Browse Items (38 total)

I can’t stop thinking about this girl. Her gorgeous smile, her presence in front of the camera. The photo was taken sometime in the 1860s. @amhistorymuseum shared it on Instagram a few days ago, and I keep coming back to it. Long thread.We don’t…

Kentucky was first in the nation to grant women school suffrage: the right to vote in school board elections. More than 50 years later, the legislature 👇expanded -- and then abruptly revoked -- school suffrage. How come? Because Black women turned…

Addie Hunton was no naïf, but the shameless racism she saw in her war service shocked her. She spent 1918-19 as one of a handful of African American women deployed by the YMCA to serve 150,000 Black troops in France. WWI thread. Addie Hunton and…

By the 1916 election, it was clear the Nat'l Woman’s Party strategy was working: a federal constitutional amendment had become a live political issue. NAWSA couldn’t beat NWP, so they were going to have to join them. But neither group was willing…

What's a Rochester suffragist from Susan B Anthony's day doing on a racist anti-suffrage leaflet in Virginia circa 1920? Read on . . . Julie O’Connor @AlbanyMuskrat recently called my attention to Hester Jeffrey, a prominent African American…

Ida B at work. Another glimpse of the master persuader, via the beautiful 2d edition of her autobiography. Great foreword by @eveewing & afterword by @MichelleDuster about preserving the legacy. 🧵 In 1900 the Chicago Tribune runs stories…

As 1913 began, planning was underway for a massive suffrage march and pageant to take place in Washington, DC on March 3, the day before #WoodrowWilson’s inauguration. Black women wrote the organizers to ask if they were welcome. If you have to ask…

Black women & white women experiencing this country differently is nothing new. In the suffrage movement, what voting meant for white women was different than what it meant for Black women. And not just because the fight was segregated, running…

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…

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…