The single best history of the US suffrage movement
This recent paperback edition of Century of Struggle, Eleanor Flexner's classic history of women's suffrage and the work to expand women's rights, has a splendid new introduction by her friend and collaborator Ellen Fitzpatrick, who relates the major events in Flexner's own life to Flexner's deep understanding of the complex social and political problem confronting 19th- and early 20th-century American suffragists. There is no better account than Flexner's of the dogged determination of US women to achieve their political aims, or of the genius of their political inventiveness in a time in which both law and custom were against women's full participation in civic life. The achievement of the vote for women was extraordinarily difficult, infinitely more so than most people realize. In her own preface to Century of Struggle, Eleanor Flexner quotes from Carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Rogers Schuler: "Hundreds of women gave the accumulated possibilities of an entire lifetime, thousands gave years of their lives, hundreds of thousands gave constant interest and such aid as they could. It was a continuous, seemingly endless chain of activity. Young suffragists who helped forge the last links in that chain were not born when it began. Old suffragists who forged the first links were dead when it ended . . . It is doubtful if any man, even among suffrage men, ever realized what the suffrage struggle came to mean to women before the end was allowed in America
