A Time for Courage: The Suffragette Diary of Kathleen Bowen

Although many women still feel mistreated and second-class in the U.S. today, there was a time not that long ago when things were even worse for them. For much of the country's history women were not allowed to vote. Period. They legal rights were limited (they couldn't sue in court), and higher education was sometimes denied to them. Although technically free, women of that time weren't much above slaves as far as personal power went.

This book shows events happening in 1917 in which women began a movement to obtain the legal right to vote. The things that happened to them are quite shocking, even by today's standards. Many were arrested on basically trumped-up charges and the court trials that they had were ludricous, their rights not really protected in any way. (The concept of "free speech" which is so important today was utterly ignored at the time.)

The conditions of the jails that they were put into were atrocious and would have resulted in major shocking news coverage in all of today's papers if the same thing happened now.

Yet this is also shown as the personal story of a young girl whose mother was involved in the movement and whose father was a busy doctor, leaving her at times feeling quite alone. We see how differences of opinion between men and women were enough to tear up one family, and how the women who were demonstrating were often physically assaulted while the police looked the other way.

We also learn how the government, including the President, didn't want to pay any attention to the women at all. Of course this was also the time when World War I had started in Europe and when the U.S. was trying to stay out of the war, unsuccessfully. The women's plea that the U.S. would fight for democracy overseas while ignoring it at home was also ignored by the government.

Yet another excellent book in this series.


Main Index

Dear America index page

Yadult Index