#GAReads | The Imperfect, Unfinished Work of Women's Suffrage
“The Imperfect, Unfinished Work of Women's Suffrage”:
Wagner frames “The Women’s Suffrage Movement” as a revision of the history of suffrage as it was written by wealthy white women such as those Louisine Havemeyer knew. Susan Ware’s “Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote” (Harvard) accomplishes a similar goal with a different method. While Wagner uses primary sources—sermons, legislative documents, party platforms, poems, eulogies, diary entries, and letters—to recover lost contributions to the women’s-suffrage movement, Ware’s book is a work of material-culture studies, which attempts to enliven the past by looking at the things that survive it. Ware pairs biographies of suffragists with objects like saddlebags, tree plaques, jewelry, political cartoons, parade programs, and statues.