The opening of Preface
The History of Woman Suffrage is comprised in six volumes averaging about one thousand pages each, of which the two just finished are the last. While it is primarily a history of this great movement in the United States it covers to some degree that of the whole world. The chapter on Great Britain was prepared for Volume VI by Mrs. Millicent Garrett Fawcett, leader of the movement there for half a century. The accounts of the gaining of woman suffrage in other countries come from the highest authorities. Their contest was short compared to that in the two oldest countries on the globe with a constitutional form of government--the United States and Great Britain--and in the former it began nearly twenty years earlier than in the latter. The effort of women in the "greatest republic on earth" to obtain a voice in its government began in 1848 and ended in complete victory in 1920. In Great Britain it is not yet entirely accomplished, although in all her colonies except South Africa women vote on the same terms as men.