Women from all over Arkansas—left out of the civil rights granted by the post–Civil War Reconstruction Amendments—took part in a long struggle to gain the primary civil right of American citizens: voting. The state’s capital city of Little Rock served as the focal point not only for suffrage work in Arkansas, but also for the state’s contribution to the nationwide nonviolent campaign for women’s suffrage that reached its climax between 1913 and 1920. Based on original research, Cahill’s book relates the history of some of those who contributed to this victorious struggle, reveals long-forgotten photographs, includes a map of the locations of meetings and rallies, and provides a list of Arkansas suffragists who helped ensure that discrimination could no longer exclude women from participation in the political life of the state and nation.

This thesis contains in-depth instructions as to the research and creation of the They Made Their Voices Heard! exhibit. Women's suffrage in Arkansas has been an area of Arkansas history that has not been overly studied. Arkansas became the first southern state to give women the right to vote when in 1917 women were permitted to vote within primaries. Florence Brown Cotnam, Bernie Babcock, James Mitchell, and Charles Brough are all studied within this process paper and exhibit for their contributions to the women's suffrage movement in Arkansas.

"Every serious student of woman suffrage must take account of this vital contemporary document, which tells the story of the struggle for woman suffrage in America from the first woman's rights convention in 1848 to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Originally published in 1923, it gives the inside story of this remarkable movement, told by two ardent suffragists: Carrie Chapman Catt (of whom the New York Times wrote, 'More than anyone else she turned Woman Suffrage from a dream into a fact') and Nettie Rogers Shuler. Writing from vivid recollection, the authors offer some of their own ideas about what caused the United States to be the twenty-seventh country to give the vote to women when she ought 'by rights' to have been the first"--Unedited summary from book cover.

This collection of essays focuses on the various arguments for and against woman suffrage by federal constitutional amendment rather than by individual states. An essay by Henry Wade Rogers provides an interesting counterpoint to another volume in this collection, "Woman's Suffrage by Constitutional Amendment," by Henry St. George Tucker [Section VII, no. 380].