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Susan Ware's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Susan Ware recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Susan Ware's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1
Originally published in 2000, The Right to Vote was widely hailed as a magisterial account of the evolution of suffrage from the American Revolution to the end of the twentieth century. In this revised and updated edition, Keyssar carries the story forward, from the disputed presidential contest of 2000 through the 2008 campaign and the election of Barack Obama. The Right to Vote is a sweeping reinterpretation of American political history as well as a meditation on the meaning of democracy in contemporary American life.
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Recommended by Susan Ware, and 1 others.

Susan WareThis is about the only comprehensive history of the right to vote. He looks at the racial dynamics of voting after the Civil War and the demand for restricting immigrants’ access to the ballot box through literacy tests. This book is a critical read because it reminds us that voting rights are always contested. It puts the suffrage story, the story of women organizing to get the vote, into the... (Source)

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2
"Both a page-turning drama and an inspiration for every reader" -- Hillary Rodham Clinton

Soon to be a major television event, the nail-biting climax of one of the greatest political battles in American history: the ratification of the constitutional amendment that granted women the right to vote.

Nashville, August 1920. Thirty-five states have approved the Nineteenth Amendment, granting women the right to vote; one last state--Tennessee--is needed for women's voting rights to be the law of the land. The suffragists face vicious opposition from politicians,...
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Recommended by Susan Ware, and 1 others.

Susan WareThis 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. (Source)

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3
The place of women's rights in African American public culture has been an enduring question, one that has long engaged activists, commentators, and scholars. All Bound Up Together explores the roles black women played in their communities' social movements and the consequences of elevating women into positions of visibility and leadership. Martha Jones reveals how, through the nineteenth century, the "woman question" was at the core of movements against slavery and for civil rights.

Unlike white women activists, who often created their own institutions separate from men,...
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Recommended by Susan Ware, and 1 others.

Susan WareMartha Jones’s book All Bound Up Together is not specifically about black suffragists. African American women’s activism was much broader. All Bound Up Together describes an interlocking network in which activists are never just out for women’s issues; activism is always part of what we now call an intersectional vision, which links race, class, and sex. (Source)

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4
The massive size of the original six-volume History of Woman Suffrage has likely limited its impact on the lives of the women who benefitted from the efforts of the pioneering suffragists.  By collecting miscellanies like state suffrage reports and speeches of every sort without interpretation or restraint, the set was often neglected as impenetrable. 
In their Concise History of Woman Suffrage, Mari Jo Buhle and Paul Buhle have revitalized this classic text by carefully selecting from among its best material.  The eighty-two chosen documents, now including interpretative...
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Recommended by Susan Ware, and 1 others.

Susan WareThe foundational text for the creation of the myth of Seneca Falls was written by three suffragists, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage. It’s remarkable to read, but you don’t necessarily want to read 6,000 pages of it. That’s why Mari Jo Buhle and Paul Buhle put together this Concise History of Woman Suffrage. It contains highlights and gives you a sense of the whole. (Source)

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5
The story of how the women's rights movement began at the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 is a cherished American myth. The standard account credits founders such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucretia Mott with defining and then leading the campaign for women's suffrage. In her provocative new history, Lisa Tetrault demonstrates that Stanton, Anthony, and their peers gradually created and popularized this origins story during the second half of the nineteenth century in response to internal movement dynamics as well as the racial politics of memory after the Civil War. The... more
Recommended by Susan Ware, and 1 others.

Susan WareThe Myth of Seneca Falls brilliantly shows that Seneca Falls is not the only place to start the story—there are many others. For instance, you could start the story in 1832 with an African American woman named Mariah Stewart, who spoke about women’s rights in public for the first time. (Source)

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