Browse Items (38 total)

Most law schools accepted female students grudgingly, but @WashULaw in St. Louis sought them out. In 1868 the school went looking for white women to enroll; Phoebe Couzins started the following year and graduated with some fanfare. Couzins is known…

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…

1. I’m immersed in the suffrage movement’s first major rupture, and grappling with how to acknowledge ElizCadyStanton & Susan B Anthony’s racism without dismissing them. 2. Faye Dudden’s book Fighting Chance offers a scorching assessment of what…

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…

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…

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…

By 1892, Ida B Wells’ Memphis paper was thriving. She traveled the Mississippi Delta selling subscriptions, tripling circulation. Free Speech was editorially fearless: Ida sharply called out any accommodation of white supremacy, even by Black…

I’m chasing down a citation, so you’ll have to wait to hear from Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, one of few Black women on the record in these debates. First, a word from Frederick Douglass. Thread. It would not be an overstatement to say that among…

I’m spending so much time on the 1869 split because it reflects and anticipates so many activist conflicts since: over race and racism, over who gets to speak for whom, who has to wait their turn. #Suffrage100 #KnowYour19th We’ve seen that…

The 19th c. suffrage movement split resulted from a painful failure. AERA fought to have “sex” included in the 15th Amendment, which barred states from discrimination in voting on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” They…