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The Suffrage Activists of Brooklyn

Lucie Levine. "Brownstones and ballot boxes: The fight for women’s suffrage in Brooklyn." 6sqft.com. March 15, 2018.

Era: Post-Suffrage Era | Media: Web-based

6SqFt, a website that covers New York City, has put together this resource explaining the leading suffrage activists that came out of Brooklyn, New York. The author, Lucie Levine, writes:

Today, Brooklyn is home of all things avant-garde, but King’s County has always led the pack. Beginning as early as 1868, the women of Brooklyn established one of the first suffrage organizations in the country and began advocating for women’s enfranchisement and political equality. The “wise women of Brooklyn,”as they were lauded in suffrage literature, made some of the foremost contributions to the movement. From the Silent Sentinels, who organized the first March on Washington, to the African American women who established the nation’s first suffrage organization by and for black women, Brooklyn was home to extraordinary advocates.

The article features blurbs of eight Brooklyn-based suffrage activists. They include women like Anna C. Field, who founded the Brooklyn Equal Rights Association, and Sarah Garnet, the first female African-American principal of a school who started the Equal Suffrage League of Brooklyn, the nation’s first suffrage group founded by black women.

Read the whole article here.

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