Sisters: The Lives of America’s Suffragists

Jean H. Baker’s Sisters shows how the personal became political In the fight to grant women civil rights.

They forever changed America: Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frances Willard, Alice Paul. At their revolution’s start in the 1840s, a woman’s right to speak in public was questioned. By its conclusion in 1920, the victory in woman’s suffrage had also encompassed the most fundamental rights of citizenship: the right to control wages, hold property, to contract, to sue, to testify in court. Their struggle was confrontational (women were the first to picket the White House for a political cause) and violent (women were arrested, jailed, and force-fed in prisons). And like every revolutionary before them, their struggle was personal.

For the first time, the eminent historian Jean H. Baker tellingly interweaves these women’s private lives with their public achievements, presenting these revolutionary women in three dimensions, humanized, and marvelously approachable.