Author Event | Elaine Weiss Discusses "The Woman's Hour: The Great Fight To Win The Vote"

When

Sunday May 19, 2019: 4:00pm to 5:30pm  Add to Calendar /   Add to Google Calendar

Where

Westgate Branch: West Side Room

Description

Award-winning journalist and writer Elaine Weiss discusses the battle for the 19th Amendment and her book The Woman's Hour: The Great Fight To Win The Vote. 

A record number of women have been elected to Congress and statehouses in the recent elections, and several women have announced runs for the White House in 2020. None of this would be possible if not for the brave grass-roots activists of yesterday – the suffragists – who disrupted the political establishment as they fought for American women's right to vote. The Woman's Hour describes how the seven-decade crusade to win the ballot came down to a pitched battle in Nashville Tennessee to gain the final state needed to ratify the 19th Amendment.

For six weeks in the summer of 1920, the dauntless suffragists confronted the bribery, misogyny, and dirty tricks of their powerful opponents: politicians with careers at stake, corporate interests that viewed women voters as a threat to business, and racists who didn't want black women voting. They also faced the “Antis” –women vehemently opposed to their own enfranchisement, fearing suffrage would bring about the moral collapse of the nation. The outcome remained in doubt until the very last moment, decided by a single vote of conscience.

Following a handful of remarkable women, both white and black, who led their respective forces into battle, and featuring appearances by Frederick Douglass, Woodrow Wilson, Ida B. Wells and Eleanor Roosevelt, this book is an inspiring story of women fighting for equality. It is also a cautionary tale of moral compromises made in the name of political expediency, and the book's themes—voting rights, women's rights, culture wars, and racism—are especially resonant today.

Elaine Weiss is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Harper's, The New York Times, and The Christian Science Monitor, as well as in reports and documentaries for National Public Radio and Voice of America. A MacDowell Colony Fellow and Pushcart Prize Editor's Choice honoree, she is also the author of Fruits of Victory: The Woman's Land Army in the Great War.

This event includes a book signing and books will be on sale.