Nonfiction Monday-- Rightfully Ours

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

Hollihan, Kerrie Logan. 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.