Primary Sources: Civil Rights in America - Events: Suffrage - Women

Site provided by Iowa State University. Access speeches by women in politics on a variety of topics.

"The struggle for women’s suffrage, which culminated with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution on August 26, 1920, involved many different kinds of women and many different tactics. Laura Ellsworth Seiler, interviewed by historian Sherna Gluck in 1973, came from a prosperous New York state family and started a suffrage club while a student at Cornell. In this excerpt from Gluck’s interview, Seiler recalled campaigning for suffrage after college on an automobile tour, with her mother in tow as chaperon. In contrast to some historical accounts that emphasized the narrowing of the campaign in the 20th century, Seiler remembered arguing for the vote along with other reforms, and emphasizing the importance of suffrage as a way to improve social conditions." GMU History Matters

Images of the Suffrage Movement in Wisconsin
Wisconsin Electronic Reader Image Galleries
A cooperative digital imaging project of
the University of Wisconsin-Madison General Library System and the State Historical Society of Wisconsin

"Carrie Lane Chapman Catt (1859-1947) was an internationally recognized suffragist, feminist and political activist. The Catt photograph collection consists of over 800 photographs of suffrage leaders and events, dating primarily from the last years of the nineteenth century through the first two decades of the twentieth century."

"The Appeal to Reason, the most popular radical publication in American history, was founded in 1895 by J. A. Wayland. The socialist newspaper reached a paid circulation of more than three-quarters of a million people by 1913, and during political campaigns and crises it often sold more than four million individual copies. Wayland, the paper’s publisher until his suicide in 1912, had become a socialist through reading. He built his paper on the conviction that plain talk would convert others to the socialist cause. From its Kansas headquarters, the Appeal published an eclectic mix of news (particularly of strikes and political campaigns), essays, poetry, fiction, humor, and cartoons. During and after World War I the paper declined in circulation, and it ceased publication in November 1922. This poem by feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman appeared in the September 28, 1912, issue." GMU History Matters

"Presents the text of an November 3, 1846 supporting the enfranchisement of women. Argument for the equality of men and women; Comments on the rights and conditions of women at the time." by Samuel J. May

"Women’s suffrage activists used a variety of tactics during World War I to advance their cause. While the more conservative North American Woman Suffrage Association energetically supported the war by knitting socks, selling war bonds, and preparing Red Cross supplies, members of the more militant National Women’s Party were arrested for picketing the White House. During a July, 1917, visit from representatives of the new Russian government, demonstrators in front of the White House appealed to the envoys to support suffrage for American women as a condition for Russia’s remaining in the Allied camp. The banner roused the ire of patriotic passersby, and soon after this photograph was taken an angry crowd attacked the suffragists."

"A humorous and highly entertaining account of suffrage written by a man married to a suffragist who is also a supporter of the woman suffrage movement."

"In the early 20th century suffragists employed many different tactics in their struggle to win the vote for women. Members of the militant National Woman’s Party (NWP), for example, rejected the patient waiting espoused by much of the movement. Some NWP members even chained themselves to the White House gates—an action that led to sentences in the Occoquan Workhouse. In this 1973 interview with historian Sherna Gluck, Ernestine Hara Kettler, a young woman of radical immigrant background, recalled her stint in the workhouse."

"The site contains a slightly expanded and fully searchable version of the print publication American Women: A Library of Congress Guide for the Study of Women's History and Culture in the United States (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 2001). The guide has been redesigned for online use, with added illustrations and links to existing digitized material located throughout the Library of Congress Web site. These materials are supplemented by a small number of newly digitized items that provide a sample of the many relevant types of materials available in Library of Congress holdings (see Building the Digital Collection). The Research Guide also provides practical search tips, detailed collection summaries of the Library's voluminous multiformat holdings, and links to fuller catalog record descriptions and digitized material (see About the Guide for further information regarding the content and structure of the Research Guide portion of the site, as well as tips for using its search feature)." Library of Congress

"The National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) Collection is a library of nearly 800 books and pamphlets documenting the suffrage campaign that were collected between 1890 and 1938 by members of NAWSA and donated to the Rare Books Division of the Library of Congress on November 1, 1938.

