Tag archives for Women
Posted by BOOK NAME: You Wouldn’t Want to Be a Suffragist!
AUTHOR: Fiona MacDonald
CREATOR: David Salariya
ILLUSTRATOR: David Antram
This book is part of a well known series that explain different historical events in an easy to understand and fun way. These books are nice if you want an interesting short read sometime. This one is about American women fighting for suffrage, which is another way of saying their right to vote. These people were called suffragists. There was a time when only men could vote and women started fighting for that same right. It finally happened with the passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution in 1920. Many people were happy because they had all worked together for this cause; not just women, but men and African Americans too. But what I really found interesting was that not all women approved of their receiving the right to vote! Many scorned the actions of these brave suffragists, some of whom even went to jail.
The book has interesting drawings of some of the extreme actions that suffragists took for women’s rights. It even provides handy hints throughout it to show you what you should have done if you had been a part of this cause. The other books in this in the series cover many different topics such as what it was like to be a Roman soldier, a Victorian servant, or a castle dweller. So pretty soon you could be a history expert! I will never get tired of this series because all of them are great and they come out with new ones all the time. Happy reading!
Read Braden’s review of other books in the You Wouldn’t Want To… series!
BOOK NAME: Wheels of Change
AUTHOR: Sue Macy
As I read Wheels of Change, the newest book from National Geographic, it really started moving the wheels in my mind. This book takes you through how the bicycle began a chain of events in which women and the general public came to realize that women’s rights, freedoms and expectations were in need of change.
The book starts with a basic history of the bicycle itself with many intriguing facts, images, and short biographies of ladies who led the way. A woman riding a bike back in the late 1800s wasn’t that big of a deal, but when they wanted to become competitive, they realized that the long skirts had to go. Many felt that if women got to wear pants or divided skirts, the whole social system would collapse. Maybe women would even compete with men! In fact, in a race in which a woman challenged a man-she won! This behavior was considered scandalous at that time.
The bicycle aroused wide-spread thinking about women’s rights and their place in society. It opened the way for actions toward equality and women eventually gaining the right to vote. The new freedom that the bicycle gave them opened up the way for different kinds of thinking, a sort of symbol of independence.
I would recommend this book to older readers due to the vocabulary and the topic itself. This book lends itself to have you think about women as activists and their place in society. A pretty heavy topic, but told in an attractive, easy to follow format.
And yes, a big change started with something as simple as a bicycle!
(AD) Check out Wheels of Change in the National Geographic Store!
