Cesar Chavez: We Can Do It! Book

From Booklist
Gr. 3-7. 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

This was a book that I really enjoyed reading. I feel a strong connection to those women that fought so hard for what many women take for granted these days. This book was nice in that it gave a lot of personal information on Elizabeth Cady Stanton, but also talked about some of the other women involved in the same work, Susan B. Anthony and Lucretia Mott. This book would most likely be for a child that is really interested in this subject to begin with, because there are some parts that seem monotonous. Again, because of my strong interest in the subject matter I could get through it easily. She was a courageous and inspiring woman!