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Ellen Carol DuBois is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her most recent books are Woman Suffrage and Women's Rights and Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage.

Tekijän teokset

Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women's History [1st edition] (1990) — Toimittaja; Avustaja — 291 kappaletta
Woman Suffrage and Women's Rights (1998) 21 kappaletta

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A very readable history of the women who fought the suffrage battle, and the obstacles they faced. The familiar names are here, from Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Carrie Chapman Catt. The author deals with many of the charges being flung at the early feminists, not flinching as she addresses not only the statements that led to the charges of racism, but the context in which they were said or done. She includes a history of black suffragists that makes the story more complete. The world inhabited by the brave women is drawn out in vivid lines, including the two wars that interrupted but did not stop the fight for suffrage.… (lisätietoja)
 
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Devil_llama | 2 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Jan 28, 2023 |
Note: I accessed a digital review copy of this book through Edelweiss.
 
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fernandie | 2 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Sep 15, 2022 |
During the antebellum era, women were prominent participants in the abolition movement that transformed America. For many of them, their activism underscored their own inferior status in America society, which they were increasingly determined to address. From this emerged the first movement in America dedicated to gaining equal rights for women, one that would ultimately focus on winning the right for women to vote. Ellen Carol DuBois’s book is about the birth of this movement in the middle decades of the 19th century. In it she chronicles the growing dedication of women activists to the cause, the different measures they pursued, and how these early results culminated in the founding of not just one but two national organizations committed to the cause of women’s suffrage.

To chart the course of this evolution, DuBois begins by detailing the growing discontent of women with their lack of rights in the years leading up to the Civil War. As she explains, the activism of many women in the antebellum reform movements of the era called into question the idea that women had a domestic “sphere” to which they should limit their activities. Often, public issues intruded upon the home, and many women perceived the need for public engagement in order to address them. For others, moral outrage over injustices such as slavery motivated women to participate in efforts to restrict or end slavery. Yet the limitations imposed by their domestic responsibilities and their lack of political power soon highlighted for many of them the need to expand their focus to demand their own equality as well.

While these demands were met sympathetically by many within the abolitionist movement, for the most part they remained subordinated to their original cause of ending slavery. The closer they got to that goal, however, the more the issue of women’s suffrage emerged as a source of division. The split took place in the aftermath of the Civil War, as anti-slavery leaders sought to crown their success with the enfranchisement of Blacks. Any hopes that women had that their own enfranchisement would be coupled with this, however, were dashed by the desire of proponents of Black suffrage to minimize any possible objections to their efforts.

This caused a split among the ranks of women activists. While some of them reluctantly conceded the postponement of women’s suffrage and remained committed to the Republican Party’s reform efforts, others – most notably Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton – explored other options for winning the vote. This included an ill-judged association in a Kansas state referenda campaign with Democrats eager to exploit the issue as a means of blunting Republican enfranchisement efforts, as well as efforts to forge an alliance with labor organizations before settling on what would prove to be the most enduring solution. This was the creation in 1869 of an independent organization, the National Women’s Suffrage Association, that would be controlled by women and campaign for women’s right to vote to the exclusion of any other goal.

The establishment of the NWSA began a new phase in the campaign for women’s suffrage, one that would culminate in the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment over a half-century later. While the story of this larger effort lies outside of the scope of DuBois’s book, what she provides is a wonderfully lucid account of what led women to establish what was the first national feminist organization. To do so she delves into the details of local campaigns and organizational infighting, explaining the decisions they made and how their consequences ultimately led women to take what was an enormously radical and uncertain step. It’s a story that should be read by anyone interested in learning how women took charge of their fight for the vote, as well as the broader history of feminism and the political struggle for rights in mid-19th century America.
… (lisätietoja)
 
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MacDad | 1 muu arvostelu | May 25, 2021 |
In Suffrage: Women’s Long Battle for the Vote, Ellen Carol Dubois offers a two-pronged argument. In the first part, she argues, “The woman suffrage movement had incredible range. It was sustained and transformed through massive political, social, and economic changes in American life and carried forward by at least three generations of American women” (pg. 2). Dubois further argues, “The suffrage movement was shaped by – and shaped – the different political eras through which it grew” (pg. 2). Dubois’ work presents a synthetic history of woman’s suffrage from the 1850s through the 1920s, offering an excellent introduction for the unfamiliar and a new analytical approach for seasoned historians. She draws extensively upon biography to humanize a history with distinct phases and a story that cannot be condensed into a single lifetime.

