Media-related Ephemera in the University of Rochester’s Trove of Suffrage Material

In March 2017, the University of Rochester acquired a number of never-before-seen letters, ephemera, and other documents sent to and collected by Isabella Beecher Hooker, a lecturer and activist who fought for women’s suffrage.

The letters, discovered in an attic, include missives authored by suffrage leaders Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. These letters, as well as newspaper clippings, petitions, resolutions, are digitized here.

The University of Rochester explained more about the documents in a press release:

A recently discovered trove of letters, speeches, petitions, photographs, and pamphlets—forgotten for a century in attics, barns, and on porches—now opens a window onto the quotidian details of that historic movement. Originally owned by suffragist Isabella Beecher Hooker, the collection includes dozens of letters from fellow movement leaders Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The collection has now found a new home in the University of Rochester’s Department of Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation (RBSCP).

Part of a notable family of reformers, Hooker was the daughter of the Reverend Lyman Beecher and a half-sister of social reformer and abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher, educator Catharine Beecher, and novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe.

TIME magazine published  one of the discovered letters from Anthony and Stanton.

But it is not only letters contained in this trove. The collection includes newspaper articles and resolutions on women’s suffrage.

One of the documents in the collection is an 1871 resolution adopted by the Republican State Convention of Massachusetts. The resolution demands the right to vote for “all law-abiding, tax-paying American citizens, and will hail the day when the educated intellect and enlightened woman finds direct expression at the ballot box.” Read the resolution here.

A January 1872 newspaper article from The National Republican, available here, reports on a thousand women from Albany, New York who came to the U.S. Senate to protest “against female suffrage.”

Another document from 1872 (seen here), addressed to the “editors of the United States,” invites the media to publish pro-suffrage arguments in the aftermath of the U.S. Senate refusing to hear from them in person and not printing their arguments alongside a Senate document against suffrage.

Other documents that are not digitized, but can be found in person, are detailed here. They include a leaflet that “calls for the women journalists covering the Centennial Exposition to be properly recognized and allowed to practice journalism,” and a “letter to the editor like article from Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Victoria Woodhull.”

For more information, read this New York Times article on the recently discovered documents, or watch a video produced by the university below.

To learn how to access this archival collection in person, click here .  You can access digitized copies of documents here.

Interview: Susan Ware on the “Long 19th Amendment” and Harvard Schlesinger Library’s Plans for the Suffrage Centennial

More on this site regarding Susan Ware: See the post on her new book, from Harvard University Press Why They Marched and Ware’s Washington Post essay on the need to return black women to the center of suffrage movement history. What follows is an interview with her by Alex Kane as she took the helm of the Schlesinger Library’s suffrage centennial commemoration initiative. 

Harvard’s Schlesinger Library is gearing up to mark the suffrage centennial in 2020.

Thanks to a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the library plans “cutting-edge interdisciplinary scholarship through long-term fellowships, summer residencies, public programming and exhibits, undergraduate seminars, and an international scholarly conference” on women’s suffrage.

To learn more about what the Schlesinger Library plans for the suffrage centennial, Alex Kane, a researcher for this website, spoke with Susan Ware, a Schlesinger Library Council member and a scholar and author on women’s history and suffrage.

Alex Kane: Could you tell me what the Schlesinger Library’s plans are for the next few years as it relates to suffrage?

Susan Ware: The first plug I have to make is for the Schlesinger Library itself, which is one of the main repositories of archival material on the suffrage movement. And in fact, we’re celebrating our seventy-fifth anniversary this year, and the core collection when the library was founded in 1943 came directly out of the suffrage movement, with former suffragists wanting to preserve that history and make sure that it was accessible to future generations.

We take that legacy seriously, and so the upcoming centennial has been on our radar for quite a while. I think what the library is trying to do is to focus especially on scholarly initiatives around the suffrage centennial. We realize there are state commemorations and there’ll be plays and recreations of suffrage pageants, which are exciting because you get people interested. But I think that we’ve decided that our role really could be more of a scholarly one, and that we really wanted to encourage new questions and new knowledge about the suffrage movement and its significance to a broad range of 19th, 20th,, and 21st century topics.

