Browse Items (38 total)

Renounce: To give up, to resign, to surrender; esp. to give up in a complete and formal manner. Laura Clay ran the Kentucky Woman Suffrage Assoc. from its founding in 1881 until 1912. Kate Gordon, left, ran Louisiana’s suffrage association from…

The end of legal slavery didn’t make a dent in white Americans’ racism. The opposite, really: after the Civil War Northern whites patted themselves on the back for being so virtuous, then turned around and passed laws making it harder for…

When Anna Howard Shaw was a young woman, she wore pants and short hair. She gave it up eventually because she got too many comments, but she couldn’t hide her ambition, and her certainty she could do better than a man. Turn-of-the-century thread. She…

The 14th Amdt’s Biggest Failure, or Women Excluded for Naught: a long thread. Two decades after the Civil War, it was as though it had never happened. Instead of the safety to work their land and vote, Black families were re-enslaved as sharecroppers…

At the turn of the century, leading white suffragists deluded themselves into thinking that colluding with racists would help their cause. Spoiler alert: it didn’t.Thread. The new generation of suffrage leaders - with the blessing of the old guard -…

Annual conventions belong in the nation’s capital--at least as far as the National Woman Suffrage Assoc was concerned. But the American WSA had always rotated among states, so a few years after the merger, NAWSA began to alternate: even years in…

Doldrums: a state or period of inactivity, stagnation, or depression. Or, the women’s suffrage movement at the turn of the 20th century. Of course, it didn’t feel that way at the time. 🧵 By the end of the 19th century, the movement had unified…

Must be a busy day for my friends @SuffrageBdays! Both Frederick Douglass & Anna Howard Shaw were born #OTD. #DouglassDay celebrations this year are devoted to Anna Julia Cooper, feminist and suffragist - more on her in months ahead! See @CCP_org…

The belief that “women” would vote as a block about alcohol animated support and opposition re: suffrage. (It wasn’t ever really true.) The liquor industry lobbied against women’s votes at many junctures, though historians debate how much…

Today the Chicago World’s Fair is most familiar from true-crime bestseller “Devil in the White City.” The nickname referred to the white stucco that gave the whole place a marmoreal gleam. It was also an apt description of who was welcome at…