SUFFRAGE STATE BY STATE

“Her Flag” by Marilyn Artus

The National Women’s History Alliance has put together a very thorough newsletter detailing commemorative events broken down by state, as well as a list of relevant media and resources celebrating the centennial through 2020 and into 2021.

Highlights include local projects and celebrations, large-scale art pieces and monuments, museum exhibits and more. The newsletter will also serve as a lasting resource once the month of celebration is through after August 26, 2020, as it contains a wealth of information and links to ongoing projects and educational resources related to women’s history and the suffrage movement.

View suffrage centennial events in each state.

Exhibition: Votes for Women: A Portrait of Persistence

Here you can read about the National Portrait Gallery’s suffrage centennial exhibition, “Votes for Women: A Portrait in Persistence.” From the website: “Through portraiture, biography, and material culture, the exhibition examines the contributions of the radical women in antislavery societies; women activists of the late nineteenth century; the “New Woman” of the turn of the century; and the militant suffragists of the 1910s. This presentation also highlights the struggles that minority women endured long after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. The exhibition is curated by Kate C. Lemay, historian and director of Portal, Portrait Gallery’s Scholarly Center, National Portrait Gallery.”

 

 

Exhibition with VIDEO: the New York Society Library: Women Get the Vote: A Historic Look at the Nineteenth Amendment

The New York Society Library presented a new exhibit on women’s suffrage called “Women Get the Vote: A Historic Look at the Nineteenth Amendment.” On this page, find a rundown of the opening reception with photos of the exhibit, the cartoon postcards, the model for the proposed Central Park monument depicting Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and a video and text of Brooke Kroeger’s remarks at the event. The exhibition runs through August. (Note that in Washington, DC, the National Portrait Gallery exhibition, “Votes for Women: A Portrait in Persistence,” opens March 29, 2019, and runs through January 5, 2020.)

The library’s website explains the exhibit:

In Women Get the Vote, selections from the Library’s holdings bring to light the literature from a social and political revolution that reverberates down to the present day. Books, archival materials, and rare treasures on display include the early suffragist publication Votes for Women Broadside; Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and the 1882 edition of History of Woman Suffrage, edited by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage. Also featured are biographies of Alice Paul, the British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst, and legendary abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth.

Women Get the Vote also showcases the activities of two Library members engaged in the struggle: Mrs. John Winters Brannan, the daughter of newspaper editor Charles A. Dana, who was sentenced to imprisonment at the Occoquan Workhouse in Lorton, Virginia for picketing the White House, and Rosalie Gardiner Jones, known for her fiery views on women’s rights.

The library scheduled a number of events related to the suffrage exhibit:

For more information on the exhibit and how to see it, visit the New York Society Library website. The exhibition is open to the public whenever the library is open. 

Virtual Archive: Tennessee and Passage of the 19th Amendment

The Tennessee State Library and Archives put together an online archival resource that documents the state’s pivotal role in passing the 19th Amendment, which ended the exclusion of women from using the ballot box.

36 states were needed to ratify that amendment. By the time the suffrage debate reached Tennessee, 35 states had ratified the change. In August 1920, Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the 19th Amendment. The state, and the rest of the United States, will celebrate the centennial of suffrage in 2020.

The state’s archives features documents, photos, cartoons and audio from pro-suffrage and anti-suffrage forces. The website explains:

This initial collection focuses on pro- and anti-suffrage activity in Tennessee in 1920, primarily drawing from the papers of suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt, anti-suffragist Josephine A. Pearson, and Governor Albert H. Roberts. In addition to letters, telegrams, political cartoons, broadsides, and photographs, it contains three audio clips from an interview conducted in 1983 with Abby Crawford Milton. As the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment approaches, we plan to add to this online collection, expanding the chronological and narrative scope.

 Check out the whole website here.

Exhibit: When Greenwich Village Was a Suffrage ‘Hotbed’

“Hotbed,” a new exhibit at the New-York Historical Society, explores how Greenwich Village, a neighborhood on the west side of lower Manhattan, served as a hub for suffragist activity in the early 20th century.

The exhibit features over 100 items that spotlight the feminist spirit of activists who congregated in Greenwich Village and fought for suffrage. “Hotbed” “bring[s] to life the bohemian scene and its energetic activist spirit,” the New-York Historical Society says on its website.

The exhibit website also features a small gallery of suffrage-related photographs.

