Woman Suffrage: Arguments and Results [The Blue Book] FIRST EDITION

New York: National American Woman Suffrage Association, 1912. First Edition. Hardcover. Good +. First Edition. Hardcover. This rare first edition of the women's rights handbook that would become known as "The Blue Book," with that title and the editors' names added to later, revised editions, collects eight popular booklets into one handy, nearly pocket-size volume, "designed especially for the convenience of suffrage speakers and writers and for the use of debaters and libraries." The editors of The Blue Book were Frances Maule Björkman (1879-1966), a queer, socialist member of Heterodoxy, a Greenwich Village feminist debating club, and Annie Gertrude Webb Porritt (1861-1932), an editor of the National American Woman Suffrage Association's Publishing Company who followed Alice Paul after her expulsion from NAWSA, joining Paul at the more 'militant' National Woman's Party, and after the passage of the 19th Amendment, becoming a birth control activist, through her work at the American Birth Control League and as managing editor of the Birth Control Review.

The full contents of this first edition of "The Blue Book" include: "Why Women Should Vote," by American settlement activist Jane Addams; "Objections Answered: Why Should Women Vote?" by journalist and human rights activist Alice Stone Blackwell; "Where Women Vote," by Björkman; "Do You Know," by once and future NAWSA President Carrie Chapman Catt; "A Comon-Sense View of Woman Suffrage," by Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Jesse Lynch Williams; "Why Women Want to Vote," by Björkman; "Measuring Up Equal Suffrage," by later head of the United States Committee on Public Information George Creel and social reformer Judge Ben B. Lindsey; and "Eminent Opinions" on women's suffrage, collecting quotes from Abraham Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony, Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, John Stuart Mill, Frances Willard, Clara Barton, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Elizabeth Cady Stanton,and many other notable figures.

6 1/4" X 3 3/4". 20pp, 32pp; 38pp; 12pp; 16pp; 12pp; 32pp; 55pp. Presents well in protective archival jacket. Bound in faded blue cloth over boards, lettered and ruled in black to upper board. Heavy scattered rubbing to cloth, especially at rear, with sunning to blank spine and moderate rubbing to edges and extremities. Rear hinge a touch tender; binding remains sound, with occasional hints of spine visible at gutters of signatures. $2.25 price per dozen copies amended in pencil to $2.50 at verso of title page. Occasional spot of foxing, thumbing, or smudge to pages throughout, else unmarked. An admittedly worn but overall well preserved first edition of this significant book in the history of women, voting rights, and the United States of America.