They forever changed America: Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frances Willard, Alice Paul. At their revolution's start in the 1840s, a woman's right to speak in public was questioned. By its conclusion in 1920, the victory in woman's suffrage had also encompassed the most fundamental rights of citizenship: the right to control wages, hold property, to contract, to sue, to testify in court. Their struggle was confrontational and violent. And like every revolutionary before them, their struggle was personal. For the first time, the eminent historian Jean H. Baker tellingly interweaves these women's private lives with their public achievements. As only a biographer can, Baker presents each revolutionary woman in three dimensions, humanized, and marvelously approachable. The formidable founding mothers of American feminism are introduced as the sisters they were to one another, and as they must be remembered by the feminists who follow in their footsteps.
 
(277 pages)