February 9, 2004 Eleanor Clift at the Embassy of Jordan "How American Women Won the Vote" The Embassy of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and Mrs. Coach Kathy Kemper, founder of The Institute for Education hosted the celebrated and renowned author and journalist Eleanor Clift at the Embassy’s Cultural Series February 9th 2004. The distinguished Diane Rehm, of the National Public Radio’s Diane Rehm show introduced Ms Clift and told the audience about Clift’s great achievements as a woman writer, marking her latest book, Founding Sisters, as the greatest venture back in time for all her readers to experience the struggle for women’s suffrage in the United States. Clift spoke to the Embassy’s guests about the Founding Sisters and their painful yet enlightening experience to make their voices heard, to guarantee their right to vote and to make the history of the women’s social movement in the United States. Clift traces their struggle from the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention in 1848, their encounter with President Wilson’s opposition to their movement until the celebration of their efforts with the 19th amendment in 1920, which granted women the right to vote. Clift paints this evolution by describing the challenges these courageous women faced, inside and outside the household; where they felt imprisoned and sequestered from the social, economic and political life.  "As a journalist who specializes in women and politics, I thought I knew a lot about the struggles of women in this country for equality. But I had no idea that winning the right to vote took more than seven decades and that women were jailed and held in unspeakable conditions by the same government that took America to war in Europe to spread democracy,” Clift told the crowd.  Clift kept the audience engrossed in this marvelous tale with her eloquent account of her experience writing this book. She later showed a sneak preview of the HBO film, “Iron Jawed Angels” which highlights various parts of her book. The film, starring Hilary Swank, will be aired February 15th. Clift said that the HBO movie “ brings to life many of the scenes (she) wrote about in my book, and serves as a timely reminder in an election year of how hard the Founding Sisters fought for the vote.”