An Unfinished Revolution by Marguerite Kearns 

The story of the suffrage movement and the ongoing struggle for women’s rights through the lens of one family’s history.

Through the lens of one family's history, An Unfinished Revolution tells the story of the suffrage movement and the ongoing struggle for women's rights in the United States. The book opens with ten-year-old Marguerite Kearns listening to her grandfather Wilmer's stories about how he met her grandmother Edna, a ninth-generation Quaker and ardent suffrage campaigner, and how he fell in love with her. Wilmer, who became a male suffrage activist himself, also shares the story of the "Spirit of 1776" suffrage campaign wagon that Edna and others used while organizing in New York State in 1913. After sitting for years in a Kearns family garage, the wagon is currently housed in the permanent collection of the New York State Museum as a prime artifact in the national suffrage movement.

As Marguerite grows older, she draws on a wide variety of sources—from family stories and photographs to archives and scholarly histories—to piece together the real-life narrative of her family. Profoundly changed in the process, she becomes an activist herself, and when she marches in a present-day women's march, she carries a photo of her grandparents participating in a 1914 women's march in New York. With the women's suffrage movement as the backdrop, this memoir and family history illuminates how activism passes from one generation to another—and how a horse-drawn suffrage campaign wagon became a symbol of freedom and equality.

"Although the book is solidly based on primary sources, the author allows herself some imaginative leeway in reproducing her childhood conversations with Wilmer. Both their dialogue and her internal analysis are re-created, which gives the narrative an authentic feel while hewing closely to the facts. The author is a good storyteller, and she turns Edna and Wilmer into compelling and dynamic characters readers will be eager to follow from one page to the next. The work does an excellent job of telling the story of these two people in detail while also placing them in the broader historical context, showing the many ways in which personal matters illuminate sociocultural trends." — Kirkus Reviews

329, paper, 2021