Reading My Way to The 19th Amendment
Like many of us, I had plans for the hundredth anniversary of the 19th Amendment. One of those plans was to run a series of blog posts about the suffrage movement in July and August. Then my life took a sharp turn: first I wrote a history book for kids in thirty days and then headed off to the Wisconsin State Archives to do research.Instead of lots of blog posts, I gave you no blog posts.
I’ve just finished three out of four weeks of fishing in the archives. (If you want to know more about my experience there, check out the latest issue of my newsletter. Since I’ve got a couple of days in which to catch my breath before I head out again, I thought I’d share some of the suffrage-related books on my shelves, with links to a few earlier blog posts related to the books. Here we go:
April Young Bennett. Ask a Suffragist: Stories and Wisdom from America’s First Feminists.
Ellen Carol Dubois. Suffrage: Women’s Long Battle for the Vote.
Kimberly A. Hamlin. Free Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener.
Theresa Kaminski. Dr. Mary Walker’s Civil War.
Mike Kendall and A. D’Amico. Amazons, Abolitionists, and Activists: A Graphic History of Women’s Fight for Their Rights.
Nancy B. Kennedy. Women Win the Vote: 19 for the 19th Amendment
Brooke Kroeger. The Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote.
Allison K. Lange. Picturing Political Power: Images in the Women’s Suffrage Movement.
Kate Clarke Lemay. Votes for Women! A Portrait of Persistence. (This is the catalog for the Smithsonian exhibit of the same name. )
Obviously there are many more good books on the history of the 19th amendment, but this should get you started.
Please let me know if there are other books related to the women’s suffrage movement and the 19th amendment that you would recommend.
In the meantime, I have some research to do.
Stranger in the Shogun’s City
One of the major challenges historians face when writing about the lives of non-elite women of the past is the absence of sources. Sources written by men that describe their lives are rare. Those written by the women themselves are rarer yet.
Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World, by historian Amy Stanley, demonstrates how rich history can be when such sources are available.
The project began when Stanley became fascinated with a family archive that included dozens of letters written in early nineteenth century Japan.by a rebellious woman named Tsuneno and the letters (and legal documents) created by her family in response. Together, these letters created a rare picture of the life an unconventional, non-elite woman, written in her own words.
Born in 1804 in a rural village, Tsuneno was the daughter of a Buddhist priest. She tried to settle into the traditional (and relatively privileged) life that her family expected of her, but it didn’t take. After three divorces and faced with another arranged marriage, she ran away to Edo (now Tokyo), then one of the largest cities of the world. Her life in Edo was always hard and often scandalous by the standards of her family and society. She made horrible decisions. She moved from tenement to tenement, took menial jobs that didn’t pay enough to support her, and married, divorced, and re-married a violent man from her home region. Her life can be summed up in a single line from one of her letters: “I ended up in so much trouble.”
Stanley places Tsuneno firmly in her historical context, creating a multi-layered picture of life in Japan in the decades before it was forcibly “opened” to the West by Commodore Perry’s fleet in 1854. Stranger in the Shogun’s City is a vivid and often lyrical portrait not only of Tsuneno, but of Edo, the city she loved.
Most of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers
Gone Fishing
I’m up to my knees in the rushing waters of history right now. Once I climb out, dry off, and have a reviving shot of whiskey or three, I’ll be back in here in the Margins with new stories. I promise.
Leave the light on for me.