The Surprising History of Woman Suffrage covers the extraordinary three quarters of a century of suffrage struggle, concentrating on four episodes:  first, the original form of the woman suffrage constitutional amendment that called, not just for women's enfranchisement, but for the right to vote for all national citizens; second, the Gilded Age growth of suffrage support engineered, surprisingly, by the Woman's Christian Temperance Union; third, the surprising fact that states were able to  fully enfranchise four million women by 1914; and finally, the near defeat of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.

Ellen Carol DuBois is Distinguished Research Professor of History at UCLA.  Educated at Wellesley College and Northwestern University, she is one of the nation's foremost historians of US suffragism.  Her first book on the subject was Feminism and Suffrage:  The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement, 1848 - 1869  (1978). She won the Joan Kelly Gadol Prize from the American Historical Association for Harriot Stanton  Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage (1987).   In 2020, she published Suffrage:  Women's Long Battle for the Vote, the first comprehensive history of suffrage since 1959.

The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University and the National History Center) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is organized jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Woodrow Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks its anonymous individual donors and institutional partners (the George Washington University History Department and the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest) for their continued support.