Roses and Radicals: The Epic Story of How American Women Won the Right to Vote

ROSES AND RADICALS tells the story of the long struggle to give American women the right to vote. It began in 1848 after a small group of women decided it was time to organize a "public meeting for protest and discussion": a Women's Rights Convention. Led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony ("I forged the thunderbolts," said Stanton, "and she fired them"), the movement that grew out of the convention would be met with disbelief and outrage at the very suggestion that the female sex might have the capacity to cast a vote. After the Civil War, the movement would survive a nasty split over whether the fight for African-American voting rights was being prioritized over the vote for women. Anthony and Stanton would actually oppose the 15th Amendment, which gave the vote to African-American men. By the 1870s, the slow march of states granting women suffrage began, but the opposition was fierce and often violent. Women were arrested, jailed, and sometimes physically assaulted by their jailers. But they persisted, and in May 1919, Congress passed the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote in every state ... but only if that amendment was ratified by 36 states. In August 1920, it came down to a 24-year-old legislator in Tennessee, who arrived for the vote carrying a letter from his mother in his pocket. He voted "Aye," and the 19th Amendment became law.