Tracing the roots of the movement to the independent women of seventeenth-century colonial America, Weatherford chronicles the long and tortuous campaign to secure women's suffrage. She emphasizes the connections of the women's movement, which rested on profound moral convictions, to the other great nineteenth-century reform movements of abolitionism and temperance. She recounts the inspiring triumphs as well as the heartbreaking setbacks of the movement, which culminated in the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.