In this voting year, no child is going to escape bombardment with news about the election. But will those children understand the significance and context that led to that vote? Two new books look at the right to vote in very different ways.
The first book is Two Friends: Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass is an account of the famous tea party where they met and discovered that they shared similar opinions. In the text, Dean Robbins opens with them having tea together. In flashback, he uses parallel structures to show the opinions they held in common about the right to vote. We read that Susan:
read about rights in the United States.
The right to live free.
The right to vote.
Some people had rights, while others had none.
Why shouldn’t she have them, too?
A few pages later we read that Frederick:
read about rights in the United States.
The right to live free.
The right to vote.
Some people had rights, while others had none.
Why shouldn’t he have them, too?
The book is an interesting contrast to Friends for Freedom, which is also about the tea party. In tone, though, the books couldn’t be more different. Two Friends is a lyrical, spare account, while Friends for Freedom, which is much more reportorial, gives a lot more details about their collaboration. The two would make an interesting comparison in a classroom. It would be a great way to discuss tone and authorial choices.
Another book that has just come out is also about the right to vote, but instead of focusing in on a single event, it covers the sweep of the women’s suffrage movement, from 1776 to the present day. In Elizabeth Started All the Trouble, Doreen Rappaport takes us on a whirlwind tour of the people and events that led to American women finally getting the vote.
It’s a hard thing to get a survey topic right in a picture book, but Rappaport does a great job. This would be a good book to read before reading many other books about women’s suffrage, as well as other civil rights, to put things into context.
The western US states come out looking a lot better than the eastern states when it comes to women’s suffrage! (And as a Utah native, I’d like to point out that while Wyoming was the first state where women kept the vote, Utah women also received the right to vote in 1869, after a unanimous vote of the state legislature, but the US Congress stripped them of that right in 1887 and they had to wait 8 years to win it back.)
Books like these are especially important in an election year, to help young readers understand the historic significance of the vote. These are a great addition to that stack of voting picture books.
Two Friends: Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass, by Dean Robbins, illustrated by Sean Qualls and Selina Alko. Orchard: 2016
Elizabeth Started All the Trouble, by Doreen Rappaport, illustrated by Matt Faulkner. Disney Hyperion: 2016.