As Giant Steps opens, thirteen-year-old Bernie Epperson of Lafayette, Indiana, is wrestling with double standards placed on her compared with her brothers. Soon her cousin awakens her to all the unfair restrictions women face, and Bernie becomes a suffragette. Meanwhile, World War I begins. Her family is devastated when her brothers become soldiers, and Bernie must decide how to help the war effort and continue to fight for women’s rights. While this story is fictional, the details of the suffrage movement and the war efforts of ordinary Americans are true. Middle and high school students will relate to Bernie and her brothers’ dilemmas a century ago because they also face making decisions in a turbulent world while sifting through contradictory news and changing wisdom.

During Russia revolutionary year of 1917, Emmeline Pankhurst and her secretary Jessie Kenney, both well-known suffragettes, traveled to the beleaguered country to talk with Russian women about suffrage, but also to persuade Russia to remain in the war. While there, Pankhurst and Kenney met many leading figures in Russia: Felix Yusupov, the ringleader in the murder of Grigorii Rasputin; members of the Provisional Government, including its president, Alexander Kerensky; and Maria Bochkareva, the commander of the Women’s Death Battalion. They spoke with officials from the YMCA and the Red Cross and gave talks to small groups of women in private homes. Throughout, Kenney kept a diary, which she later turned into a manuscript, “The Price of Liberty.” This volume introduces Kenney’s Russian diary to a general audience, offering a new perspective on the Russian Revolution and facilitating awareness of this unique episode in the story of the British suffrage movement.