Blog #26

Elizabeth Leads the Way: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Right to Vote

Written by: Tanya Lee Stone

Illustrated by: Rebecca Gibbon

Henry Holt and Company, LLC

2008

30 pages

            I chose this book because of the coming election.  This is a nonfiction story about the life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the right for women to vote.  Elizabeth was a small girl when she heard someone say that boys had an easier life than girls.  In the late 1800s, women were not allowed to own property, to have money, or vote.  She was infuriated by the treatment of women in the country that proudly gave freedom to “all men” by the Constitution of the United States.  Elizabeth went to a women’s college and eventually married an abolitionist with similar views.  She did have children and she cooked, cleaned, and did laundry.  But she did not like it!  Stanton made a speech in New York that sparked the nations fire for women’s right to vote.  Sadly, Stanton died eighteen years before her dream of women’s rights became a reality with the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.

            The artwork for this book was created by Rebecca Gibbon.  She rendered the illustrations using gouache and colored pencils on paper.  The text is printed in China on acid-free paper.  The illustrator used both double-page and single-page spreads throughout.  She uses both formal and informal text placement throughout the book.  The illustrations contain a lot of negative white space that is used to draw the reader’s attention to the bold blues, reds, and greens of the illustrations.  I love how Gibbon captured the essence of the women's clothing of the time period.

            This book is appropriate for any age group.  Younger children will especially be able to understand the simple language used, but older children will understand the concepts of voting and women’s rights.  This book would be great to use now that the election is over to talk about the importance of voting.  Also, older grades studying the Constitution could read this book to discover more about the Nineteenth Amendment.  I would use this book to talk about prejudice and unfair attitudes about people.  This would be a great example to show that the Civil Right’s Movement is not the only instance of discrimination in the United States’ history.