The bulk of the collection is derived from the library of Carrie Chapman Catt, president of NAWSA from 1900-1904, and again from 1915-1920. Additional materials were donated to the NAWSA Collection from the libraries of other members and officers, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, Alice Stone Blackwell, Julia Ward Howe, Elizabeth Smith Miller, and Mary A. Livermore."

"The collection contains, among other materials, posters, playbills, songsheets, notices, invitations, proclamations, petitions, timetables, leaflets, propaganda, manifestos, ballots, tickets, menus, and business cards. There are more than 28,000 items in the collection with 10,172 available online. The material dates from the seventeenth century to the present day and covers innumerable topics."

"Photographs from the Records of the National Woman's Party Photographs from the Records of the National Woman's Party "
Library of Congress

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"This collection consists of records of the Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Further Extension of Suffrage to Women, including Executive, Education and Organization Committee minutes; secretary's and annual meeting reports; miscellaneous correspondence; lectures; and printed material. Also included are an institutional history, legislative history of suffrage movement, and other papers relating to the activities of the founders."

"Presents the text of Minor v. Happersett, an 1874 United States Supreme Court ruling which dealt with a woman in Missouri wishing to vote under a provision of the Fourteenth Amendment. Details of the case; Ruling of the court."

"Established in 1897, the Mississippi Woman Suffrage Association (MWSA) sought "to use every available means in our power to obtain for the women of Mississippi the right of franchise." The twenty-five items in the collection document their efforts in growing the association, printing and distributing literature, and proposing legislation on issues of particular interest to females."

Senator Vest Nixes Woman Suffrage
"In an 1887 speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate, Democratic Senator George G. Vest of Missouri put forth traditional arguments that a woman’s proper place was at home, not the ballot box. "

FEBRUARY 1859 ATLANTIC MAGAZINE
by Thomas Wentworth Higginson

From the National Archives Teaching with Documents site (scroll all the way to the bottom to see an image of the actual petition)

"This series focuses on the women's suffrage movement in eastern Kentucky in 1920. Women discuss their family histories, women's roles in society in the 1920s, home life, the suffrage movement, voting methods and practices, moonshining, Prohibition, the influenza epidemic of 1918, buying votes, Pikeville in the 1920s, Katherine Langley, John Langley, Josephine K. Henry, Bessie Arnold, and June Stanley."

"In 1920, after more than seventy years of struggle, the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granted women the right to vote. While nineteenth-century suffrage campaigns gained partial voting rights for women in twenty states, beginning in 1910 the push for suffrage took on a new urgency under the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and the more radical National Woman’s Party (NWP). Their campaigns reached wide audiences, in part because suffragists had learned to spread their messages through imaginative use of various media. Supporters held old-fashioned pageants and street parades as well as statewide tours, thanks to the relatively new technology of automobiles. “Der Sufferegetsky,” a Yiddish suffrage song, illustrates yet another medium used in the campaign for women’s enfranchisement. In the lyrics, a female suffragist imagined the days when women would be treated like people and men would do the cooking. Her male interlocutor glumly predicted that emancipated women would mistreat men. [English translation follows Yiddish.]" GMU History Matters

"Members of the National Woman’s Party (NWP) took some of the most militant actions in the struggle for suffrage in the early 20th century. NWP members who had been imprisoned in the Occoquan Workhouse went on a hunger strike to draw international attention to their cause. Prison authorities responded with brutal force feedings. The excerpt included here, from the clandestine prison diary of NWP member Rose Winslow, described the rigors of that experience. Born in Poland, Rose Winslow (her given name was Ruza Wenclawska) started working in a Pennsylvania textile mill at age eleven, quitting eight years later when she developed tuberculosis." GMU History Matters

"In 1920, after more than seventy years of struggle, the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granted women the right to vote. While nineteenth-century suffrage campaigns gained partial voting rights for women in twenty states, beginning in 1910 the push for suffrage took on a new urgency under the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and the more radical National Woman’s Party (NWP). Their campaigns reached wide audiences, in part because suffragists had learned to spread their messages through imaginative use of various media. Supporters held old-fashioned pageants and street parades as well as statewide tours, thanks to the relatively new technology of automobiles. Suffragists also reached large audiences through newspapers. In Alice Duer Miller’s “Unauthorized Interviews,” originally published as newspaper columns in the New York Tribune, the pro-suffrage writer spoofed male legislators with clever reversals of gender stereotypes: the men were petulant and irrational, while the women suffragists remained cool and logical." GMU History Matters

