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  • The American Scholar

    Making Their Voices Heard

    Mar 02, 2020 4 minutes
    Review by Nancy Isenberg

    SUFFRAGE: Women’s Long Battle for the Vote

    BY ELLEN CAROL DUBOIS

    Simon & Schuster, 383 pp., $28

    WE AMERICANS LOVE the myths about our nation’s past. We pretend to be a land of unlimited opportunity, despite a painful legacy of discrimination based on the unholy trinity of race, class, and gender. We celebrate abstract notions of natural rights, human liberty, and social equality, even though Americans have routinely embraced deeply inegalitarian ideas of white supremacy, class pedigree, and maternity as women’s destiny.

    Take California. In 1850, the new Free Soil state prohibited slavery yet protected peonage (servitude) of Native Americans. After passage of the 15th Amendment, southern states used grandfather clauses, literacy tests, and

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