Customer Reviews

With Courage and Cloth: Winning the Fight for a Woman's Right to Vote

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The publications of the National Geographic Society encompass some of the finest non-fiction titles for kids on the planet. Year after year this company churns out remarkable historical, scientific, and cultural tomes that are not only readable, but also lively, informative, and well-researched. "With Courage and With Cloth", one of the very few children's books to delve into women's suffrage in any depth, is no exception. It offers amazing information that everyone should know, and so few do. Unfortunately, it suffers from its format. While the text is brilliant and the pictures sublime, the layout of the book will undoubtedly turn off some readers, while those seeking information about the photographs will be up a tree. A fine fine book that could've used some fine fine tuning.

Author Ann Bausum has this to say about American history. Learning about history in school, "I knew all about Washington and Lee, Marshall and Eisenhower. History seemed to be a progression of stories about men and wars and conquest". How much did any of us learn about women getting the vote in school? As I recall, it consisted of one or two sentences in a textbook amounting to something like, "And then in 1920, women were given the right to vote under the 19th Amendment". Goodnight, everybody! The real story behind that teeny little sentence, however, is immense. It's a story that spans more than seventy-two years and was won with literal blood, sweat, and tears. Through this book we meet great heroes like Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Sojourner Truth. We hear about how the suffragists repeatedly split into two different factions and how these factions worked separately to bring about an amendment to the constitution. We see the heroism of the women (dealing with particularly disgusting forced feedings, beatings at the hands of sailors, and rat infested cells) and witness their less than shining moments as well (in regards to their treatment of African-American women). By the time the amendment comes to a vote and has to be ratified by thirty-six states, the book has become an edge-of-your-seat thriller. You may know the ending already, but it's a heckuva ride getting there.

Bausum writes in a style befitting of the heroes she's commending. She never shies away from the movement's prejudices and problems, but at the same time it's clear that these women were particularly exceptional. The book even goes so far as to include a section on the Equal Rights Amendment (something I can honestly say I have never before witnessed in a kids' text). On top of that you have profiles of all the major players, a chronology of events, a resource guide, sources and acknowledgements, a bibliography, an index, and a list of books about the suffragists that I spent the better part of last night copying down so that I could read them later. Obviously, I would have liked there to have been some more sections on the African-American women and their take on suffrage. There's an excellent passage quoting Sojourner Truth's, "And Ain't I A Woman" speech and some mild references to racism in the south and within the movement, but these are kind of glossed over.

The layout of the book is the only real problem with it. The photographs that dot almost every page are accompanied by pale light brown captions that will be almost impossible to read if your child has less than stellar eyesight. Also, some of these pictures are stunning or shocking to the point that you'd love to learn more about them. Unfortunately, nine times out of ten the images you see here are given brief three to four line captions and then never mentioned in the text. It makes for slightly frustrating reading. The colors of the book (purple, brown, and white) are lovely, but don't quite make up for the difficult-to-read-text.

But that's neither here nor there. The fact of the matter is that the book fills a very great need. No library in the country is complete without it. If you've children who considers themselves to be experts on American history, brother they don't know nuthin' until they've read "With Courage and With Cloth". A remarkable creation and a necessary read. Perhaps even moreso for adults.

Richie's Picks: WITH COURAGE AND CLOTH: WINNING THE FIGHT FOR A WOMAN'S RIGHT TO VOTE by Ann Bausum, National Geographic, September 2004, 112 pages, ISBN: 0-7922-7647-7

"...a discussion of the rights of animals would be regarded with more complacency by many...than would a discussion of the rights of women."
--Frederick Douglass speaking about the public's response to the Seneca Falls women's convention of 1848 which he had attended.

"Though we adore men individually
we agree that as a group they're rather stupid."
--"Sister Suffragette" from Walt Disney's Mary Poppins.

The part of the story that they left out of the Mary Poppins movie is when Mrs. Banks is abused by a mob of men and young boys and arrested for causing a disturbance even though she and her sisters-in-arms are quietly assembled--holding banners that quote the US Constitution and the current President's own words--and it's the men who are causing all the disturbance. They also left out the part where Mrs. Banks is abusively dragged into a dark prison, thrown in with rats, common criminals, blankets that get laundered once a year, and a bucket for a toilet. Nor do they show prison employees shoving the hose up Mrs. Banks's nose to force feed her when she decides to go on a hunger strike.

