Historian Ellen Carol DuBois will join a live online discussion of her new book, “Suffrage: Women’s Long Battle for the Vote,” at 5 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 15, presented by the History Book Festival.
Commemorating the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, this book explores the movement to win the vote for women through portraits of its bold leaders and devoted activists, beginning before the Civil War with Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth. It continues through the turbulent postwar years and into the 20th century with voting champions Carrie Chapman Catt, Alice Paul and Ida B. Wells-Barnett.
Suffragists built a coalition of moderate lobbyists and radical demonstrators who forged a strategy of winning voting rights in crucial states, setting the stage for securing suffrage for all American women in the Constitution. The suffragists’ final victories in Congress and state legislatures, and the last, most difficult ratification, in Tennessee, are vividly described.
Ellen Carol DuBois is a distinguished research professor at UCLA, where she taught women’s history. She is co-editor of the anthology “Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in Women’s History” and co-author of “Through Women’s Eyes: An American History with Documents.”
Anne M. Boylan, professor emerita of History and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Delaware, will interview DuBois. Boylan is the contract historian for the Congressional Women’s Suffrage Centennial Commission. Her book “Votes for Delaware Women” is forthcoming from the University of Delaware Press.
This Zoom event is free but registration is required. To register, go to historybookfestival.org and click on 2020 Events.
The 2020 Virtual History Book Festival is presented in cooperation with the Lewes Public Library and sponsored by Delaware Humanities and the Lee Ann Wilkinson Group.
Copies of “Suffrage” with signed archival bookplates are available from the festival’s official bookseller, Browseabout Books in Rehoboth Beach. Biblion in Lewes also has copies. To borrow copies from the Lewes Public Library, call 302-645-2733 or email lewes.library@gmail.com to arrange for pickup.