As we worked to think about our various programs, we came up with the concept of the “long 19th Amendment,” and that is proving very useful to us as we plot our various activities. What it allows us to do is look at traditional suffrage history, which is pretty much bounded by Seneca Falls in 1848 and the passage of the amendment in 1920, but also expand the chronology to what came before Seneca Falls and especially what came after 1920, because for African-American women in particular, 1920 isn’t much of a milestone.

I think we also were trying to expand our understanding of suffrage by making it wider, by putting the suffrage movement in conversation with other movements for social change—especially activism around the Reconstruction period and civil rights and the rights of African-American men. Women’s suffrage has been put off in its own separate silo, and we’re trying to challenge that.

And we have been very fortunate to receive a generous grant from the Mellon Foundation for our “long 19th Amendment” project, and we are using that in various ways. We are able now to offer fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute and also at the Schlesinger Library, which we hope will encourage new scholarship and the creation of new knowledge about suffrage. We are planning a major scholarly conference for the fall of 2020. Mellon is trying to encourage interaction with undergraduates, so there’s a teaching component. There will be at least two, if not three, new courses that are seeded by that money and they will be archive-intensive courses taught at the Schlesinger Library drawing on archival resources and the staff at the library.

Then, there’s what we’re calling a digital portal. A lot of our suffrage material is being digitized, and we want to make that available. But we also want to see if we can use our position as a go to place for women’s history in a collaborative way so that we can be linking with other institutions and scholarly resources that are also collecting material for posting new content on suffrage.

Issues of gender and citizenship and voting are topics that are more timely than ever. We’re really hoping that the national conversation around these issues can be informed by history. We would like to play a role in providing some of that and we hope to come up with some new questions and some new approaches to how we think and teach women’s suffrage.

AK: Why has the Schlesinger Library been such a repository for women’s history?

SW: The former Radcliffe College, and now the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, has been very supportive of scholarship on women. And the Schlesinger Library, when it was founded in 1943, was under the bureaucratic administration of Radcliffe College. It was specifically founded as a repository to document the history of women in America, and in the years since then, the library’s collection has just grown exponentially, far beyond the original, big cache of suffrage material.

They had a black women’s oral history project, Pauli Murray’s papers are there, and June Jordan’s, and now a lot on reproductive rights and justice. It’s really part of a larger conversation about the history of women in America and suffrage is part of that. That’s why suffrage is so much a part of our history—but that’s not all we do, far from it.

AK: I wanted to highlight the concept of the “long 19th Amendment.” Could you explain that and how it relates to other “long centuries” in the academy and how the Schlesinger Library is going to engage with the concept.

SW: We were influenced by other uses of the concept of “long.” The two most significant ones are the “long 19th  century,” which 19th  century historians and early American historians use to cover the founding of the United States through World War One, because bounding it just by 1800 and 1900 loses what came before and where it’s going to go. Then there’s the “long civil rights movement,” because some of the richest material now that’s coming out is the backstory or the prequel to what happens in the 1950s and 1960s, because it doesn’t just come out of nowhere at that moment. And then you also want to see what happens afterwards. That has been very much our goal with suffrage.

One of the people involved with this project is Lisa Tetrault, who teaches at Carnegie Mellon. She pointed out with her book The Myth of Seneca Falls that Seneca Falls is a constructed starting point. It was made for specific purposes by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to serve their view of suffrage history and their role in that. But it wasn’t the first women’s rights convention ever, and it certainly wasn’t the first time these issues had been raised. And so, by pushing the timeline back we could look at what Maria Stewart was doing, an African-American woman, when she’s speaking in public about women’s rights in the 1830s or early attempts to change property laws. So that is already turning out to be a rich focus point in terms of thinking where this movement came from and seeing it as part of a much bigger story.

