The Woman's Hour

October 15, 2017

Women's battle to secure the vote began in Seneca Falls in 1948 and ended decades later when Tennessee approved the 19th Amendment. Award-winning journalist Weiss chronicles the final fight, pitting suffragists against conservative politicians, business magnates, and the "Antis"--women who feared the vote would undermine the country's moral fiber.

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Starred review from November 6, 2017
Despite the story’s foregone conclusion, historian Weiss (Fruits of Victory) orchestrates a page-turning reconstruction of the last push to ratify the 19th Amendment in Tennessee in 1920. The drama reaches hair-raising heights in the last half of the book as support for the so-called “suffs” falls away under pressure from corporate lobbyists, outraged “antis,” and Tennessee’s unique state constitution. Weiss nimbly organizes a large ensemble of suffragettes, protesters, and politicians, and she smoothly punctuates her scenes of high-stakes action with history of the recent world war and the 70-year battle for legalizing votes for women. Weiss doesn’t flinch from depicting the political machinations on all sides. If suffragette leaders Carrie Catt of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and Sue White of Alice Paul’s Women’s Party get more attention than Josephine Pearson and the antis, it is perhaps because the anti tactics of bribes, threats, intimidation, ruses, liquor, and relentless appeals to racism are less moving than the suffs’ pleas for real democracy. Readers will find in the political landscape of 1920 features familiar today: corporate shaping of legislation, bitter partisanship, and the intense effort by some groups to obstruct what looks from most angles like simple justice. Weiss’s remarkably entertaining work of scholarship provides a thorough and timely examination of a shining moment in the ongoing fight to achieve a more perfect union. Photos.

December 1, 2017
A history of the political battle in Tennessee in 1920 over the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.The approval by the Tennessee legislature would meet the requisite number of states to provide women the vote in all elections. The efforts by women--and plenty of men--to secure universal suffrage date back to the beginning of the Republic, and journalist Weiss (Fruits of Victory: The Woman's Land Army of America in the Great War, 2008) weaves useful historical context throughout the book. But the tight focus on a few weeks in Nashville makes for a compelling narrative, marred only by an overabundance of detail about the many battles between the suffragists and their opponents. What strengthens the narrative are the author's minibiographies of primary characters in this "furious campaign"--Carrie Chapman Catt ("it was [her] job--more precisely, her life's mission--to guide American women to the promised land of political freedom"), Alice Paul, Josephine Pearson, and Presidents Warren G. Harding and Woodrow Wilson--as well as of the less-well-known players (mostly Tennessee politicians and lobbyists). Pearson is the most visible of the women who opposed suffrage, believing that it posed a danger "to the American family, white supremacy, states' rights, and cherished southern traditions." Perhaps the most famous of the anti-suffragists was muckraking journalist Ida Tarbell, whom Weiss chronicles briefly. The author clearly explains how the opposition by women--a stance that will surprise some modern readers--derived partly from their desire to be sheltered from politics, partly from the negative influence of men in their lives, and partly from racism (providing ballots to white women would open the floodgates of black women voters).Although the outcome of the Tennessee drama is obvious--after all, we all know the amendment was ratified--Weiss expertly builds the suspense, and the closeness of the eventual vote by the Tennessee legislature adds to the drama.

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