Editors note: the following book review appears in the Fall 2021 issue of Eikon.
Erika Bachiochi. The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2021.
Two marches, just over one hundred years apart, mark the introduction of Erika Bachiochi’s The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision. The first march took place in 1913. Women gathered to make their voices heard in support of federalizing the right of women to vote in general elections. Some states gave women the right to vote in the nineteenth century; Utah allowed women to vote in 1870. Other states lagged behind and by 1913 marchers loudly — and confidently — proclaimed that women’s suffrage represented high ideals like charity, liberty, justice, peace, and hope. The second march occurred in 2017, and, as Bachiochi notes, if there were high ideals present, their impact was lost in the cacophony of explicit-filled, insulting, sensationalist, and sexualized…