" 'These women have raised neither hand nor voice,' wrote one female reporter who eventually stood on the picket line herself and was arrested. 'They speak no word and do not attempt to defend themselves if attacked,' she explained."

But those omissions and discrepancies could be attributed to the fact that Mary Poppins takes place in jolly, old England, and it was in America during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson that all of these abuses were being endured by the informed women who had resolve to organize and question how the US could be fighting for democracy in Europe while simultaneously denying democratic participation--the Vote--to women at home.

Being able to speak freely is what America is all about, right?

But students of American history know that there are times when Freedom of Speech seems to be reserved for only SOME Americans, those who agree with the government.

"Now, however, the growing nationalism of wartime made such protests seem, as reported in newspapers, 'unwomanly,' 'unpatriotic,' 'dangerous,' 'undesirable,' even 'treasonable.' "

(Sound familiar?)

The central focus of WITH COURAGE AND CLOTH: WINNING THE FIGHT FOR A WOMAN'S RIGHT TO VOTE is on the years of widespread activism and protest directly preceding the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. And it is during those final years of a fight that began in earnest back in Seneca Falls in 1848 that we so clearly see the parallels between the suffering of those brave Americans involved in the Women's Suffrage Movement and the violence and repression faced by those in the Civil Rights Movement; those images that so many of us watched either on television or firsthand; those images that so many of us will never forget.

Another parallel that I found interesting involves the fact that:

"The period from 1896 to 1910 (during which no states adopted woman suffrage) became known as the 'doldrums' of the movement. The wind seemed to go out of the sails of the cause. No matter how hard suffragists argued in support of votes for women, they could not muster the momentum to overcome the anitsuffragists, or 'Antis,' who opposed them."

It would seem to me not to be coincidental that the same year that the US Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that "separate but equal" was permissible, leading to baseball owners successfully conspiring to eliminate people of color from the Major Leagues for half a century, and leading to the growth of all those other insidious tentacles of apartheid that spread across America and took hold of it, that American women would face a similar fate at the hands of white paternalism.

"It's grand to be an Englishman in 1910
King Edward's on the throne;
it's the age of men"
--"The Life I Lead," from Disney's Mary Poppins

It is during this period that several award-winning historic novels dealing with oppressed young women are set: Jennifer Donnelly's A NORTHERN LIGHT and Jennifer Holms's OUR ONLY MAY AMELIA quickly come to mind. To read that scene in A NORTHERN LIGHT where the well-educated "Miss Wilcox" is offered the choice by her husband of either complying with his demands or being institutionalized as mentally unfit provides an understanding of what kind of power men wielded over women. WITH COURAGE AND CLOTH will make a great companion for these books.

Thank goodness for the Senator we meet in WITH COURAGE AND CLOTH, a man who listened to his mother and allowed this particular phase of injustice by the minority of the American population against the majority to come to an end.

Of course, eighty-four years (and 15 white male Presidents) later, some readers will surely pause to wonder why there remain such wide disparities between the portion of the population that is female (the majority) and that meager portion of America's decision making elite (President, Congress, state legislators and governors, top jurists, CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, presidents of major universities, generals, and presidential advisors) who are women.

That's a debate we won't be seeing tonight.
(written the day of the first Presidential debate of 2004)

This book was a tremendously interesting read. We all remember the stories in high school history class about the Suffragettes marching with placards to secure the vote for women. What we didn't learn was how horribly they were treated and that it took 72 years to secure the vote. This book should be read by every high school girl so that she realizes what these women went through to make sure voting is a right for women as well as men.

Great book with primary sources to teach intermediate elementary students the history of women's suffrage. There are a few minor moments where subjective language is used to paint a picture of certain historical figures, but otherwise a fair and intriguing read for parents and students alike.

I highly recommend this book to all women just to learn how women were treated in their fight to be enfranchised and allowed to vote under the 14th amendment. Very little is written about the suffrage movement when I was in school in the 1970's. Men treated women as second class citizens from beginning of time and over 60 years later we are still not treated equal today. Our government gives business's and companies tax breaks to ship jobs to China giving the majority of Chinese women jobs just to make the almighty business exces wealthier. Why don't they think about all the jobless women in the USA struggling to make a living.