In lively prose well-matched by Gibbon’s irrepressible images, Stone tells the story of suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The breezy narrative visits Elizabeth at key moments in her youth: when she wondered why a visitor expressed regret that her baby sister was a girl; when she learned a widow would lose the farm she had worked on her whole life because her husband died and women couldn’t own property; when she begged to continue her education. She married the abolitionist Henry Stanton, but kept her name along with his. A meeting with Lucretia Mott and other strong, like-minded women led to a much larger gathering at Seneca Falls, N.Y. There began the long battle—the end of which Elizabeth did not live to see—to win the right to vote. Gibbon uses pattern and line on white backgrounds to set off her figures and exaggerated gestures and expressions to give them energy. A fine introduction for very young readers to the woman and her key role in American history. (author’s note, sources) (Picture book/biography. 5-9)
