A VOICE OF OUR OWN: LEADING AMERICAN WOMEN CELEBRATE THE RIGHT TO VOTE
edited by Nancy M. Neuman (Jossey-Bass Publishers, 265 pages, $24.00). To commemorate last year’s seventy-fifth anniversary of the 1920 ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment–which declared that no American could be denied the right to vote because of gender–the League of Women Voters invited a group of eminent women to offer their own viewpoint on the increasing participatory role of women in American democracy. This volume presents the resulting 28 essays, contributed by such notables as First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton (1947- ); former First Lady Rosalynn Carter (1927- ); Diane Yu (1951- ), the first woman and first member of an ethnic minority to be appointed General Counsel for the State Bar of California; Ada Deer (1935- ), assistant secretary of Indian Affairs in the Department of the Interior; and Martina Navratilova (1956- ), Wimbledon and U.S. Open tennis champion. The authors reflect on women’s past struggles and successes and examine the challenges of the future.