Yesterday, I spoke to Mary Morgan Ketchel and her mother, Senator Marsha Blackburn, about a new children’s book they co-authored called Camilla Can Vote: Celebrating the Centennial of Women’s Right to Vote. This is a wonderful, timely book focusing on the hard-fought, decades-long battle for women’s suffrage.
Ketchel and Blackburn felt a particular responsibility to tell this story because of their Tennessee heritage. As they detail in the book, on August 18, 1920, Harry T. Burn cast the tie-breaking vote in the Tennessee House of Representatives, making Tennessee the last of the necessary 36 states to ratify the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote.
Like those early suffragettes, Senator Blackburn is also a trailblazer. She was the first female elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from the State of Tennessee as well as the first female elected to the U.S. Senate from her state. During our chat yesterday, the Senator’s daughter, Mary Morgan Ketchel, explained how proud she was to vote for her own mother in each of her elections and how much of that is owed to the brave women who fought for a women’s right to vote.
As America gets ready to celebrate the 100th anniversary of women’s right to vote, I highly recommend this exciting, engaging, and fun new children’s book to help the children in your lives understand how the suffragettes changed history for mothers and daughters for generations to come.