Journalist Elaine Weiss, author of The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote, will kick off a year of WestportREADS that will celebrate the history, contemporary challenges and future of women’s suffrage.
This year, WestportREADS is a year-long program that will celebrate the centennial anniversary of the ratification of the 19th amendment and the history of women’s suffrage. Two books — one nonfiction and one fiction — have been chosen as our community reads. The nonfiction choice is The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight for the Vote by Elaine Weiss, and the fiction choice is A Short History of Womenby Kate Walbert. Copies of both books will be available at the Library. Link to more information on WestportREADS 2019-2020.
Registration is strongly suggested.
Community Partners: League of Women Voters, Westport Country Playhouse, Westport Historical Society, Westport Public Schools
The non-fiction WestportREADS choice, The Woman’s Hour, focuses on one of the greatest political battles in American history: the ratification of the constitutional amendment that granted women the right to vote. Nashville, August 1920. Thirty-five states have approved the Nineteenth Amendment, granting women the right to vote; one last state–Tennessee–is needed for women’s voting rights to be the law of the land. The suffragists face vicious opposition from politicians, clergy, corporations, and 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 nation’s moral collapse. And in one hot summer, they all converge for a confrontation, replete with booze and blackmail, betrayal and courage. Following a handful of remarkable women who led their respective forces into battle, The Woman’s Hour is the story of how America’s women won their own freedom, and the opening campaign in the great twentieth-century battles for civil rights.
"The book grippingly recounts the twists and reversals that took place in the weeks leading up to the suffrage victory, but it is even more thrilling in its presentation of ideas—both those of the suffragists and those of the people who opposed them." — The New Yorker
Elaine Weiss is a journalist and author whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, The New York Times and The Christian Science Monitor, as well as in reports and documentaries for National Public Radio and Voice of America. A MacDowell Colony Fellow and Pushcart Prize Editor’s Choice honoree, she is the author of the highly acclaimed narrative non-fiction book, The Woman's Hour: The Great Fight for the Vote (Viking 2018), hailed as a "riveting, nail-biting political thriller" with powerful parallels to today's political environment. Weiss is also the author of Fruits of Victory: The Woman’s Land Army in the Great War, the inspiring story of a long-forgotten women's movement.
Elaine Weiss Photo Credit Nina Subin
The fiction choice is A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert, a moving portrait of the complicated legacies of mothers and daughters. It chronicles five generations of women from the close of the 19th century through the early years of the 21st. From a European suffragist who starves herself for women’s rights in 1914 to her great-granddaughter in New York in 2007, Walbert’s work highlights the love, friendship, and regrets that each of these women experienced. Readers will be swept up in the tremulous times as these five women attempt to find their way in a society that needs an answer to “The Woman Question.”
Kate Walbert is the author of six books of fiction. A Short History of Women was on the New York Times Book Review list of Ten Best Books of 2009 and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize stories.
