Century of Struggle
by Eleanor Flexner
Buy on Amazon"The book you are about to read tells the story of one of the great social movements in American history. The struggle for women's voting rights was one of the longest, most successful, and in some respects most radical challenges ever posed to the American system of electoral politics ... It is difficult to imagine now a time when women were largely removed by custom, practice, and law from the formal political rights and responsibilities that supported and sustained the nation's young democracy ... For sheer drama the suffrage movement has few equals in modern American political history."--Back cover.
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"This was first published in 1959 and was one of the first books I read on the history of women. Her approach went far beyond a narrow consideration of how women got the vote at local or federal level. Instead she looked at all varieties of women’s activism including trade unionism, African-American women’s struggle, the middle-class club woman movement, and so on. In so doing she showed how to connect the economic, social, political and cultural dynamics that finally resulted in women obtaining Federal suffrage. This book was critical because she opened up all these topics and it took about ten years before women began really researching some of the topics that she covered in general, but it was a real eye-opener of a book. She was very much one of the forerunners in that field."
The History of American Women · fivebooks.com