Women’s Suffrage Centennial
were blocked by poll taxes and
other obstacles until the Voting
Rights Act of 1965 prohibited
racial discrimination. Even
today, as the idea of universal
suffrage is celebrated, the reality
is that each American’s ability to
vote still depends on who they
are and where they live.
“It’s not my anniversary,” says
Mikki Kendall, a writer whose
subjects include the intersection
of feminism and race. She has
two books about women’s polit-
ical engagement coming out in
the next few months: Amazons, Abolitionists, and Activists (Ten
Speed, Nov.), a sweeping graphic history of women’s rights
illustrated by A. D’Amico, and Hood Feminism: Notes from the
Women That a Movement Forgot (Viking, Feb. 2020). “Not all
women got rights at the same time.”
Dodson is familiar with this sentiment. “I’ve seen too many
articles saying, ‘Oh, we really shouldn’t celebrate these people’
and, ‘Black people don’t have anything to celebrate,’ ” she says.
“That’s not true. There are too many black women who worked
very hard for [suffrage]. They wouldn’t have fought that hard
if it didn’t mean something.”
Dodson’s strategy is to “start talking about the things that
pioneering black women did do,” she says, citing as one
example Maria Miller Stewart, a free black woman who, in the
1830s, became the first American woman to leave records of
her public speeches about political issues such as abolition.
“The whole women’s movement was an outgrowth of the abo-
litionist movement,” Dodson says.
The names most commonly associated
with women’s suffrage are Susan B.
Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
who organized what’s known as the first
women’s rights convention, in Seneca
Falls, N.Y., in 1848. That moment, many
decades in the making, kicked off a
72-year campaign for constitutional pro-
tection. A schism in the movement in the
late 1890s stemmed from the fact that
many members, including Stanton and
Anthony, prioritized the rights of white
women above those of African-American
women and men.
Here, we speak with authors and edi-
tors whose books examine this legacy, and
discuss how setbacks and missteps in the
battle for suffrage inform the current
political and social moment.Rock the Vote
“I had been taught very little in school—
shockingly little—about the lengthy,
complex, fraught movement for women’s
suffrage in this country,” Rebecca Traister
wrote in a 2018 article for The Cut,
naming six books that inspired her then-
new title Good and Mad: The Revolutionary
Power of Women’s Anger. “And I often findThe Superwoman
and Other
Writings by
Miriam Michelson
"Thanks to Harrison-Kahan
for bringing to light in this
extraordinary book a body
of work that honors the
one-hundredth anniversary
of women getting the vote,
and introduces all of us
today to a journalist whose
writing helped make
suffrage possible."- Eleanor Clift, Daily Beast columnist