Vote!: Women’s Fight for Access to the Ballot Box
Coral Celeste Frazer
Twenty-first Century Books
Published August 6, 2019

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About Vote!: Women’s Fight for Access to the Ballot Box

August 18, 2020, marks the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, which prohibited states and the US government from denying citizens the right to vote on the basis of sex. See how the 70-year-long fight for women’s suffrage was hard won by leaders such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Alice Paul, Carrie Chapman Catt and others.

Learn how their success led into the civil rights and feminist movements of the mid- and late twentieth century, as well as today’s #MeToo, #YesAllWomen, and Black Lives Matter movements. In the face of voter ID laws, voter purges, gerrymandering, and other restrictions, Americans continue to fight for equality in voting rights.

My Review

Reading this book, right now, as Federal officers are deployed in Portland and potentially other places (I am writing this a few weeks before it goes live, so things may have changed) was really strange.

I didn’t know a lot about the fight for women to vote before I’d read this book. Here are some of the things I learned that stood out most:

• Women’s rights and Black rights activists sometimes worked together and sometimes worked against each other. I want to know a lot more about the dialogue between the two groups and people who devoted themselves to one cause at the expense of the other or in opposition to the other.
• Police attacked women’s rights protestors. I don’t know what I imagined those protests looked like, but there was violence.
• The book also points out and spends several chapters talking about the rights of Black and POC women and the fight for their right to vote as well. I hadn’t deeply thought of those as two separate battles before, which really just points up more of my ignorance, honestly.

One of the things I love about this book is that it’s packed with personal stories of the women involved in women’s rights activism. I loved learning the names and approaches of these women. Lucy Stone and Fannie Lou Hamer stand out to me the most. I’d love to learn more about both of them.

August 18 marks the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. If you don’t know a lot about the struggle that preceded it, I recommend this book as a great introduction to the topic.

Content Notes

Recommended for Ages 10 up.

Representation
Follows the stories of women’s rights and civil rights activists.

Profanity/Crude Language Content
Mild profanity used infrequently.

Romance/Sexual Content
None.

Spiritual Content
References to Christian faith as a motivator for some activists.

Violent Content
References to lynchings. Descriptions of police brutality against protestors. Descriptions of force-feeding prisoners who were on hunger strikes.

Drug Content
References to women’s rights groups that also opposed drinking alcohol and protested in front of bars and saloons.

Note: I received a free copy of VOTE!: WOMEN’S FIGHT FOR ACCESS TO THE BALLOT BOX in exchange for my honest review. This post contains affiliate links, which do not cost you anything to use, but which help support the costs of running this blog.