An American Suffragette

Dr. John Earl, celebrated physician and hero of the Indian medical campaigns, steps off a ship into a New York City bracing for change. He's come home to his fiancée Leonora Kimball, to the comfortable world of privilege he's always known. But the city has shifted while he was away. Women march through the streets demanding the vote, and at the center of one such parade stands Silvia Holland, brilliant and relentless, a woman who refuses to be invisible. What begins as polite curiosity about the suffrage cause becomes something far more destabilizing. Through Silvia, Dr. Earl encounters a world where everything he assumed about women's proper place is being questioned. His engagement to the conventional Leonora begins to feel like a costume he's outgrowing. This is a novel about the year America nearly changed its mind about who women were. Written during the height of the suffrage fight, it captures a moment when the old order trembled but had not yet fallen. Stevens writes with real conviction about the suffragists' intelligence and ferocity, never reducing them to saintly reformers. For readers who love historical fiction that takes politics seriously and asks what it costs to change your mind.