Dubois begins with the pre-Civil War conventions, such as Seneca Falls in 1848, thereby following much of established history around woman suffrage. She turns to the post-Civil War period, writing. “The Thirteenth and the subsequent two postwar amendments essentially rewrote basic elements of the U.S. Constitution, turning it into a document that could respond to challenges in national life. Eventually this change, and women’s role in it, elevated the demand for woman suffrage to the forefront of the women’s rights movement and to the level of the federal constitutional stage” (pgs. 52-53). Discussing the effort to enfranchise women in Kansas’ state constitution, Dubois writes, “Women’s rights had come of age in association with another great reform movement against slavery and for racial justice, but now that bond was being shattered… Woman suffrage was becoming its own movement, and its leaders must seek out avenues to victory wherever and however they might present themselves, regardless of the counsel of others. For them, it was a coming of age” (pg. 69).

Looking to the changed understanding of citizenship after the Civil War, Dubois writes, “In the atmosphere of Reconstruction, the notion that enfranchisement was an individual right that belonged to all citizens equally, rather than a government-bestowed privilege, was spreading” (pg. 85). Dubois discusses how Susan B. Anthony’s trial for illegally voting essentially cast election laws as a state issue rather than a federal one. Based on this, she writes, “Suffragists began to refocus on amending state constitutions to grant women suffrage rights. If and when woman suffragists could succeed in amending state constitutions, these state-by-state changes would grant women full rights to vote, including in federal elections, including for president” (pg. 105). Dubois chronicles the slow, contentious process of achieving woman suffrage as western territories were incorporated as states. Women suffragists formed alliances with organizations such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and with other social causes, though they cemented their break from other civil rights organizations as racist beliefs became more entrenched. Dubois writes, “As these state enfranchisements mounted, it became clear to all serious suffrage strategists that the possibilities of winning a federal constitutional amendment, which had lain fallow for three decades, had drastically improved… It was no longer men and men only who had the political power to put pressure on Congress and determine the outcome of the fight for a U.S. constitutional amendment. Women were no longer a ‘voteless constituency’” (pg. 186).

By the time of the Wilson Administration, however, woman suffragists became a more diverse group reflecting a changing society. Dubois writes, “In her account of the picketing, [Doris] Stevens bragged that the earliest arrested picketers included daughters of ambassadors and descendants of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Later, the appeal of the campaign, the chance to make history, and the bold outlaw thrill of civil disobedience drew a much wider range of women. Overall, the spirit was one of gender solidarity reaching beyond class difference. Among the more than one thousand women who eventually became picketers were business and professional women, teachers, and librarians” (pg. 229).

Dubois concludes, “Democracy doesn’t end with the right to vote, but it certainly begins there” (pg. 281). Unfortunately, the Nineteenth Amendment brought impossible expectations. According to Dubois, “The length of the battle, the final fury of the opposition, the militancy and determination that it had taken to secure this most basic of rights all inflated expectations and enlarged disappointments beyond what realistically might have been expected in the immediate post-suffrage years. The standard for the impact of the new female voting population was unachievably high” (pg. 283). To this end, “Ultimately it would require the incubation of another feminist movement before the greater promise of woman suffrage could be realized” (pg. 284). Dubois structures each period of time around the stories of individual women, thereby humanizing her story so that it is not simply a narrative of large political movements, but one of people with whom the reader can identify. In this, Suffrage is not simply a history of a movement, but a series of biographies. The work itself will appeal to scholars and would make an excellent addition to both undergraduate and graduate course readings. Her appendices include vital documents, such as the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments, the 1876 Declaration of the Rights of the Women of the United States, and the text of the Nineteenth Amendment. The book would also work well on PhD exam lists.
… (lisätietoja)
 
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DarthDeverell | 2 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Mar 22, 2020 |

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18
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856
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#29,896
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8
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50
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1

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