“Weiss is a clear and genial guide
with an ear for telling language … She also shows a superb sense of
detail, and it’s the deliciousness of her details that suggests
certain individuals warrant entire novels of their own… Weiss’s
thoroughness is one of the book’s great strengths. So vividly had
she depicted events that by the climactic vote (spoiler alert: The
amendment was ratified!), I got goose bumps.”–Curtis Sittenfeld,
The New York Times Book Review
Nashville,
August 1920. Thirty-five states have ratified the Nineteenth
Amendment, twelve have rejected or refused to vote, and one last
state is needed. It all comes down to Tennessee, the moment of truth
for the suffragists, after a seven-decade crusade. The opposing
forces include politicians with careers at stake, liquor companies,
railroad magnates, and a lot of racists who don’t want black women
voting. And then there are the “Antis”–women who oppose their
own enfranchisement, fearing suffrage will bring about the moral
collapse of the nation. They all converge in a boiling hot summer for
a vicious face-off replete with dirty tricks, betrayals and bribes,
bigotry, Jack Daniel’s, and the Bible.
Following
a handful of remarkable women who led their respective forces into
battle, along with appearances by Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding,
Frederick Douglass, and Eleanor Roosevelt, The
Woman’s Hour is an
inspiring story of activists winning their own freedom in one of the
last campaigns forged in the shadow of the Civil War, and the
beginning of the great twentieth-century battles for civil rights.