The Last Suffragist Standing

"Canada's vibrant suffrage movement was a complicated story of achievement and loss. The Last Suffragist Standing is an unprecedented study of a pioneering Canadian suffragist and politician, a New Woman who tested Canadian democracy. A rich product of archival and public sources, this biography of Laura Marshall Jamieson (1882-1964) opens a window into the political and social landscape of the time. Veronica Strong-Boag chronicles Jamieson's life from orphaned child of marginal Ontario farmers to member of British Columbia's Legislative Assembly and Vancouver city councillor. The last suffragist in Canada to be elected to a provincial or federal legislature, Jamieson embraced issues such as factory labor conditions, minimum wage, feminist pacifism, housing, municipal franchise, and employment equality throughout her six decades of activism. Jamieson's political radicalism was forged by the suffragist movement and the Great Depression, whetted by her exposure to mainstream and fringe activist groups, and tempered during her tenures in office. Strong-Boag's meticulous research and deep knowledge of the history of the women's movement and Canadian politics turn this compelling account of a woman's life into an illuminating work on the history of feminism, socialism, internationalism, and activism in Canada"--

The Last Suffragist Standing is an unprecedented study of a pioneering politician, a New Woman who tested Canadian democracy. Laura Marshall Jamieson (1882–1964) was the last suffragist in Canada to be elected to a provincial or federal legislature, and her biography opens a window onto the political and social landscape of her time. She embraced issues such as minimum wage, feminist pacifism, housing, and employment equality throughout her six decades of activism. Strong-Boag’s deep knowledge of the history of the women’s movement and Canadian politics turns this compelling account of a woman’s life into an illuminating work on the history of feminism, socialism, internationalism, and activism in Canada.

"British Columbia is often overlooked in the national story of women's struggle for political equality. This book rights that wrong. A Great Revolutionary Wave follows the propaganda campaigns undertaken by suffrage organizations and traces the role of working-class women in the fight for political equality. It demonstrates the connections between provincial and British suffragists, and examines how racial exclusion and Indigenous dispossession shaped arguments and tactics for enfranchisement. Lara Campbell rethinks the complex legacy of suffrage and traces the successes and limitations of women's historical fight for political equality. That legacy remains relevant today as Canadians continue to grapple with the meaning of justice, inclusion, and equality."--

In 1844, seven widows dared to cast ballots in an election in Canada West, a display of feminist effrontery that was quickly punished: the government struck a law excluding women from the vote. It would be seven decades before women regained voting rights in Ontario. Our Voices Must Be Heard explores Ontario’s suffrage history, examining its ideals and failings, its daring supporters and thunderous enemies, and its blind spots on matters of race and class. It looks at how and why suffragists from around the province joined an international movement they called “the great cause.” This is the second volume in the seven-part Women’s Suffrage and the Struggle for Democracy series.

The story of how and why a group of prominent and influential men in New York City and beyond came together to help women gain the right to vote. Finalist for the 2018 Sally and Morris Lasky Prize presented by the Center for Political History at Lebanon Valley College The Suffragents is the untold story of how some of New York’s most powerful men formed the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage, which grew between 1909 and 1917 from 150 founding members into a force of thousands across thirty-five states. Brooke Kroeger explores the formation of the League and the men who instigated it to involve themselves with the suffrage campaign, what they did at the behest of the movement’s female leadership, and why. She details the National American Woman Suffrage Association’s strategic decision to accept their organized help and then to deploy these influential new allies as suffrage foot soldiers, a role they accepted with uncommon grace. Led by such luminaries as Oswald Garrison Villard, John Dewey, Max Eastman, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and George Foster Peabody, members of the League worked the streets, the stage, the press, and the legislative and executive branches of government. In the process, they helped convince waffling politicians, a dismissive public, and a largely hostile press to support the women’s demand. Together, they swayed the course of history. Brooke Kroeger is Professor at the New York University Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. Her books include Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist and Fannie: The Talent for Success of Writer Fannie Hurst.

