She Devils at the Door by Eliza Smith Brown

She Devils at the Door
by Eliza Smith Brown
Carnegie Mellon University Press, 360 pages, paperback $29

The United States Women’s Suffrage Movement was a tenuous battle that took nearly eight decades to be realized. Women across the country saw this fight pass from themselves to their daughters and granddaughters in hopes that women would be seen as more than custodians of home and hearth. Eliza Smith Brown’s She Devils at the Door tells the story of two Pittsburgh-born sisters, Lucy Kennedy Miller and Eliza Kennedy Smith, who fiercely led Pennsylvania suffrage groups to glory and became well known nationally. However, the Kennedy sisters didn’t see suffrage as a means to an end; they used their hard-won right to confront corruption in the City of Pittsburgh’s government, daring to speak out against political machines and working with those who wanted to improve the lives of the city’s citizens, whether rich or poor, old or young, Black or white.

As the granddaughter of Eliza Kennedy Smith, author Eliza Smith Brown had unfettered access to rich archival material such as letters, newspaper clippings and photographs to tell the story of her grandmother and her grandaunt, Lucy. The book chronicles the lives of the two sisters and the origins of the Kennedy family, who like most Americans across the country in the mid-19th century, built a life around agriculture. However, the rise of the steel industry and the promise of the Gilded Age allowed Julian Kennedy, the father of Lucy and Eliza, to open doors to his children that surpassed the average American life, though this is far from a rags-toriches story.

She Devils at the Door weaves detailed research with memoir to achieve a fascinating story that brings Gilded Age Pittsburgh history to the center stage, with unique historical content, at this pivotal moment when women’s rights are again in question.

Alonna Carter-Donaldson
University of Pittsburgh