In a New York Times write-up of the museum exhibit, Melissa Smith reports that the museum collection makes the case that the figures who gathered in Greenwich Village were a key reason why the suffrage cause’s popularity grew in size in the early 20th century.

Smith writes:

The political radicals who lived there were mainly middle class and educated, and for them dignity took on a new meaning as the key element in the fight for equal rights for women. From 1908 to 1915, these figures worked to persuade women that they had to stop behaving so much like ladies.

Smith notes that the exhibit’s opening gallery displays magazines, photographs and a map showing neighborhood meeting spots for suffrage activists.

Other galleries show how suffrage activists’ embrace of other causes boosted their own ranks, and how World War I and race divided the suffrage movement.

The New-York Historical Society’s “Hotbed” runs from November 03, 2017–March 25, 2018.

You can buy tickets here.

 

Advertisement: “Gift for National Woman’s Party”—Susan B. Anthony Medallion

This newspaper clipping from the May 5, 1922 edition of Tennessee’s Dickson County Herald shows sculptor Leila Usher next to her bas-relief portrait of the famous feminist and suffragist Susan B. Anthony. Usher presented this work to the National Woman’s Party, to be put on display at the organization’s national headquarters in Washington, DC.

A digitized version of the original photo of Usher and the portrait is available for viewing and download through the Library of Congress website.

You can read about the National Woman’s Party’s pro-suffrage public awareness campaign here and access an archive of primary source material related to the NWP here.

Digital Exhibit: Arkansas Women’s Suffrage Centennial

This virtual exhibit is part of the Arkansas Women’s Suffrage Centennial, a project that “commemorates the 100th anniversary of the right to vote for women in Arkansas by promoting events, encouraging research and education programs related to women’s suffrage, and helping to preserve the history of women’s suffrage within the state.”

The exhibit features a number of galleries, which include information as well as photographs and original documents from the suffrage era and focus on topics ranging from African-American suffragists to suffrage fashion.

Of particular interest is the exhibit’s media gallery, which features documents, cartoons, drawings, and photographs and includes this delightful suffrage fashion gallery.

Video-Slideshow: Film’s Role in the British Suffrage Movement

British Film Institute Silent Film Curator Bryony Dixon created this slideshow, which combines text, still images, and video clips from the British suffrage movement, to celebrate the release of the 2015 film Suffragette.

The slideshow includes historical background on the push for women’s suffrage in the UK, but its particular focus is the way in which suffragettes used film—then a silent, nascent medium—to further their cause. As the BFI puts it, Dixon “explores how the BFI’s collections highlight the passion and media savvy of the suffragettes’ struggle, offering a fascinating portrait of British women during this time.”

Dixon examines more than just suffragettes’ use of film, however; she also looks at their portrayal in non-suffragist movies from the era, and the slideshow includes short clips of some of the most famous examples of suffrage in early film, making it a useful—if compact—primary-source guide.

The webpage also contains a short documentary video in which Dixon discusses similar topics.

Online Exhibit: Motherhood, Social Service and Political Reform: Political Culture and Imagery of American Woman Suffrage

This online exhibit, “Motherhood, Social Service and Political Reform: Political Culture and Imagery of American Woman Suffrage,” follows women’s long road to the vote, focusing on the “distinct female political culture and imagery” of the suffrage movement.

The exhibit allows you either to take an in-depth look at the history of women’s suffrage or to take a shorter tour through an image gallery. The in-depth journey provides commentary, photographs, and documents of the history of the movement, including an exploration of how themes of domestic life and motherhood were used to advance movement goals. The image gallery contains 50 images of pamphlets, posters, and other paraphernalia used to rally support for the movement.

An updated image exhibit, “Creating a Female Political Culture,” curated by Edith P. Mayo and the National Women’s History Museum and released in January 2017, presents many of the same images from the bigger exhibit in slideshow format, with a main image and detailed text description on each slide.

National Portrait Gallery: Women’s Suffrage

The Women’s Suffrage National Portrait Gallery showcases 13 portraits —including drawings, paintings, and photographs— of important leaders of the suffrage movement. These include well-known figures, such as Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) at the time of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who helped organize the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, the founding moment of the movement for women’s suffrage. Each record provides an image of the portrait (including a link to download a savable version of the image), a short description of the figure profiled, as well as more information on the location and details of the original artwork.