And Yet They Persisted by Johanna Neuman

A comprehensive history of the women’s suffrage movement in the United States, from 1776 to 1965

Most suffrage histories begin in 1848 when Elizabeth Cady Stanton first publicly demanded the right to vote at the Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York. And they end in 1920, when Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the 19th Amendment, removing sexual barriers to the vote. And Yet They Persisted traces agitation for the vote over two centuries, from the revolutionary era to the civil rights era, excavating one of the greatest struggles for social change in this country and restoring African American women and other women of color to its telling. 

In this sweeping history, author Johanna Neuman demonstrates that American women defeated the male patriarchy only after they convinced men that it was in their interests to share political power. Reintegrating the long struggle for women’s suffrage into the metanarrative of U.S. history, Dr. Neuman sheds new light on such questions as:

Why it took so long to achieve equal voting rights for women
How victories in state suffrage campaigns pressured Congress to act
Why African American women had to fight again for their rights in 1965
How the struggle by eight generations of female activists finally succeeded
And Yet They Persisted: How American Women Won the Right to Vote his is the ideal text for college courses in women’s studies and history covering the women’s suffrage movement, as well as courses on American History, Political History, Progressive Era reforms, or reform movements in general.

2020, 268 pages, paper

Johanna Neuman is one of the nation’s leading experts on the history of women’s suffrage. An award-winning historian and a scholar in residence at American University, she has written two books and several monographs on the topic. She often lectures about the long campaign by American women to win the vote, from the revolutionary fervor of the American Revolution in the 1770s to the call for justice during the Civil Rights Movement two centuries later. Chronicling one of the broadest coalitions for social change in American history, she brings delights in illuminating personalities – from the women who fought for their rights of citizenship during the revolutionary era to the activists who fought Jim Crow laws in the South to claim their constitutional rights to vote during the civil rights era.

A journalist who covered the White House, State Department and Congress for USA Today and the Los Angeles Times, Johanna won a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University, served as president of the White House Correspondents Association and specialists in writing advance obituaries of political figures in Washington, D.C. After her journalism career, she returned to the academe, earning a Ph.D. in history from American University in 2016.