What Eight Million Women Want.
[Suffrage]. Dorr, Rheta Childe. What Eight Million Women Want. Boston: Small, Maynard & Company, (1910).
8vo.; photographic frontispiece (“Convention of Club Women at Hotel Astor, New York: A typical gathering, well-dressed, intelligent, business-like”); other photographs throughout; blue cloth, stamped in gilt.
First edition. What women want, of course, is the vote, which they eventually got nearly a decade after the publication of this book, a fascinating contemporary history of women’s struggle for this right. Dorr particularly treats the local and national women’s clubs as instruments of political change, and looks at the effect that the various women’s clubs have had upon the fight for suffrage. In part:
When American women began, a generation ago, to form themselves into clubs, and later to join these clubs into state federations of clubs, and finally the state federations into a national body, they did not dream that they were going to express a collective opinion...The immediate need of women’s souls at the beginning of the club movement was for education; the higher education they missed by not going to college, and they formed their clubs with the sole object of self-culture... (p. 23)
Includes many scarce high quality contemporary photographs of women’s rights marches (including one in Union Square) and women’s club meetings. (Cited in: The Clubwoman as Feminist, by Karen J. Blair, NY: Holmes & Meier, 1980, p. 110)
(#4876)
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