Book Signing & Reading from Her New Book Suffrage: Women's Long Battle for the Vote Simon & Schuster (February 25, 2020)
Ellen Carol DuBois is one of the nation's leading historians of women's efforts to gain the right to vote. She was educated at Wellesley College and Northwestern University. After teaching at the University at Buffalo for 16 years (during which time she served on Hallwalls' board of directors), she moved to Los Angeles to continue teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles. She retired from UCLA in 2017. Among her many books on "woman suffrage," this, her most recent, published by Simon and Schuster in February 2020, is Suffrage: Women's Long Battle for the Vote. This is the first comprehensive history of the 75-year-long U.S. women's suffrage movement to appear in more than a half century. She has also written about women's rights movements internationally, and is the co-author of the leading textbook in U.S. women's history, Through Women's Eyes: An American History.
About Suffrage: Women's Long Battle for the Vote:
Honoring the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment to the Constitution, this exciting history explores the full scope of the movement to win the vote for women through portraits of its bold leaders and devoted activists.
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.
This presentation, postponed two and a half years years from April 21, 2020 at the onset of the pandemic, is being held now in conjunction with UB's 50th-anniversary celebration of its historic Women's Studies Program.
