Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote is a charming book. I intend this description in the most complimentary manner. Each of the nineteen chapters—a number that honors the Nineteenth Amendment—presents a vignette, or an artifact, or a story (often all three) that illuminates some telling aspect of the suffrage movement in the United States. Some of the people in Why They Marched are well-known: Susan B. Anthony, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell, Rose Schneiderman. But Ware tells us things about them that even suffrage scholars might not know. I, for one, had never heard of the suffrage forest cultivated by Carrie Chapman Catt, the indefatigable leader of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and International Woman Suffrage Association. This was a collection of trees on her property that she adorned with plaques commemorating the women's rights activists she saw as especially important. And how wonderful that Ware's unparalleled familiarity with and access to the collections of Harvard's Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America yielded not just a series of charming stories but also an array of objects and images that vividly illustrate the reach of the suffrage movement into every aspect of American life and culture from the middle of the nineteenth century through the early decades of the twentieth. Ware uses this sort of material culture as a launching pad for each chapter, providing a wide-ranging collection of tales from the suffrage movement.

In addition to the well-known suffrage leaders and organizations that appear in these pages, lesser-known activists also come into view. One of the most intriguing figures in Why We March is Claiborne Catlin, who toured the state of Massachusetts on horseback in 1914 to bring attention and converts to the cause, relying literally on the kindness of strangers as she set out, penniless, on her trek. In another chapter, Dr. Cora Smith Eaton, a suffragist and mountaineer in Washington State, plants a “Votes for Women” banner on Mount Rainier, graphically illustrating the conviction of the movement that women belonged everywhere. Ware also gives the men who supported women's enfranchisement their due, focusing in the chapter “How It Feels to Be the Husband of a Suffragette” on Ray Brown, the husband of Gertrude Foster Brown, president of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association. All these stories also provide useful reminders of the national reach of suffrage, which operated on the local, state, and national levels in ways that are sometimes submerged by grand narrative accounts of the movement.

Another great strength of the book is that Why We March reflects decades of suffrage scholarship that examines the class prejudice, racism, and xenophobia that mar the history of the movement. In one chapter, Ida B. Wells bravely joins the Illinois delegation at the 1913 suffrage parade in Washington, DC, despite the parade organizers’ official relegation of African American women to the back. In another chapter, Ware uses Southern writer Mary Johnston's novel Hagar (1913) as a window into the racism endemic in Southern suffrage campaign appeals to white women to support (white) women's enfranchisement as a means of assuring continued white supremacy. Similar rhetoric was used to emphasize the importance of native-born women getting the vote in order to check the power of immigrant men, who could achieve citizenship relatively easily during this period.

For all the charms of this book, there are some issues worth pointing out. One is that in choosing to write such distinct chapters, Ware foregoes the possibility of seeking thematic ties among subjects that could fruitfully be analyzed together. As an example, the chapter on “Cartooning with a Feminist Twist” includes images drawn by Nina Allender, Blanche Ames, and Lou Rogers, all artists who should be better known. Rogers's famous cartoon “Tearing Off the Bonds” depicts a woman breaking free from the chains and ropes that bind her. This visual theme became part of the iconography of the suffrage movement, as seen in a later chapter in the illustration of a prison pin given by the National Woman's Party to activists like Hazel Hunkins who went to jail for their cause. The pin was fashioned to resemble a jail cell grate, ornamented with a chain attached to a heart-shaped lock. It would be worth thinking about the multiple meanings that images of chains conveyed to the suffrage movement at various times and in various contexts. Similarly, in one chapter, Ware features Jewish activist sisters Maud Nathan (pro-suffrage) and Annie Nathan Meyer (anti-suffrage), and in another she features Jewish labor activist and suffragist Rose Schneiderman. In neither chapter, though, does she engage with the recent scholarship that takes seriously their Jewish identities as important to their activism and explores more fully the role of American Jewish women in the movement (full disclosure: I am the author of such scholarship). It would similarly be useful to consider more holistically the relationships among suffrage and an array of religious traditions rather than keep so separate the chapters on Jewish and Mormon women. Although Ware does justify her organizational strategy at the beginning, the format makes the book perhaps less pathbreaking for specialists than appealing to students and a broader public—not that there is anything wrong with that. Still, there is much in the book for any audience to appreciate, a testament to Ware's creative research and deep knowledge of American women's history.