The Woman's Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote

"This is a really good read by Elaine Weiss. It makes the battles for ratification in Tennessee, the last state that was needed to ratify in August of 1920, into a page-turner. There was a lot going on in the six weeks of Tennessee history that she writes about. She tells the story by focusing on three women, using them as the ‘through threads’ to a huge amount of history. One of the figures she focuses on was the head of the mainstream suffrage organization, Carrie Chapman Catt. A second is Sue Shelton White, an activist with the National Women’s Party, which is the rival of the mainstream group. And the third is a woman named Josephine Pearson, who is the leader of the Tennessee anti-suffrage movement. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Weiss is able to use those three stories to examine, in detail, this moment, which was critical to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. In August of 1920, they were running out of time to pass the amendment in time for women to be able to vote in the upcoming 1920 presidential election. People think women winning the right to vote was inevitable. And they seem to think of course states would ratify the amendment. Well, it was a battle, with backroom deals and dramatic last-minute changes. The field of feminist history has uncovered that even when women didn’t have the vote or couldn’t hold office, they still acted to influence political outcomes. Once you begin to look at the ways in which women exercise political power, through their churches, through voluntary groups, through their communities, you begin to see that this sense that women haven’t ever accomplished anything politically is false. “To get the vote, women had to be incredibly politically savvy” To get the vote, women had to be incredibly politically savvy. They needed to learn how to lobby, raise money, get publicity, set up organizations, organize petition drives and mobilize male voters. Throughout American history—during the Revolution, as abolitionists, as Civil War wives and mothers—women were acting politically. The suffrage movement is an excellent example of that."