Women who fought for their rights
Summer 2020 has drawn attention to women’s rights, both gains and losses. On Tuesday, Aug. 11, California Sen. Kamala Harris became the presumptive Democratic vice presidential nominee, making history as the first woman of color on a majorparty ticket. On Tuesday, Aug. 18, the nation marks the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, finally guaranteeing women the right to vote. My own mother was born disenfranchised!
But July saw a setback, when the Supreme Court upheld the right of employers to withhold contraceptive coverage from their insurance plans on “religious or moral” grounds — a blow to basic medical care for women. My mother, an early Planned Parenthood nurse, would be appalled.
Four new kids’ books remind me of how long and hard women have fought to secure full participation in our democracy and to exercise control of their own bodies. It is encouraging to read about progress but infuriating to foresee the struggles still ahead.
How Women Won the Vote: Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, and Their Big Idea
Written by Susan Campbell Bartoletti and illustrated by Ziyue Chen Harper; 80 pages; $18.99; ages 8-12
This timely history of voter suppression includes a photo of the Women’s March on Washington on Jan. 21, 2017. All over the country, millions marched to protest Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration. I marched in Atlanta, unknowingly connecting with a proud tradition of activism that a century ago achieved women’s suffrage across the United States.
The focus here is on two Americans, schooled in the British women’s movement and determined to import what they learned. Their “big idea” was a parade, to be held on March 3, 1913, the day before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration. Stirring archival photos recall many scenes with more than 5,000 suffragists making their way down Pennsylvania Avenue before 250,000 spectators. Subsequent boycotts, rallies, pickets, petitions, arrests, hunger strikes and vigils kept the pressure on in the years to come.
To its credit, this candid account does not skirt irony — that in fighting gender discrimination, parade organizers themselves practice racial discrimination, at first barring black women from participation, eventually (but not completely) relenting, because they feared Southern backlash. Thus, the suffrage movement is shown to be both regressive and progressive, underscoring a persistent contradiction perhaps central to understanding our American story.
No Steps Behind: Beate Sirota Gordon’s Battle for Women’s Rights in Japan
Written by Jeff Gottesfeld and illustrated by Shiella Witanto Creston Books; 44 pages; $18.99; ages 7-12
Ratified in 1788, the U.S. Constitution makes no mention of equal rights for women. Adopted in 1946, the Japanese Constitution does, thanks mainly to an
Austrianborn woman, today revered in Japan but little known stateside. This inspiring picture biography helps fill the void with a straightforward chronology — how Gordon’s family escapes European antiSemitism, moving to Japan in 1929 for her father’s career; how she masters Japanese and absorbs the culture, its beauty and ugliness (problematic: misogyny and militarism); how she goes off to Mills College in Oakland, spending World War II afraid for her parents left behind; and, finally, how she returns to postwar Japan to find them safe and takes work with the U.S. occupation forces. As an interpreter, she helps craft a new Japanese Constitution, bravely insisting on language to protect women. This longoverdue tribute glorifies the value of an “outsider” perspective and of chance alignment. After all, as we see, the right woman for the right job at the right time makes all the difference.