You want women to vote, Lizzie Stanton? - Softcover

Acclaimed biographer, Jean Fritz, was born in China to American missionaries on November 16, 1915. Living there until she was almost thirteen sparked a lifelong interest in American history.  She wrote about her childhood in China in Homesick, My Own Story, a Newbery Honor Book and winner of the National Book Award.
     Ms. Fritz was the author of forty-five books for children and young people. Many center on historical American figures, gaining her a reputation as the premier author of biographies for children and young people.
     Among the other prestigious awards Ms. Fritz has garnered are: the National Humanities Medal, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, the May Hill Arbuthnot Lecture Award. the Christopher Award, the Boston Globe-Horn Book Non-Fiction Award, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and many ALA Notable Books of the Year, School Library Journal Best Books of the Year, and ALA Booklist Editors’ Choice Awards.
     She passed away on May 14, 2017.

Gr. 4^-7. This is Fritz at her ebullient best, writing a historical biography that weaves together the life of a spirited leader and the fight for her cause. In this case, the fight is for women's suffrage. Without fictionalization, Fritz re-creates Stanton's decisive, impatient, outspoken personality. "Elizabeth had never heard of anything so ridiculous" is a constant refrain from Stanton's childhood on through her domestic life and her long years of politics. The friendship between Stanton and the suffragist leader Susan B. Anthony is drawn with immediacy and zest, their closeness and their arguments, their work together and their failures. Stanton fought with the abolitionists who wanted to separate black rights and women's suffrage. She "lit into" the churches for being so backward. Yet there's no caricature; running throughout is a restrained sense of her sorrow that she could never please her father because she was not a boy. The description of her last speech in 1892 is an eloquent fusion of the personal and the political: "In the end, she said, everybody, men and women, were alone. They were responsible for themselves; no one could represent them." As usual, Fritz provides a bibliography but no further documentation of sources. Illustrations by DyAnne DiSalvo-Ryan not seen in galley. Hazel Rochman