To ring in the Jewish new year, I’m highlighting 2 women whose impact on labor rights for all working people -esp. women- endures. Both fierce union organizers, suffragists, lesbians. Read @AnneliseOrleck1's profiles: Rose Schneiderman first. Shana…
Pauline Newman was dykier than Rose. At 16 she led the biggest rent strike in NYC. After scores of friends died in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, she helped write & enforce NY safety laws. Led women in WTUL & ILGWU for decades. There's so much…
Washington becomes a separate territory from Oregon in 1853. At the first meeting of its independent legislature, a man named Arthur Denny proposes “to allow all white females over the age of 18 years to vote.” The bill fails 9-8. #StateOfTheWeek…
Women went to jail for the vote at three significant periods in American history. In the modern civil rights movement, Fannie Lou Hamer, Diane Nash and Ella Baker designed strategies for which men got credit. In the last years before the 19th Amdt,…
In the Presidential election of 1872, Ulysses S Grant was challenged by Horace Greeley. Grant was corrupt and incompetent, and Greeley opposed suffrage. Women voters didn’t have much of a choice - which was appropriate, since there weren’t any women…
In the spring of 1871, Mary Ann Shadd Cary and Frederick Douglass led at least 63 Black & white women to attempt to register to vote in Washington DC. She was turned away by the Board of Registration, whose members included 2 Black men who surely…
After Susan B. Anthony voted in 1872, a deputy federal marshal came to her door and asked her to accompany him downtown. “What for?" she asked. "To arrest you," he said. "Is that the way you arrest men?" "No." "Then I demanded that I should be…
It’s the first Monday in October! @DailySuffragist is going to dwell a bit on the early history of women at the Supreme Court. First up, Lucy Prince - and some bad news. #Suffrage100 #BlackWomen #SCOTUS Oct Lucy Prince did not argue before the…
If you’ve heard of Belva Lockwood, it’s likely b/c she was the 1st woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court, in 1880. First, she spent 5 years lobbying Congress to pass an anti-discrimination bill to let women practice law in federal court.…
It’s Yom Kippur, which Ernestine Rose surely did not observe. As a child, she challenged her rabbi father on why G/d would require the pain of fasting. Comrade of Susan B Anthony, her motto was "Agitate, agitate." Truly the 1st Jewish feminist.