Browse Items (38 total)

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…

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…

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…

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 -…

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…

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 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…

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…

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…

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…