Browse Items (16 total)

If you were born rich and you know that’s not fair, what can you do? Jessie Ashley tried to use her advantages to make the world more just. Socialist, suffragist, lawyer, birth control advocate, “a valiant rebel” (Emma Goldman).🧵 Jessie’s…

Activism needs resources. Wealthier women provided funding that working class suffragists needed: to print leaflets & posters, rent meeting halls, and most of all to pay salaries so activists could quit their factory jobs & organize…

In Dec 1909, Socialist suffragists convened a party conference to debate whether they should work with the mainstream suffrage groups. Rose Schneiderman & Leonora O’Reilly thought the movement was too small for purity tests, and women should be…

Rose Schneiderman and Leonora O’Reilly were featured speakers at NAWSA conventions as early as 1907. The leaders of the suffrage mainstream warmed to working class women when they saw how these fiery activists could ignite a crowd. [New thread!] But…

“The manufacturer has a vote; the bosses have votes; the foremen have votes, the inspectors have votes. The working girl has no vote.” - Clara Lemlich, 1912 White working women became suffragists in large numbers when they heard working women…

Work. Throughout the 19th century, even suffragists saw paid work as something poor women _had_ to do, not something women would _want_ to do. Most of the movement’s full-time activists (both white and Black) had family money or a husband who…

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…

Why do some tragedies generate change and others don’t? 109 years ago today the Triangle Shirtwaist fire killed 146 people - mostly Jewish & Italian immigrant women. The fire was key to winning labor & safety laws. The political power women…

Leonora O’Reilly had a hand in umpteen important organizations of the Progressive Era. She was a founder of the Consumers League, the Women’s Trade Union League, and the NAACP, to name a few. “Leonora O’Reilly attracted people like a…

Remember Elizabeth Meriwether, the suffragist who helped start the Memphis chapter of the Ku Klux Klan? She shared her home with her brother- & sister-in-law, Lide Smith Meriwether. Lide was as devoted a suffragist as Elizabeth, and more…