Bridget Quinn - She Votes: How U.S. Women Won Suffrage, and What Happened Next

FOR ZUZU
REBEL GIRL & QUEEN OF MY WORLD

BUT WELL HAVE OUR RIGHTS; SEE IF WE DONT: AND YOU CANT STOP US FROM THEM; SEE IF YOU CAN.
SOJOURNER TRUTH

PROCEEDINGS OF THE WOMANS RIGHTS CONVENTION HELD AT THE BROADWAY TABERNACLE, IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK, ON TUESDAY AND WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 6TH AND 7TH, 1853.

SHE DID NOT MIND WORKING.
SHE WORKED TO CULTIVATE HER VOICE.
GERTRUDE STEIN

MISS FURR AND MISS SKEENE, 1922

Text copyright 2020 by Bridget Quinn.
Foreword copyright 2020 by Nell Irvin Painter.
Images copyright 2020 by Chronicle Books LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

ISBN 9781452173399 (epub, mobi)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Quinn, Bridget, author. | Painter, Nell Irvin, author of foreword.
Title: She votes : how U.S. women won suffrage, and what happened next / by Bridget Quinn ; with a foreword by Nell Painter ; with illustrations by 100 women artists.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019047183 | ISBN 9781452173160 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: WomenSuffrageUnited StatesHistoryJuvenile literature. | SuffragistsUnited StatesJuvenile literature.
Classification: LCC JK1898 .Q56 2020 | DDC 324.6/230973dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019047183

Design by Allison Weiner.
Typesetting by Frank Brayton.
Images coordinated by Mallory Farrugia.
Jacket illustrations by Libby VanderPloeg (front), Dani Pendergast (back left), and Simone Martin Newberry (back right).

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San Francisco, California 94107
www.chroniclebooks.com

FOREWORD

NELL IRVIN

PAINTER

HERE WE ARE, a century after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution allowing women the voteallowing women, a majority of the American citizenry, a say in their countrys governance. This, truly, is an anniversary worthy of gigantic celebration. And celebration there is in this book, a work of fresh, deep understanding of womens suffrage as the foundation of womens rights.

Such a book has never been seen before, and I mean that literally. Here we have not only a bounty of witty words, historians usual tools. Here also are images chosen with Bridget Quinns especial skill as an art historian: one hundred artworks by one hundred women artists. An art bounty of womens empowerment.

Breadth of vision is She Votes's enduring characteristic as an intersectional work. Quinn sees American women broadly, not simply the educated white women at the fore a century ago, and does not skip over the continued disfranchisement nor the agency of women of color. Quinn starts her definition of womens rights with the ability to hold and dispose of property, as embodied in Haudenosaunee women in upstate New York. Well before the event ordinarily recognized as the origin of womens rights, the Seneca Falls womens rights convention of 1848, Native women had what settler American women lacked: agency, property, and power. At Seneca Falls and throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, non-Indian women struggled to gain their full rights as citizens.

Nell Irvin Painter, Princeton Self-portrait, 2015.

Inclusion is one of She Votes's great strengths, as Quinn navigates a history of both expanded rights and the narrow-minded exclusion that emerged when suffrage expanded after the Civil War. The beloved antebellum community of feminist-abolitionists broke apart after the Civil War amendments enfranchised black men and inserted male into the United States Constitution. Ever since 1867, Americans have been arguing over whether woman suffragists and womans suffrage were fundamentally exclusionary.

For some commentators, obviously racist comments by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and early twentieth-century suffragists characterize the movement as a whole. For others, suffragisms comfortable fit into American white supremacy needs to be seen as a regrettable but not a defining part of the history of womens rights. Disagreements of this character persist, as in July and August 2018 columns in the New York Times. Threading between opposing views, Quinn never loses sight of the limitations, even the villainies, of woman suffrage within the prejudices prevailing in American society over time. In words and images, Quinn never narrows her own vision of American women.

Within its narrative of rewarding imagination, She Votes investigates and demolishes convenient founding myths: Was Susan B. Anthony actually in Seneca Falls in 1848? Evidently not. And did Sojourner Truth really ask whether or not she was a woman? Emphatically not. Thanks, Bridget Quinn, for a commemoration of the struggles for American womens rights, conceived and written broad-mindedly.