffrage movement were fearless in the face of ridicule, arrest, imprisonment, and even torture. Many of them devoted themselves to a cause knowing they wouldn’t live to cast a ballot. This is their story.
All Stirred Up: Suffrage Cookbooks, Food, and the Battle for Women’s Right to Vote by Laura Kumin (Nonfiction)
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We all likely conjure up a similar image of the women’s suffrage movement: picket signs, red carnations, militant marches through the streets. But was it only these rallies that gained women the exposure and power that led them to the vote?
Ever courageous and creative, suffragists also carried their radical message into America’s homes wrapped in food wisdom, through cookbooks, which ingenuously packaged political strategy into already existent social communities. These cookbooks gave suffragists a chance to reach out to women on their own terms, in nonthreatening and accessible ways. Cooking together, feeding people, and using social situations to put people at ease were pioneering grassroots tactics that leveraged the domestic knowledge these women already had, feeding spoonfuls of suffrage to communities through unexpected and unassuming channels.
Kumin, the author of The Hamilton Cookbook, expands this forgotten history, she shows us that, in spite of massive opposition, these women brilliantly wove charm and wit into their message. Filled with actual historic recipes (“mix the crust with tact and velvet gloves, using no sarcasm, especially with the upper crust”) that evoke the spirited flavor of feminism and food movements, All Stirred Up re-activates the taste of an era and carries us back through time.
The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow (Fiction)
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Three sister witches team up to change the course of witchcraft and feminism in this historical fantasy set amidst the Women’s Suffrage Movement. Any woman can be a witch, but most magic has been banished and women are punished for using their powers. In step Juniper, Bea, and Agnes, three sisters who, in their refusal to withstand any more misogyny, fight for women’s rights using spells taken from fairytales and nursery rhymes.