We also learn about the New Yorker Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, who in 1912 rode a white horse as she led members of her Chinese and Chinese-American community in one of the biggest suffrage parades in U.S. history. And there is an excellent section on the suffragist and writer Frances Ellen Watkins Harper — one of the first African-American women in the United States to publish short stories and novels — who said, “I do not believe that white women are dew-drops just exhaled from the skies. I think that like men they may be divided into three classes, the good, the bad and the indifferent. The good would vote according to their convictions and principles; the bad, as dictated by prejudice or malice; and the indifferent will vote on the strongest side of the question, with the winning party.” Could there be a more vivid description of the gendered, racial and political dynamics of our contemporary moment, a century after the 19th Amendment, and two and a half months before a presidential election in which a Black woman is on the ballot for vice president for the first time in this nation’s history?
Reading the lushly illustrated chapters about the Mexican suffragist Jovita Idár and the Dakota Sioux writer and activist Zitkála-Sá, as well as about Elizabeth Piper Ensley, who in the 1890s fought for racial integration within the suffrage movement in the Western states and wrote, “Women’s work in politics must be like that of the chambered nautilus, the spiral animal, which after completing one house or shell proceeds to make another and so is constantly advancing,” I felt myself wanting more. Not from this volume, which offers lots, but from others.
These books make me hungry for more like them, for children and adults. I want this history offered in as many forms and with as much energy and dedication as the history of this nation’s white men over the centuries.
The purely heroic, bang-pow version of affirmative women’s history is the stuff I fear younger readers will reflexively rear back from, reasonably question and ultimately reject. The complex, challenging texts that provoke curiosity and frustration seem more likely to drive kids of every gender, race and identity to want to read more, learn more, write more of their own history and, most crucially, jump into America’s ongoing, jumbled, urgent fight for full enfranchisement.
Also of Note: “Bold & Brave: Ten Heroes Who Won Women the Right to Vote,” by Kirsten Gillibrand and Maira Kalman (Random House, 40 pp., $7.99; ages 6 to 9) is now out in paperback, and “The Suffragist Playbook: Your Guide to Changing the World,” by Lucinda Robb and Rebecca Roberts (Candlewick, 160 pp., $15.99; ages 12 and up), by the daughters of Lynda Robb and Cokie Roberts, will be published in September.
Rebecca Traister is a writer for New York magazine and author of “Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger.”
