Non-business book: Why They Marched

This election season we are thinking and talking a lot about women’s rights.

So I decided to head back into history and understand a little more context about how this right to vote, which white women have held for a little over 100 years, came to be.

Susan Ware’s history is the kind of book they’re not allowed to teach in some places. It talks about racism and sexism. It talks about the history of ordinary women across the country, not just the few names you can think of from New England.

These are biographies of 19 women who stepped well outside their comfort zones into what they thought was the right thing “through actions large and small, courageous and quirky, in states and communities across the nation.” The battle for the right to vote for white women took 80 years. For women of other ethnicities, on a practical level, it is still very much in progress.

Along the way, that 80-year battle saw some women killed. Some went on hunger strikes and some were beaten in prison. Some of them collapsed in exhaustion, lost their marriages, and suffered other personal setbacks. It saw terrible racism within the movement and triumphs despite that racism. It saw international alliances rise and fall. It saw sisterhoods form and families divide.

We live in a world with a lot of instant gratification, so reading about this saga is humbling. The people who started it didn't see it finish. They fought for the rights of their great-great-granddaughters. They organized on timelines that are almost impossible to imagine in a culture that can't culturally commit to climate action to protect the world twenty years out. But they found strength in their teams, in their sisterhoods, in their purpose, that inspire me in many ways.

many women’s lives were profoundly altered by participation in the struggle to win the vote. This narrative captures those personal and political transformations.

I’ve said before that I vote in every election because my great-grandmother Nellie, who was born in 1900, remembered vividly when she first voted and told me about it. It was a big deal. It was precious. She had seen how much it cost, she had watched the last of those 80 years.

And she made sure her great-granddaughters promised we would always vote, in every election, in her name and the names of the women who marched.