History Smashers: Women's Right To Vote, by Kate Messner

Photo by Wil C. Fry

★★★★★ (of 5)

Full Title: History Smashers: Women’s Right To Vote
Author: Kate Messner
Illustrator: Dylan Meconis
Year: 2020 (mine was library hardcover)
Pages: 190*
Genre: U.S. History, Women’s Suffrage, Democracy
Publisher: Random House Children’s Books (Penguin Random House)
ISBN 978-0-593-12035-4

(* 190 pages does not include Timeline, Author’s Note, Bibliography, Image Credits, or Index.)

My 11-year-old daughter read this and recommended it to me. She was right to do so. The book is part of a “History Smashers” series that includes several other titles; the idea is to take a historical incident or phenomenon (Underground Railroad, Titanic, the Mayflower, etc.) and distill the truths into an easy-to-read format for pre-teen children, while also debunking commonly repeated myths (and outright fabrications in some cases).

This book, like the others, makes the topic clear in the title, as well as with the cartoon-drawing on the front cover. This one is about the struggle to secure women’s voting rights in the United States.

Despite being obviously written for children (based on word and phrasing choices), make no mistake: it is not “dumbed down”. It’s also relatively thorough, covering the roots of the problem in early colonial days, the first surges of the women’s suffrage movement in the U.S., early successes and failures, and schisms within the women’s rights movement. Unlike some other shallow histories of the movement I read when I was younger, this one doesn’t sugarcoat the rampant racism among some of the most prominent early white feminists. It also explains how Susan B. Anthony came to be the face and name most associated with the movement despite being one of many women leaders (it’s because she wrote a history of the movement that over-emphasized her own impact, and self-published, and got that book stuck into a bunch of libraries before anyone else had a chance to straighten things out), and despite dying before the movement succeeded.

Though part of the book is illustrated in comic-book style, it also includes many historical photographs of the women involved, some of which I’d never seen before.

Conclusion

I quite enjoyed the book and would highly recommend it to anyone. (I think it’s aimed at readers aged 9-13, or so, but likely most adults would learn something from it too.)