Five best books about women's suffrage

Sally McMillen is the Mary Reynolds Babcock Professor of History and Department Chair at Davidson College. She specializes in Southern and women's history, with an emphasis on the nineteenth century. Among her publications are Motherhood in the Old South: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Infant Rearing, Southern Women: Black and White in the Old South, and To Raise Up the South: Sunday Schools in Black and White Churches, 1865-1915. Her latest book is Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement.

For the Wall Street Journal she named a five best list of books on women's suffrage. One title on the list:

Century of Struggle
by Eleanor Flexner
Harvard, 1959

Though now half a century old and succeeded by more modern scholarship, Eleanor Flexner's study of the prolonged fight for women's voting rights remains the best comprehensive overview. Flexner covers the major issues and the major reformers—movement leaders as well as women who organized unions, broke into previously men-only professions and challenged laws that restricted women's opportunities. The last third of "Century of Struggle" examines the final push for a constitutional amendment in the early 1900s as a new generation of leaders, often at odds with one another, fought to secure the vote and to convince lawmakers that theirs was a just cause.

Read about another book on McMillen's list.

See the Page 99 Test: Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement by Sally McMillen.

--Marshal Zeringue