Editors & authors Stacie Taranto and Leandra Zarnow will discuss their book, Suffrage at 100, which looks at women’s engagement in US electoral politics and government over the one hundred years since the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. Stacie Taranto and Leandra Zarnow will share their collaboration on the book, and some of the history and stories of women who have stepped into politics at many levels since the 19th Amendment passed.
In the 2018 midterm elections, 102 women were elected to the House and 14 to the Senate—a record for both bodies. And yet nearly a century after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, the notion of congressional gender parity by 2020—a stated goal of the National Women’s Political Caucus at the time of its founding in 1971—remains a distant ideal. In Suffrage at 100, Stacie Taranto and Leandra Zarnow brought together twenty-two scholars to take stock of women’s engagement in electoral politics over the past one hundred years.
This is the first wide-ranging collection to historically examine women’s full political engagement in and beyond electoral office since they gained a constitutional right to vote. The book explores why women’s access to, and influence on, political power remains frustratingly uneven, particularly for women of color and queer women. Examining how women have acted collectively and individually, both within and outside of electoral and governmental channels, the book moves from the front lines of community organizing to the highest glass ceiling.
Essays touch on:
• labor and civil rights
• education
• environmentalism
• enfranchisement and voter suppression
• conservatism vs. liberalism
• indigeneity and transnationalism
• LGBTQ and personal politics
• Pan-Asian, Chicana, and black feminisms
• commemoration and public history
• and much more.
