Ellen Carol Dubois is a distinguished historian and scholar of gender studies. Her work delves deeply into the complexities of women's history and their place within societal structures. Dubois examines historical narratives, seeking to uncover often overlooked voices and perspectives. Her approach is analytical, aiming to bring fresh understanding to the past.
Thirty essays look at women's history from a multicultural perspective that acknowledges and explores the diversity of women's lives. But the essays are not only cultural case studies--they are part of a profound project to reconceptualize American history in terms of racial, cultural, and sexual diversity. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Distinguished historian Ellen Carol DuBois begins in the pre-Civil War years with foremothers Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Sojourner Truth as she explores the links of the woman suffrage movement to the abolition of slavery. After the Civil War, Congress granted freed African American men the right to vote but not white and African American women, a crushing disappointment. DuBois shows how suffrage leaders persevered through the Jim Crow years into the reform era of Progressivism. She introduces new champions Carrie Chapman Catt and Alice Paul, who brought the fight into the 20th century, and she shows how African American women, led by Ida B. Wells-Barnett, demanded voting rights even as white suffragists ignored them. DuBois explains how suffragists built a determined coalition of moderate lobbyists and radical demonstrators in forging a strategy of winning voting rights in crucial states to set the stage for securing suffrage for all American women in the Constitution. In vivid prose DuBois describes suffragists' final victories in Congress and state legislatures, culminating in the last, most difficult ratification, in Tennessee. DuBois follows women's efforts to use their voting rights to win political office, increase their voting strength, and pass laws banning child labor, ensuring maternal health, and securing greater equality for women. Suffrage: Women's Long Battle for the Vote is sure to become the authoritative account of one of the great episodes in the history of American democracy
Explores the full scope of the movement to win the vote for women through portraits of its bold leaders and devoted activists.