This was a good look at the issue of women's rights and the women working to gain equal rights.

This book is very detailed, comprehensive and engaging, but for me I found it a little boring. as a YA book, I think it might be a little heavy. Too much text book, not enough to engage the younger readers. I did enjoy it, but found MY attention span wandering, so I think the target audience would too.

Winifred Conkling is emerging as a definitive chronicler of women's history. Passenger on the Pearl told the story of Emily Edmondson, who escaped slavery and dedicated her life to education young African-American women; Radioactive! gave long-overdue props to Irène Curie & Lise Meitner, whose work on radioactivity was often overlooked in a male-dominated field; now, Votes for Women gives us a comprehensive history of the fight for American suffrage, long before women finally won the right to vote in 1920. For readers who may only be familiar with Susan B. Anthony, this volume is indispensable, introducing readers to Elizabeth Cady Stanton; Susan B. Anthony's counterpart and founder of the suffrage movement, and Alice Paul, who took her cue from the more action-oriented British suffrage movement, and went to jail for the cause, where she and fellow protestors suffered deplorable conditions and were force-fed. We meet Victoria Woodhull, the first female Presidential candidate, and revisit Sojourner Truth's famous speech, "Ain't I A Woman?" Most importantly, we learn about the beginnings of intersectional feminism; when abolitionists and suffragists found common ground - and then diverged under political fire.

This is a comprehensive book, complete with photos, primary sources, and writing that never turns away from the more difficult moments in the battle for the vote: from racism to violence, it's all here. It's a good book for your nonfiction collections and women's history collections for middle school and high school, with extensive primary source references, a timeline of American women's suffrage, a bibliography, notes, and an index. Booktalk this with the graphic novel, Sally Heathcote: Suffragette by Mary M. and Bryan Talbot, which features a fictional character from the British movement, and is a great hook to get teens interested. A Mighty Girl has a strong list of additional reading, filtered by age, on suffrage.

Votes for Women! is a very well-researched account of the American Women's Suffrage Movement. While technically aimed at the middle grade audience, this is dense text. There are some fascinating facts throughout the book, and I think it would be great to pull passages to use in the classroom. I just wish that this was slightly more engaging for the younger audience.

I have read extensively about the campaign in Britain to secure votes for women but know little about the equivalent in the USA. Winifred Conkling's book has filled huge swathes in the gaps of knowledge. Excellent!

On 18 August 1920, Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the 19th Amendment, meaning that the enfranchisement of all American women became law.

The scene in the Tennessee House of Representatives had been exceptionally tense as everything ultimately turned on the vote of twenty-four-year-old Harry T. Burn who had been expected to vote against ratification but who was swayed at the eleventh hour by a message from his mother telling him, "Don't forget to be a good boy" and "vote for suffrage."

This is the dramatic story with which Winifred Conkling’s ‘Votes for Women!’ opens, although it is only 250 or so pages after her Preface that she finally reveals the exhortatory contents of Mrs ‘Febb’ Burns’s epistle to her son.

Between these two points Conkling travels back to 1826 (a pivotal moment in Elizabeth Cady’s life when her brother Eleazar, her father’s last male heir, died) and then provides a lively and engaging narrative of the battle to achieve votes for women, centring on the many remarkable women involved in that campaign including Lucy Stone, Lucretia Mott, Carrie Chapman Catt, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Victoria Woodhull, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Burns and Alice Paul.

The otherwise very full bibliography does not mention Johanna Neuman’s ‘Gilded Suffragists’ (which I have reviewed elsewhere on Amazon), nor is there any mention of Neuman’s thesis in the text. This is, however, not too grave an omission as Conkling nevertheless provides a nuanced and inspirational story adorned with extracts from key primary sources a timeline and many illustrations, which should appeal to young readers of both sexes.

An excellently drawn and wonderfully told tale for students and readers alike.

Votes For Women is an extremely well written and extensively researched book. The author included not only the issues of suffrage, but other topics such as the temperance movement and the exclusion of voting rights for women with the passing of the Fifteenth Amendment. There’s a myriad of background information as well as personal obstacles that many faced along the way. You will not find this type of information in history textbooks. This book would be an added bonus when teaching about the suffrage movement in a much more comprehensive manner and will enlighten the minds of students everywhere.

Every woman should read this one - the details of what it took to get the rights we sometimes take for granted! So interesting and ... inspiring really!