Browse Items (10 total)

My #StateoftheWeek feature is a history of sisyphean effort. From 1867-1918, women lobbied male voters in 56 state referenda, most of them fruitless. The 1st was #Kansas, a disaster that pitted white women against black men. Neither won. Women didn't…

OHIO CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION, 1912 MR. HALFHILL: Now, gentlemen, this question of franchise is not, as has been sometimes debated and urged, an inalienable right; it is a conferred right, and it must be conferred under our theory of govt and under…

IHO Year of the Rat, a fearless teenager on a horse. Mabel Ping-Hua Lee was only 16 when she led New York City’s 1912 suffrage parade on horseback. She started college @Barnard that fall. She was a media magnet, profiled in the Tribune a month before…

Leonora O’Reilly had a hand in umpteen important organizations of the Progressive Era. She was a founder of the Consumers League, the Women’s Trade Union League, and the NAACP, to name a few. “Leonora O’Reilly attracted people like a…

How long did “the doldrums” last? The doldrums: the period at the end of the 19th c./beg. of the 20th in which the suffrage movement seemed to make no progress: no statewide victories, death of the old guard, uninspiring new leaders, embrace of…

When W.E.B.DuBois left academia and moved to New York City to work for the @NAACP, the fledgling organization could barely pay him. Launching The Crisis magazine was a risk, but by 1912 it had a circulation of 27,000. Its first special issue was…

Cities around the country instituted curfews this week to restrict protest, so it’s a good time to recall when suffragists were out after dark. In 1912, New York City suffragists lit the darkest night of the year with a massive nighttime…

A Dyke on Horseback ~ One more story from the 1912 New York City suffrage marches~ 🐴thread courtesy of @WendyLRouse Annie Rensselaer Tinker grew up swimming, sailing, and riding on her father’s Long Island estate. She rode astride, not…

At suffrage demonstrations in London, Rosa May Billinghurst responded to over-policing by ramming London bobbies with her wheelchair. May, as she was known, joined radical suffragist Women’s Social & Political Union in 1907. She founded the…

This is not a thread about the pros and cons of 3rd-party candidates. This is just to say that Woodrow Wilson became President of the United States with the consent of very few Americans. Incumbent William Howard Taft was a Republican, and very…