Why They Marched

Susan Ware's Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote is a delightful, enlightening, and eminently readable set of suffrage stories. The book is a “prosopography,” or an overlapping set of nineteen biographical essays that individually make for pleasant reading but together make up a sweeping overview of the breadth of the suffrage movement. The nineteen-chapter structure is a deliberate nod to the Nineteenth Amendment, which had its centennial in 2020.Ware has carefully chosen each activist to illuminate a larger facet of the suffrage struggle, including such wide-ranging topics as political cartooning, race work, working women's activism, antisuffragists, mountaineering, international debates, and religion. She adds another layer by opening each essay with an object or an image from Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University's Schlesinger Library’ collection. As she asserts, these material items “are especially evocative in connecting everyday lives with the broader movement” and are especially relevant in a book on the suffrage movement, which “came to embrace popular culture and public spectacle as a primary strategy to win support for its cause” (7). The objects serve to bring the reader into a world that is familiarly modern but also foreign. Political cartoons, campaign buttons, and cookbooks appear along with death masks, cartes de visite, and saddlebags.Ware organizes the essays in three sections that move in roughly chronological order, starting with chapter 1, “The Trial of Susan B. Anthony and the ‘Rochester Fifteen’ ” in 1873, and concluding with “Tennessee's ‘Perfect 36’ ” and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Though these stick close to our traditional narratives of suffrage, her choice of subjects for the other chapters expands those narratives with regional, racial, religious, and class diversity as well as considerations of women's international activism and sexuality. The essays are each self-contained windows into an individual person and subject, but they also connect through their chronological sections. Ware skillfully weaves actors from previous pieces into later essays, subtly demonstrating connections and influences.Some of the women and subjects are well-known to women's historians, such as Ida B. Wells or Maude Wood Park, but the essays offer excellent introductions to them for those who are less familiar. Such chapters offer synthesis where Ware draws on recent scholarly work to tell their stories. In other chapters, however, she gives us original research to reveal new dimensions of the suffrage movement. This is the case with chapter 4, “Alice Stone Blackwell and the Armenian Crisis of the 1890s.” “What is the Armenian Genocide doing in a book of suffrage stories?” Ware asks. The answer she offers is that Alice Stone Blackwell, second-generation suffragist and daughter of Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell, used her paper, the Woman's Journal, not only to carry on her parents’ work but also to champion “America's first international human rights crusade” (56–57).Readers of Labor History will appreciate the discussion of Rose Schneiderman and the intersection of suffrage and labor activism. Women's work appears in other essays as well, as women like Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Mary Johnson supported themselves as authors.One of the strengths of the collection is regional diversity. The American West, where women first won suffrage, receives some consideration. The chapter “Sister-Wives and Suffragists” opens with the front page of a June 1872 edition of Woman's Exponent, a Utah women's newspaper, which reports a speech by Susan B. Anthony and defends polygamy. The chapter acknowledges Utah's special role in suffrage history as the second territory in which women won the right the vote (1870), but then lost it when Congress disenfranchised them with the 1887 Edmunds-Tucker Act, which aimed at ending the Mormon Church's support of polygamy. “Mountaineering for Suffrage” uses the image of suffragists planting a “Votes for Women” pennant on Mount Rainier in Washington State to highlight how women not only broke political barriers but also proved they belonged in all spaces in their quest for equality. “The Shadow of the Confederacy” addresses the connections between suffrage and white supremacy in the South. Race mattered in the West, too, but this collection focuses on race as a Black-and-white dichotomy.Ware makes it clear that Black women played a central role in the suffrage struggle. Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, and Mary Church Terrell each have a dedicated chapter. In “Suffragists Abroad,” Ware uses Terrell's 1904 trip to Berlin, Germany, for the International Council of Women to explore the international networks of suffrage activism as well as the specific strategies African American women used to fight for justice. The chapter opens with the multilingual Terrell making a last-minute decision to give her talk in German rather than English, highlighting her extraordinary abilities. There's also a nod to the anticolonial politics that concerned Black women. In Berlin, Terrell was the only African American and indeed, as she expressed it, “the only woman taking part in the International Congress who had a drop of African blood in her veins.” As a result, she felt great responsibility for representing not only African American women, but “the whole continent of Africa as well” (169).Ware's use of biography allows her to highlight the intimate relationships of suffragists. We meet women who love women, mothers who pass suffrage activism to their daughters, sisters whose relationship becomes enmeshed in the politics of suffrage and anti-suffrage, and women whose families may or may not have supported their work. This is Ware's goal: to bring “the story down to the personal level—to the individual acts of courage and political defiance, to stories of quiet determination alongside displays of public spectacle” (11).Ware, the Schlesinger Library's Honorary Women's Suffrage Centennial Historian, has succeeded in providing an engaging and lively introduction to the vast array of suffrage history. Her emphasis on material culture (and delight in sharing the library's collections) makes the book feel almost like a personal guided tour of an exhibit. Readers will leave this collection having learned a lot and wanting to know more

Art · Centennial · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Spectacle · Suffrage · Visual arts · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society