AN UNFINISHED REVOLUTION

A debut family history book focuses on the suffrage movement.

In this work, Marguerite Kearns shares the stories of her grandparents, who met in the early 20th century. Edna Buckman was the daughter of a Philadelphia Quaker family, committed to her faith and the cause of women’s suffrage and uninterested in marriage when she met Wilmer Kearns, a Pennsylvania farm boy working in New York. The two developed a friendship that ultimately led to marriage, and Wilmer joined Edna in both Quaker worship and the suffrage movement. The author, who was born after her grandmother’s death, learned the family history from her grandfather’s stories. Much of the book consists of conversations between the young author and Wilmer as they discussed family life in the Buckman household, the 1913 suffrage parade, and the wooden wagon with rumored ties to George Washington that Edna and her colleagues used to draw attention to their cause. In the book’s final chapters, the author brings her life and career in upstate New York into the story, adding an element of memoir to the biography. While Edna was not a well-known figure in the suffrage movement, she was an active worker and well connected, and the author skillfully contextualizes her contributions to the cause as well as her identity as a Quaker. The volume takes an unusual approach to biography. Although the book is solidly based on primary sources, the author allows herself some imaginative leeway in reproducing her childhood conversations with Wilmer. Both their dialogue and her internal analysis are re-created, which gives the narrative an authentic feel while hewing closely to the facts. The author is a good storyteller, and she turns Edna and Wilmer into compelling and dynamic characters readers will be eager to follow from one page to the next. The work does an excellent job of telling the story of these two people in detail while also placing them in the broader historical context, showing the many ways in which personal matters illuminate sociocultural trends.

An imaginative biography of a husband and wife committed to women’s suffrage.