Author Brooke Kroeger To Discuss “The Suffragents” At East End-Based Historical Society

The Shelter Island Historical Society will welcome author Brooke Kroeger on Saturday, August 4. Brooke will be discussing her new book, The Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote. Guests can learn about the men who lent a helping hand to the women of New York State to win the vote.

The untold story of the Suffragents explores how some of New York’s most powerful men formed the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage. The league began with just 150 members and eventually grew to include thousands over 35 states. The book further explores the National Woman Suffrage Association’s decision to allow the League to help their cause and spread their message, an uncommon grace from the organization.

Led by such luminaries as Oswald Garrison Villard, John Dewey, Max Eastman, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and George Foster Peabody, members of the League worked the streets, the stage, the press, and the legislative and executive branches of government. They convinced politicians, the general public and the largely hostile press to support women, changing the course of history in the process.

Praise for the book include Kirikus Reviews who called it, “A vigorous, readable revisitation of the events of a century and more ago but with plenty of subtle lessons in the book for modern-day civil rights activities, too.”

James McBride, author of The Good Lord Bird said, “…with smooth efficiency and the touch of a novelist, Brooke Kroeger shows how the suffragist movement, engineered by women from top to bottom, cleverly stitched in the involvement of men from all walks of professional and political life, directed by women who used neither gun nor blade to direct the men, but the weapons of intelligence, cleverness, and when necessary, subterfuge. The collaboration in this balance of power between prominent men who invested in the movement, and the women who directed them, has everything to teach us today.”

Kroeger is a journalist, author of five books and a professor at the NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and director of its MA unit, Global and Joint Program Studies, which she founded in 2007. She is also a Senior Fellow of the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University.

The talk will be held in the Havens Barn from 4 to 6 p.m.

The Haven Barn and Grounds are located 16 South Ferry Road in Shelter Island. For more information, visit www.shelterislandhistorical.org.