Monday, June 25, 2012

Nonfiction Monday-- Rightfully Ours

Nonfiction Monday was started by Anastasia Suen and  is hosted today at Capstone Connect.






Rightfully Ours: How Women Won the Vote, 21 Activities
1 August 2012, Chicago Review Press

This was an excellent overview of the women's suffrage movement, starting with Lucy Stone, who married the brother of Elizabeth Blackwell (the first woman doctor) in 1854 and didn't change her name! Why is this still so hard for people to understand? Following along in history, the book discusses Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in a much more readable way than the Colman dual biography (Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony : a friendship that changed the world )of the women does. (A great book, but rather lengthy for middle school.)The book doesn't stop there, but continues on to discuss the difficulty of women during the Gilded Age, when things went well but they still couldn't get the right to vote. The difficulties posed by the Civil War and World War II are covered, as are the connected issues of abolition and Temperance. Brief side bars cover lesser known figures and events. There are also crafts included in every chapter. Sometimes these are informative (how to find the North Star when discussing slavery) and some a bit odd (how to pretend you are wearing a corset?), but in general I wish they had been omitted and replaced with more information about the lesser known topics. Still, this will be a great addition to my nonfiction collection, since this is a topic I find vastly interesting. My grandmother was 27 before she was able to vote!

Because this book should be required reading for all 6th grade girls, I'll repeat my comments from 17 February 2006 on it:
A riveting nonfiction title was Karen Blumenthal's Let Me Play, about Title IX and its effect on education in the US and opportunities for women. I learned so much, and I was in school when it was being put in place. The girls in school now take so many of their opportunites for granted. I had my daughter read it-- I only had to tell her about the girl who got a gold medal in swimming in the 1964 Olympics but could not get a college scholarship because there were no college swim teams for girls. She was outraged, and loved the book. This author also has a book about the 1929 stock market crash entitled Six Days in October that I am looking forward to reading.

And many thanks to Jan Eliot, the author of Stone Soup, who celebrated the 40th anniversary of Title IX in her fun comic, Stone Soup. This panel is from Go Comics, but you can also check out Ms. Eliot's web site, Stone Soup. Picky Reader managed to do every single one of her language arts opinion papers on women's rights this year, so she knew ALL about this, and thanks to these comic strips, she informed an entire slumber party of 8th grade girls about it! 

STONE SOUP (c) 2012 Jan Eliot. Used by permission of Universal Uclick. All rights reserved.

8 comments:

  1. My son is the non-fiction reader in our family but would NOT mind at all reading these, even though they focus on girl/women issues. Thank you!

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  2. Two wonderful books - especially the one about title IX which has been so much in the news lately...and thank you for the comic strip, too!

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  3. These both look good, especially Let Me Play. When people in Japan ask me why women in the US dominate the Olympics in sports men in other countries usually dominate (like soccer), I can point to Title 9. There is so much discrimination in sports here, even at the elementary school level, where certain clubs are for boys only (so my daughter won't be able to play soccer past the age of 6!) We need Title 9 here!

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  4. You have great titles here, many thanks for sharing. The second one which you noted was a must for sixth graders - I shall hunt down to share with my ten year old. Looks like something she'd have fun with.

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  5. I love learning about new nonfiction books- I know it is a genre I need to build my knowledge on. Thank you.

    Happy reading this week! :)

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  6. I have been busy? YOU HAVE BEEN BUSY. Wow. All the people who think I read fast? I don't have anything on you.

    I have never heard about Title IX. Oops. Will have to look that up.

    PS I do read all your other posts. And I'm working on being a better commenter!

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  7. Love the cartoon! I've been disappointed that the news coverage has focused on female athletes, missing out on all the great stories about how Title IX helped female computer programmers, too.

    Another thing I think they miss is that Title IX means that exercise was an available tool to me when I was determined to conquer my obesity in a way that it was never available to my mother.

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  8. Thank you for your review of my new book! I just came across it doing a web search. Your blog is delightful.

    Regards,

    Kerrie Logan Hollihan
    Rightfully Ours: How Women Won the Vote

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