``The book you are about to read tells the story of one of the great social movements in American history. The
struggle for women's voting rights was one of the longest, most successful, and in some respects most radical challenges
ever posed to the American system of electoral politics...It is difficult to imagine now a time when women were
largely removed by custom, practice, and law from the formal political rights and responsibilities that supported
and sustained the nation's young democracy...For sheer drama the suffrage movement has few equals in modern American
political history."
