Review: The Golden Lane: How Missouri Women Gained the Vote and Changed History

The Golden Lane: How Missouri Women Gained the Vote and Changed History by Margot Ford McMillen
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The Golden Lane is a short overview of the fight of Missouri suffragists to gain the right to vote. The book leans heavily on St. Louis, the site of the "Golden Lane." The Golden Lane was a protest by suffragists in St. Louis during the 1916 Democratic National Convention, the brainchild of Emily Newell Blair of Carthage, Missouri. A swarm of women dressed in suffragist white accented in yellow holding yellow parasols lined the street outside the convention to gain the attention of lawmakers for women's right to vote.

Whereas the book is a good overview of key people and events, it does tend to drift off into topics that have no bearing on the titled subject. A discourse on St. Louis and the Busch family/beer company is more detailed than some topics that I would expect to read about. A couple of the important suffragists like Victoria Minor and Emily Newell Blair have chapters dedicated to them but they garner a few paragraphs instead of the whole chapter and discussion about their dress and demeanor in pictures tends to be more detailed than their suffrage work. The cathartic moment of the Golden Lane seemed to be little more than a passing few comments than the building up of the moment.

What you do get is more of an overview of the suffrage movement in St. Louis, not of the whole state, and of a timeline of the city from the civil war through the ratification of the suffrage amendment. For those studying the movement, this book provides a jumping-off spot to begin research.

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