The Ann Lewis Women’s Suffrage Collection

The Ann Lewis Women’s Suffrage Collection is a privately owned collection of over 1,200 postcards, books, periodicals, and more on the suffrage era.

Readers can browse the following collections:

• Postcards and stamps
• Buttons and ribbons
• Manuscripts
• Books
• Periodicals
• Memorabilia

Each item includes a detailed description, permissions, and citation information.

Some gems from the site include this 1924 clipping from The Literary Digest declaring suffrage a failure and this 1915 postage stamp labelled, “Votes for Women, Pennsylvania.”

About the collector (from the website):

Ann F. Lewis was Senior Advisor to the 2008 Presidential Campaign of Hilary Rodham Clinton. She served as White House Communications Director for President Bill Clinton; as Vice President for Planned Parenthood Federation of America; as Political Director of the Democratic National Committee; and as Chief of Staff to then Congresswoman, now Senator Barbara Mikulski. Lewis has been a visiting lecturer at Brandeis University, and at the Annenberg School of the University of Pennsylvania. She was one of the founding members of the National Women’s Political Caucus.

The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign 1907-1914

Deemed too artistic for political history, too political for art history, the visual history of the campaign for women’s suffrage in Britain has long been neglected. In this comprehensive and pathbreaking study, Lisa Tickner discusses and illustrates British suffragists’ use of spectacle—the design of banners, posters, and postcards, the orchestration of mass demonstrations, etc.—in an unprecedented propaganda campaign.

A limited preview of a review of The Spectacle of Women and full-text access options is available through JSTOR.

Google Books offers a limited preview of the book. It is also available for sale through online sellers such as Amazon.com and through academic libraries (both as an e-book and in print). You can check WorldCat to see if there a library with access near you.

Anti-suffrage Poster: The Red Behind the Yellow, 1915

This poster urges readers to vote against a proposed—and ultimately unsuccessful—1915 amendment to the New York State Constitution, which would have granted women the right to vote. It equates support for women’s suffrage with support for socialist causes, arguing, “[e]very Socialist leader admits that the extension of the franchise to women is ESSENTIAL TO THE SUCCESS OF SOCIALISM.”

The New York State Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, the organization that distributed the poster, also published a prominent anti-suffrage newsletter, Woman’s Protest (rechristened Woman Patriot in 1918). The group’s founder, Josephine Dodge, believed that granting women suffrage would decrease their ability to effect change in their communities.

You can read more about the New York State Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage here, via Encyclopedia Britannica.

You can read more about Dodge and other prominent female anti-suffragists here, via National Public Radio.

The poster is from the Max Eastman Collection I, Lilly Library, University of Indiana, Bloomington, IN.

Pro- and Anti-Suffrage Posters

Pinterest has a multitude of British, US, and Canadian suffrage posters accessible via this link. Just one fine example is below.

Archive: Suffrage Resources of the National Woman’s Party

The National Woman’s Party collection at the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument in Washington, DC has a vast collection of books, periodicals, cartoons, scrapbooks, artifacts, and ephemera from the NWP’s history.  As the site describes its collection on its homepage:

The National Woman’s Party (NWP) collection housed at the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument is an important resource for the study of the suffrage movement and the campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). This unique collection, including the nation’s first feminist library, documents the mass political movement for women’s full citizenship in the 20th century, both in the United States and throughout the world. The collection contains books, scrapbooks, political cartoons, textiles, photographs, organizational records, fine arts, decorative arts, and artifacts produced primarily by women, about women.

The extensive holdings outline the history of the militant wing of the women’s movement in the United States, documenting the strategies and tactics of the movement, demonstrating the use of visual images as effective publicity tactics in a pre-electronic age, and revealing the international work of the National Woman’s Party in its historic quest for complete equality for American women.

You can read more about the tactics and techniques of the NWP here.

Woman Suffrage Memorabilia: A Site Devoted to Such Artifacts as Buttons, Post Cards, Ribbons, Sheet Music, and Ceramics

This delightful website, curated by Kenneth Florey, includes a plethora of rich visual materials from the suffrage era.

From the site:

The primary purpose of this site is to provide a repository for information about memorabilia connected to the woman suffrage movement in both England and America. Subjects discussed here will include woman suffrage buttons, suffrage ribbons, suffrage sashes, suffrage advertising cards, suffrage jewelry, suffrage sheet music, suffrage postcards, Cinderella stamps and other aspects of suffrage ephemera. The focus is not on pamphlets and autograph material, although articles about these types of items do appear on occasion.

Florey is also the author of American Woman Suffrage Postcards, a book of photographic history.

Votes for Women, a 1912 Suffrage Map of the United States

This map from the National American Woman Suffrage Association shows the status of women’s suffrage in the US in 1912, including the date when suffrage was granted in each state.

Poster: The Women’s Hour Has Struck – 1916

NAWSA, gearing up again for the new campaign, was in need of a fresh slogan. ‘Woman Suffrage Is Bound to Come’ had outlived its usefulness. A twenty-five dollar prize would go to the perfect tag line. Men’s League members on George Creel’s publicity committee dominated the judging: Cosmopolitan editor Edgar Sisson; Mark Sullivan of Colliers; John Cosgrave of the New York World; Robert Hobart Davis of Munsey’s; and Frank Crowninshield of Vanity Fair, who had shared in Puck’s February 20, 1915, suffrage issue about how the antis had converted him to the prosuffrage side by omitting any reference in their arguments to how many women worked outside the home. The winning entry:

THE WOMAN’S HOUR HAS STRUCK.

WOMAN SUFFRAGE IS COMING.

—Adapted from Brooke Kroeger, The Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote. Excelsior Editions/SUNY Press 2017, p.189 n.p. 323  Information is from the Arkansas City Daily Traveler, 7 September 1916 p. 4, available through newspapers.com on this page.

Here is a downloadable image of the poster, which is in the public domain.