Honoring the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment to the Constitution, this “indispensable” book (Ellen Chesler, Ms. magazine) explores the full scope of the movement to win the vote for women through portraits of its bold leaders and devoted activists. Distinguished historian Ellen Carol DuBois begins in the pre-Civil War years with foremothers Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Sojurner Truth as she “meticulously and vibrantly chronicles” (Booklist) the links of the woman suffrage movement to the abolition of slavery. After the Civil War, Congress granted freed African American men the right to vote but not white and African American women, a crushing disappointment. DuBois shows how suffrage leaders persevered through the Jim Crow years into the reform era of Progressivism. She introduces new champions Carrie Chapman Catt and Alice Paul, who brought the fight to the 20th century, and she shows how African American women, led by Ida B. Wells-Barnett, demanded voting rights even as white suffragists ignored them. DuBois explains how suffragists built a determined coalition of moderate lobbyists and radical demonstrators in forging a strategy of winning voting rights in crucial states to set the stage for securing suffrage for all American women in the Constitution. In vivid prose, DuBois describes suffragists’ final victories in Congress and state legislatures, culminating in the last, most difficult ratification, in Tennessee. “Ellen DuBois enables us to appreciate the drama of the long battle for women’s suffrage and the heroism of many of its advocates” (Eric Foner, author of The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution). DuBois follows women’s efforts to use their voting rights to win political office, increase their voting strength, and pass laws banning child labor, ensuring maternal health, and securing greater equality for women. Suffrage: Women’s Long Battle for the Vote is a “comprehensive history that deftly tackles intricate political complexities and conflicts and still somehow read with nail-biting suspense,” (The Guardian) and is sure to become the authoritative account of one of the great episodes in the history of American democracy.

They left in the middle of the night—often carrying little more than the knowledge to follow the North Star. Between 1830 and the end of the Civil War in 1865, an estimated one hundred thousand slaves became passengers on the Underground Railroad, a journey of untold hardship, in search of freedom. In Through Darkness to Light: Photographs Along the Underground Railroad, Jeanine Michna-Bales presents a remarkable series of images following a route from the cotton plantations of central Louisiana, through the cypress swamps of Mississippi and the plains of Indiana, north to the Canadian border— a path of nearly fourteen hundred miles. The culmination of a ten-year research quest, Through Darkness to Light imagines a journey along the Underground Railroad as it might have appeared to any freedom seeker. Framing the powerful visual narrative is an introduction by Michna-Bales; a foreword by noted politician, pastor, and civil rights activist Andrew J. Young; and essays by Fergus M. Bordewich, Robert F. Darden, and Eric R. Jackson.

Suffrage at 100 looks at women's engagement in US electoral politics and government over the one hundred years since the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. In the 2018 midterm elections, 102 women were elected to the House and 14 to the Senate—a record for both bodies. And yet nearly a century after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, the notion of congressional gender parity by 2020—a stated goal of the National Women's Political Caucus at the time of its founding in 1971—remains a distant ideal. In Suffrage at 100, Stacie Taranto and Leandra Zarnow bring together twenty-two scholars to take stock of women's engagement in electoral politics over the past one hundred years. This is the first wide-ranging collection to historically examine women's full political engagement in and beyond electoral office since they gained a constitutional right to vote. The book explores why women's access to, and influence on, political power remains frustratingly uneven, particularly for women of color and queer women. Examining how women have acted collectively and individually, both within and outside of electoral and governmental channels, the book moves from the front lines of community organizing to the highest glass ceiling. Essays touch on • labor and civil rights • education • environmentalism • enfranchisement and voter suppression • conservatism vs. liberalism • indigeneity and transnationalism • LGBTQ and personal politics • Pan-Asian, Chicana, and black feminisms • commemoration and public history • and much more. Contributors: Melissa Estes Blair, Eileen Boris, Marisela R. Chávez, Claire Delahaye, Nicole Eaton, Liette Gidlow, Holly Miowak Guise (Iñupiaq), Emily Suzanne Johnson, Dean J. Kotlowski, Monica L. Mercado, Johanna Neuman, Kathleen Banks Nutter, Katherine Parkin, Ellen G. Rafshoon, Bianca Rowlett, Sarah B. Rowley, Ana Stevenson, Barbara Winslow, Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Nancy Beck Young