Browse Items (16 total)

The National Female Anti-Slavery Convention in 1837 was the 1st convention where women discussed women's rights. Delegates traveled to NYC for 4 days of debate. Lucretia Mott was there, and so were the Grimke sisters. Ira V. Brown describes their…

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…

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…

When Ida B Wells arrived in Brooklyn, it was still its own city. (The 5 boros consolidated in 1898.) How imposing the massive metropolis must have felt to Ida, forced to flee Memphis in 1892 after publishing “The Truth About Lynching.” Ida’s…

When the Statue of Liberty rose in New York Harbor in 1886, suffragists protested. Her presence, they observed, “points afresh to the cruelty of woman’s present position, since it is proposed to represent Freedom as a majestic female form in a State…

Why do some tragedies generate change and others don’t? 109 years ago today the Triangle Shirtwaist fire killed 146 people - mostly Jewish & Italian immigrant women. The fire was key to winning labor & safety laws. The political power women…

I was prepared to hate Annie Nathan Meyer because of her vehement anti-suffrage views. But it’s hard to hate a woman whose autobiography, published posthumously, is called “It’s Been Fun.” Annie Nathan Meyer founded @BarnardCollege in 1889. Women…

Sarah Smith Garnet & Dr. Susan Smith-McKinney Steward were sisters - Sarah the eldest of 10, Susan the 7th. Together, their impact on Brooklyn's African-American community was immense. Their suffrage contributions - Sarah's especially - were…

Ida B Wells’ crusade against lynching succeeded for many reasons: her investigative rigor, her talent as a writer and speaker, her relentlessness. But her first, crucial insight was recognizing that white women were lying. Thread. Until Ida published…

“The Woman Suffrage procession moved down Fifth Avenue yesterday to the meeting of protest in Union Square, well guarded by the mounted police. New York Times, May 22, 1910 The protest was against the action, or lack of it, taken by the legislators…