The Suffragist Playbook: Your Guide to Changing the World
Age 12+
History & The Past: General Interest
“An outstanding and inspirational guide to women’s history for today’s political activists.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
The women’s suffrage movement was decades in the making and came with many harsh setbacks. But it resulted in a permanent victory: women’s legal right to vote in the United States. How did the suffragists do it? Just over one hundred years later, an eye-opening look at their playbook shows familiar strategies from women’s marches to publicity stunts, petitions to lobbying, fundraising to writing articles. From moments of inspiration to some of the movement’s darker aspects—including the racism of some suffragist leaders, violence against picketers, and hunger strikes in jail—this clear-eyed view takes in the role of key figures: Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Ida B. Wells, Alice Paul, and more. Engagingly narrated by Lucinda Robb and Rebecca Boggs Roberts, whose friendship goes back generations (to their grandmothers, Lady Bird Johnson and Lindy Boggs, and their mothers, Lynda Robb and Cokie Roberts), this unique melding of history and tactics is sure to capture the attention of today’s activists-in-the-making.
Creators
Rebecca Boggs Roberts is the author of Suffragists in Washington, DC: The 1913 Parade and the Fight for the Vote and Historic Congressional Cemetery. She has been many things, including a journalist, producer, tour guide, forensic anthropologist, event planner, political consultant, jazz singer, and radio talk show host. Currently she is the curator of programming at Planet Word. She lives in Washington, DC, with her husband, three sons, and a long-eared hound.
Lucinda Robb was project director for Our Mothers Before Us: Women and Democracy, 1789–1920 at the Center for Legislative Archives. The project rediscovered thousands of overlooked original documents and produced a traveling exhibit and education program highlighting the role of women in American democracy. She also helped organize the National Archives’ celebration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1995. She lives in Virginia with her husband, three children, one dog, and more than five hundred PEZ dispensers.