"In 1920, after more than seventy years of struggle, the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granted women the right to vote. While nineteenth-century suffrage campaigns gained partial voting rights for women in twenty states, beginning in 1910 the push for suffrage took on a new urgency under the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and the more radical National Woman’s Party (NWP). Their campaigns reached wide audiences, in part because suffragists had learned to spread their messages through imaginative use of various media. Drawing on domestic traditions of parlor plays and dramatic tableaux, suffragists used brief plays and monologues to enliven their own meetings and to enlist new members through performances at women’s clubs and community theaters. Marie Jenney Howe wrote this Antisuffrage Monologue for the drama group of the New York Woman’s Suffrage Party and other suffrage organizations. In it, she parodied anti-suffragist arguments that relied on stereotypes of female dependence, irrationality, and delicacy even as they also warned that women voters would exert too much power. Howe, a Unitarian minister, later founded Heterodoxy, a group of women intellectuals and radicals in New York City’s Greenwich Village." GMU History Matters

"In the early 1970s the Suffragists Oral History Project, under the auspices of the Bancroft Library's Regional Oral History Office, collected interviews with twelve leaders and participants in the woman's suffrage movement. Tape-recorded and transcribed oral histories preserved the memories of these remarkable women, documenting formative experiences, activities to win the right to vote for women, and careers as leaders of the movements for welfare and labor reform, world peace, and the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. Now, 25 years later, the nineteenth century meets the twenty-first as the words of these activist women, born from the 1860s to the 1890s, are made accessible for future scholarly research and public information via the Internet. "

Includes the complete trial record, the Supreme Court decision, the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, political cartoons, etc.

National American Woman Association Collection contains books, pamphlets and other sources documenting the suffrage movement 1848-1921.

A collection of documents from the Wisconsin Historical Society

From the National Archives' Teaching with Documents site

Consists of articles and news on women’s suffrage and political rights, suffrage leaders, rural women of the Midwest and West, political and international issues, local, regional, & national politics, labor laws, Women’s Leagues, Woman’s Political Party, national political parties, anti-suffrage, marriage and divorce, property laws, reproductive rights, African Americans, tradeswomen, international suffrage movement, crime, national women’s suffrage organizations, law enforcement, Spanish-American War, Native American women, health and medical practice, education, National Federation of Women’s Clubs, women’s patriotic organizations, and others.

"The Montana Historical Society created this website as part of a commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of women’s suffrage in Montana. While the site is no longer being updated, it still provides a wealth of information on Montana women’s history. "

"Held in the Macpherson Collection by and about Women at the Ella Strong Denison Library at Scripps College, the Women's Suffrage and Equal Rights Collection traces the development of the American women’s suffrage movement with a significant focus on California's history. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the collection primarily emphasizes the years from 1901-1924, preceding and immediately following the ratification of the 19th Amendment.

Contents include leaflets, flyers, newspaper articles, suffrage programs, magazine clippings, and memorabilia from the United States, with correspondence and ephemera related to suffrage pioneers such as Susan B. Anthony, Alice Park, and Carrie Chapman Catt. Additional resources are from Great Britain, Canada, India, Japan, and Europe. The collection represents central themes and issues concerning gender, labor, and politics, many of which continue to resonate today."

NOTES
Half-title: The writings of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, v. IV.
The first essay "Ought women to learn the alphabet?" appeared originally in the "Atlantic monthly," Feb. 1859, the remaining papers in "Common sense about women," which was made up largely of papers from the "Woman's journal." cf. Pref.

Includes the publications: The Lily, 1849-1851; National Citizen and Ballot Box, 1878-1881; The Revolution, 1868-1872; The New Citizen, 1909-1912; The Western Woman Voter, 1911-1913; The Remonstrance, 1890-1913; The National Standard: A Women’s Suffrage and Temperance Journal, 1870-1872; and the compilations: The 19th Amendment Victory: A Newspaper History, 1762-1922; and The 19th Amendment Victory: Books, 1812-1923.

"Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly was an American weekly newspaper first published on May 14, 1870 by sisters Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin. It was among the first publications to be published by women.[1] It lasted until June 10, 1876." Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodhull_%26_Claflin%27s_Weekly