Introduction and Summary:
Created Equal: Women Campaign for the Right to Vote, written by Ann Rossi, is a highly informative text outlining the women’s rights movement and their journey towards gaining the right to vote. This resource highlights influential women in history such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and Susan B. Anthony, to name a few. Rossi describes how events such as the Temperance Movement and the Civil War gave women the opportunity to demonstrate how they could contribute. They helped with the effort during the War and gained leadership skills. With these skills, women founded organizations, such as the American Equal Righs Association to fight for women’s right to vote. This text describes how the 14th and 15th amendments were passed, with women still not given voting rights. It discusses how some influential women’s rights leaders disagreed if women should continue to wait or to press to gain their rights with the 15th amendment. This book contains quotes from women’s leaders, as well as from the man who provided the final vote giving women the right to vote, Harry Burn. This resource provides a wealth of information for students and is well written and easy to read. At the end of the book there is a glossary of important terms and an index.
Curriculum Connections:
This would be a great resource for a second grade classroom to understand and learn about influential members of the women’s rights movement, such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (VA SOL 2.11). It may be beneficial to read this book to a second grade classroom depending on the children’s reading ability. It may be read in separate sections due to the amount of information presented. This text would also be useful as a tool to demonstrate the importance of voting and how citizens can work to achieve change.
Additional Resources:
This link provides a women’s suffrage word search which will help children become familiar with some of the vocabulary from this time in history.
This link provides several activities that classes could do together; to include matching quotes, multiple choice, and unscrambling words.
This link shows the petition that Susan B. Anthony wrote to the US Congress. This would be interesting for children to see what she actually wrote.
General Information:
Book: Created Equal: Women Campaign for the Right to Vote (1840-1920)
Author: Ann Rossi
Illustrator: National Geographic
Publisher: Crossroads America
Publication Date: 2005
Pages: 1-40
Grade Range: 3-5
ISBN: 0-7922-8275-2