Browse Items (28 total)

One of the myths of the suffrage story is that nothing radical or confrontational happened before 1913. Not so. On July 4, 1876, at the national Centennial celebration in Philadelphia, suffragists stormed the stage. Thread. They had asked for a place…

We gotta talk about lesbians. Specifically, about lesbian erasure. Queer is cool, right? It’s 2020! 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️etc., etc. So why is the lesbian reality of the suffrage movement barely part of the #19thAmendment centennial…

By the 1876 US centennial, women had been demanding the vote for nearly 30 years. The light bulb was not yet invented. As the National and the American Woman Suffrage Assoc's developed their separate identities in the 1870s, more African-American…

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…

South Dakota became a state in 1899. Its motto: “Under God the People Rule.” National suffrage leaders converged on the state immediately to campaign for a doomed suffrage amendment. Its motto: “Women Are People.” A #StateOfTheWeek thread White women…

Susan B Anthony voted 147 years ago today. For this she was arrested, and tried in federal court in Canandaigua NY the following June. She was represented by Henry Selden, a retired judge who laid out her case for why the 14th Amdt provided her the…

Today’s “March for Life” takes the 19th Amdt as its theme. The anti-abortion movement regularly invokes Susan B Anthony, ElizCadyStanton & Alice Paul. Suffragists indeed inspire people of varied opinions - but anti-abortion groups are lying…

One of the hardships of suffragists’ life on the road? Lousy food. This @NPRFood piece focused on Susan B, though it would apply to any of the 100s of women who traveled 1000s of miles, year after year, to talk to men about why we were citizens. 

Mary Ann Shadd Cary edited The Freeman in Canada. She moved there in 1850s to protest Fugitive Slave Act. Post-Civil War she returned & entered Howard Law School at age 46, the only woman in her class. More ahead on her work w/Frederick Douglass,…