BBC News: The Struggle for Women’s Suffrage

This short BBC News video from 2016 introduces a sculpture, housed in the British Parliament, that celebrates women’s suffrage in the United Kingdom. The work, titled “New Dawn,” is made of metal and illuminated glass whose lighting ebbs and flows in time with the tides in the nearby River Thames. The video also uses archival footage and photographs to look back at the women’s rights movement in the UK.

“New Dawn” was unveiled on June 7, 2016. The date marked the 150th anniversary of Member of Parliament (and famous philosopher) John Stuart Mill’s presentation to the House of Commons of the first mass petition advocating women’s enfranchisement. An excerpt from the UK Parliament’s website describes the watershed event:

Mill spoke on the petition on 17 July 1866. A year later, the petition led to the first debate on votes for women. On 20 May 1867 Mill tried to amend the Second Reform Bill to replace the word ‘man’ with ‘person’. He later described this as ‘perhaps the only really important public service I performed in the capacity as a Member of Parliament.’ The division was lost by 73 votes to 196, but Mill was delighted by the level of support, which came from both sides of the House.

St. Stephen Hall, the portion of Westminster Hall chosen to house the sculpture, was a frequent rallying point from which suffragettes protested and lobbied Parliament for the vote. The piece was created by artist Mary Branson.

You can view and explore “New Dawn” here, watch five short videos about it here, and learn more about the sculpture’s creation here.

You can also explore another important contribution Mill made to the suffrage movement: his May 20, 1867 speech before the House of Commons on the subject of women’s enfranchisement.

Lady Gaga Parody: Caught in a Bad Romance ‘Til We Have Suffrage

Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” is an infectious hit that easily gets stuck in your head. So it’s no wonder that Soomo Learning, an education company, decided to create a parody version for use as a teaching tool. Soomo Learning created the song, which has been watched over a million times, to teach students about the push to pass the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote.

The parody video, which won the Emmy for Informational or Instructional Program at the 27th Annual MidSouth Emmy Awards, features Meredith Garrison as Alice Paul, the women’s suffrage activist. Garrison as Paul sings:

Hey! We’ll raise our banner
Across this land hey!
‘Cause franchise isn’t just
The right of a man

It shows women activists marching for their right to vote, and also depicts efforts to suppress them.

Soomo Learning has put together an easy-to-use website about the parody, complete with sample lessons for teachers and lyrics.

In 2015, Sony/ATV, which published Lady Gaga’s song, filed a copyright claim with YouTube, which eventually took down the Soomo Learning parody, as the education company explains in a blog post. However, numerous copies of the parody exist online.

Recording: Rabbi Stephen S. Wise’s 1918 Speech “Women and Democracy”

Rabbi Stephen S. Wise of New York City’s Free Synagogue was one of the most sought-after suffrage speakers of the 1910s. This 1918 recording is representative of his most common pro-suffrage arguments. For more about Wise’s suffrage involvement—he was a founder of the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage of the State of New York, for instance—see Brooke Kroeger’s March 27, 2017 article in Tablet magazine, “Wise vs. Silverman, or New York’s Historic Rabbinical Women’s Suffrage Smack-Down.” The flip side of this recording is of remarks by Gertrude Foster Brown, one of the prime movers in the New York State campaign, featured here.

To read more about the roles men played in the struggle for women’s voting rights, see Kroeger’s book, The Suffragents.

A Broadside: Mission Statement of the National Men’s League for Woman Suffrage of 1912

Here is a broadside of the mission statement of the National Men’s League for Woman Suffrage, an organization of thousands of influential men across thirty five states from 1909-1919. It is attributed to the League’s president, James Lees Laidlaw, a New York financier, scion of Laidlaw & Company, and member of the board of directors of what became Standard & Poor’s. He was also, not coincidentally, the husband of Harriet Burton Laidlaw, one of the major figures of the last decade of the suffrage movement in New York State. The only known copy of the statement was found in a column by playwright George Middleton, reprinted in the May 17, 1912 issue of the St. John’s Globe, New Brunswick, CA. Middleton was the “suffrage husband” of actress and suffragist Fola LaFollette.

Here is a post about the mission statement for the Good Men Project by Brooke Kroeger, author of The Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote. Both the broadside and the Middleton column are appended below.

Pictures of the 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade

To mark the centennial anniversary of the 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade in Washington, DC, Atlantic magazine Senior Editor Alan Taylor collected 24 photographs to feature in a slideshow. Taylor explains why the march was so important, and selects some of the more striking images of the parade. There are also photos of a program for the parade, as well as portraits of the organizers.

Go to this link to see the photos, which are housed in the Library of Congress.

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.

The Root: How Racism Tainted Women’s Suffrage

This commentary by Monee Fields-White for The Root, republished by NPR on March 25, 2011 explores the complicated relationship between racism and women’s rights during the late 19th century. Fields-White focuses on the anti-lynching campaign by journalist Ida B. Wells and on the clashes between civil rights and women’s rights in the the era of woman suffrage efforts.