Q&A with Nancy B. Kennedy

Nancy B. Kennedy is the author of Women Win the Vote!: 19 for the 19th Amendment, a new middle grade book for kids. She is a journalist, and she lives in Hopewell, New Jersey.

Q: Why did you decide to write Women Win the Vote!?

A: I grew up in Rochester, New York — the home of the famous suffragist Susan B. Anthony! — but I knew absolutely nothing about suffrage. A few years ago, a colleague mentioned the upcoming suffrage centennial, and I knew right away that I wanted to write about it.

A hundred other writers wanted to write about it too! There are plenty of books about women and the vote. The adult market is well covered, and the youngest readers have a lot of great picture books to choose from. But I didn’t see many options for the middle-grade reader, a young person aged 9 to 13.

My teacher friends say that the way to grab a young person’s attention is through personal stories. So I thought, What if I tell the suffrage story through the women who powered the fight? And that’s what I did. I chose 19 suffragists who personified the fight — 19 for the 19th.

Q: How did you choose the 19 women to profile?

A: The suffrage fight went on for three generations. I needed to choose women who would take the reader through its 72 years, from its beginning in 1848 to its victory in 1920 — from Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Carrie Chapman Catt and Alice Paul.

But I also wanted to bring in suffragists who had been overlooked due to racism. It’s disheartening that white women were quick to exclude black women from the fight. So, among the 19, I include women like Sojourner Truth, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, and Mary Church Terrell.

Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?

A: I read about 75 books! I also subscribe to a few newspaper archives. It surprised me that so much could be known about a movement that began more than 150 years ago.

What really delighted me was to hear from the women themselves. Their voices come through loud and clear in their diaries, memoirs, letters and speeches. Their own words powered the narrative of my book.

Q: A century after women won the right to vote, what do you see as these women's legacy?

A: I think about this question a lot. Of course, the suffragists expanded women’s public role and political power. They overturned customs of the day that consigned women to a life as “a doll or a drudge,” as Susan B. Anthony put it.

These women also teach persistence. They kept up the fight through two wars, three generations and 18 presidents.

For them, protest wasn’t something they did one Saturday afternoon. For years, they traveled the country on foot and horseback, by carriage, train and car. They went out on boats and up in biplanes! Some of them gave more than 400 speeches a year. They paraded and picketed.

They learned to navigate a political system they had no knowledge of, and some were willing to go to prison — and undergo hunger strikes and force feeding — to accomplish their goal. They show us exactly what it takes to gain justice.

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?

A: We live in a time when young people are making their voices heard. They’re protesting racism, gun violence, climate change. I wanted to show that a hundred, a hundred fifty years ago, young people were doing the very same thing. To create change, you need both passion and perseverance.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: My agent says I shouldn’t be writing this year, that my job this year is to talk about the suffragists. I always do what she says! But I am continuing to research the suffrage fight and hope that I get to write about it in a new way.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: No one could have predicted we’d be quarantined by a pandemic this year. The suffragists fought to break out of the house, and here we are stuck at home!

My publisher did foresee that teachers would want to use the book in their classrooms, so we created a teachers’ guide that is available as a free download from my website (nancybkennedy.com/for-teachers). Now that so many parents have become their children’s teachers, the guide is even more useful as a teaching resource.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb