Why They Marched

Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote

Bibliographic Data

ID4156910
AuthorsCarol Lasser (Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume107
Issue2
Pages497-498
Publication date2020-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of American History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/jahist/jaaa303
OpenAlexW3088541458
LanguageEN
Citations received4

This collection of elegantly written sketches narrating the struggle for women's suffrage is a gem. Appearing on the eve of the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment (which in 1920 granted U.S. citizens the right to vote irrespective of sex), Why They Marched provides exactly nineteen chapters between its prologue and epilogue. The book is divided into three roughly chronological sections: “Claiming Citizenship,” “The Personal Is Political,” and “Winning Strategies.” Each chapter begins with a discussion of an object or image that is then linked to an individual, sometimes very directly, as with the death mask of the feminist philosopher Charlotte Perkins Gilman, but in other cases through a clever, attenuated connection, as with the Confederate army reunion pin that opens a discussion of the now-obscure southern author and suffragist Mary Johnston. Susan Ware successfully captures the “passion and power” of her subjects, using material culture to “make the stories even more real” (p. 285). Cumulatively, these individuals limn a comprehensive history of women's suffrage as a social and political movement with its faults, splits, permutations, transformations, and successes

Art · Centennial · Citizenship · Democracy · Literature · Object (grammar · Passion · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Prologue · Suffrage · Universal suffrage · Gender Politics and Representation · History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology

Tools

Open DOI