Women's history expert Doris Weatherford's Victory for the Vote: The Fight for Women's Suffrage and the Century that Followed offers readers an engaging and detailed narrative history of women's seven-decade fight for the vote and will bring those readers up to date on key achievements-and challenges-in women's equality since then. A foreword by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and an alliance with the Women's National Book Association will enhance market reach and influence.
An expanded edition of a 1998 volume on the history of the American suffragist movement, Victory for the Vote now puts the fight for suffrage into contemporary context by discussing key challenges for women in the decades that followed 1920, such as reproductive rights, the Equal Rights Amendent, and political power. With Weatherford's long record as a women's history expert and the political authority that Speaker Pelosi's foreword brings to the table, Victory for the Vote will be a central book in the August 2020 Centennial celebration of women's right to vote.
Victory for the Vote is based on A History of the American Suffragist Movement (ABC-CLIO, library market, 1998), which was published in honor of the 150th anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention, considered to be the beginning of the women's rights movement in the United States. To help celebrate that milestone, Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman to be nominated to the vice presidency by a major party, wrote the foreword to the book. The expanded edition will lead off, as mentioned, with the words of Speaker Pelosi, another historic woman whose political power is center stage in today's national landscape, and will include Ferraro's moving words in the appendix.
In addition to framing the book with the words of two major historic figures, Victory for the Vote will ride the wave of Centennial buzz, which promises to mount during March 2020, women's history month, and culminate on August 26th, the date of passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Attention to women's political empowerment will be reinforced by the 2020 presidential race, given the prominence of women on the national stage. At least six women, as of May 2019, are running for the 2020 the Democratic nomination and are showing more than ever how women can shape the political landscape at the highest levels. No matter who the candidate turns out to be, it's certain that 2020 will raise the visibility of women's political power, just as the election of 2018-and the 2016 milestone presidential candidacy of Hilary Clinton-did.
