Making Their Voices Heard
Mar 02, 2020
4 minutes
Review by Nancy Isenberg
SUFFRAGE: Women’s Long Battle for the Vote
BY ELLEN CAROL DUBOIS
Simon & Schuster, 383 pp., $28
WE AMERICANS LOVE the myths about our nation’s past. We pretend to be a land of unlimited opportunity, despite a painful legacy of discrimination based on the unholy trinity of race, class, and gender. We celebrate abstract notions of natural rights, human liberty, and social equality, even though Americans have routinely embraced deeply inegalitarian ideas of white supremacy, class pedigree, and maternity as women’s destiny.
Take California. In 1850, the new Free Soil state prohibited slavery yet protected peonage (servitude) of Native Americans. After passage of the 15th Amendment, southern states used grandfather clauses, literacy tests, and
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