Suffrage

With this first scholarly biography of Anna Howard Shaw (1847-1919), Trisha Franzen sheds new light on an important woman suffrage leader who has too often been overlooked and misunderstood.

During the British women’s suffrage campaign of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women wrote plays to convert others to their cause; they wrote essays to justify their militant actions; and they wrote fiction and poetry about their prison experiences.

"A political combat memoir like no other, suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt takes us to the front lines of the Votes for Women battlefields — in the states and in Congress — as American women fight for the franchise. With candor and flashes of wry humor, Catt offers sharp insights into the social, political, and economic forces arrayed against her cause, revealing the strategies that finally brought the suffragists' seven-decade campaign to dramatic victory. Woman Suffrage and Politics is not only a fascinating firsthand account of a major civil rights struggle, but a valuable guidebook for today’s political activists." — Elaine Weiss, author of The Woman's Hour