And then on the other hand not stopping the story in 1920. Something that’s really damned the poor woman suffrage movement is people thinking, “oh women got the vote and then they just went back to bed, and nothing happened, and they didn’t really exercise the vote. They didn’t change the world. End of story.” Well, it’s not the end of the story, and there is just a fascinating continuity of the activism starting with African-American women. They are the teeth of the story. And I suspect that’s going to be one of the take away points from our various conferences and programming. We do need to think about questions of voting rights, and who can vote and who can’t vote and why and how you mobilize. I think there’s a direct line between the suffrage spectacles and the Women’s March of 2017. So that way we’re able to put the suffrage mobilization in a larger conversation. That’s really what we’re trying to do and it is absolutely vital not to just how we teach and write history, but to where we are today. And I don’t think anybody could argue the question of citizenship and the vote and gender are not very much on people’s minds at the moment.

AK: And are you as a scholar going to be contributing to some of this new work on suffrage?

SW: Whether I contribute or not remains to be seen, but I have written a new book that will be out next May. And I might as well make a pitch for it. It’s called Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote, and it will be out with Harvard University Press.

The book is a history of the women’s suffrage movement, but it’s not told in a top down way. It is 19 biographical portraits of lesser known and unknown women who participated in the movement. Each one of them is paired with a suffrage object that has its own story, and when read together they actually tell the history of women’s suffrage. It’s told in a way, I hope, that makes people understand why it was so important to women—why they were in some cases willing to give their lives for. I’m a biographer, so I was drawn to biography as I wanted to tell the story and almost all the stories and almost all of the objects are found at the Schlesinger Library.

So, this book is in some ways my love letter to the Schlesinger Library, which has been my institutional home since I was a graduate student at Harvard in the 1970s. So, I feel like I’ve come full circle.

AK: And you mentioned that you know the contributions of women of color will be a big part of the Schlesinger Library’s activities. Could you explain how those stories been marginalized in the past, and why you think it’s important to amplify them now?

SW: I think they were marginalized in the past in part because African-American women suffragists were not all that welcomed by the mainstream white organizations. And certainly, when the original materials were collected at the Schlesinger Library and other places, there was very little material on African-American suffrage.

Now, people have gone back and found [material]—I give a huge shout out to Tom Dublin and Katie Sklar of the Women and Social Movement’s web site and the Black women’s suffragist project.

Finding material about these women, documenting their contributions, is changing the story in incredibly exciting ways because it makes us think about the suffrage story in an intersectional way. We can’t just talk about gender—we have to talk about race as well. We should be talking about class and other things, too. It’s really, really important. And there’s a vibrancy to the research going on that is incredibly exciting.

What hasn’t happened yet—and I will be curious to see whether it does—is whether as part of the the Centennial we also learn more about other groups that were marginalized. I’m thinking especially of Mexican-American women and Latinas in the Western states. I’m thinking also about Native American women and the vote. That’s an incredibly complicated topic but it should be part of the story. And then Chinese immigrants. There were very few Chinese-American women because of immigration restrictions, but they couldn’t vote either. And so there are stories out there that are waiting to be uncovered.

They will enrich our understanding of this movement and make it impossible to dismiss it as just something that benefited white, middle-class women. I’m not denying that racism is an important part of the story, but there is much more going on there and it’s going to make for a much richer understanding of coalitions, and this question of why the vote was so important to people. What does that mean? What does it stand for? Why did people fight so hard for it?

I have a feeling that some of the chronologies of, let’s say, especially for Latinas in the West, may be a little later than 1920 in terms of their political mobilization. I’m thinking about things like the LULAC [League of United Latin American Citizens], and some of the other civil rights organizations founded in the 20s 30s. So there may or may not be a suffrage component. I think that that’s kind of the next frontier and I’m really excited to see what gets turned up.

The United States of Anxiety Podcast: Suffrage Monuments in Tennessee

“The United States of Anxiety,” a podcast that airs on WNYC, profiled Paula Casey, an author, speaker and expert on women’s suffrage.

The podcast episode spotlights Casey’s push to create a “suffrage heritage” trail in Tennessee, the state that clinched the women suffrage movement’s victory. Tennessee was the decisive 36th state that voted for women’s suffrage in 1920.

Here’s WNYC’s summary of the podcast episode:

Paula Casey is on a mission. She wants to erect a statue in Memphis dedicated to those who fought for a woman’s right to vote more than a century ago. The problem: There’s a Confederate monument in the way. And… meet the woman who vowed to shut down women’s suffrage forever.

Listen to the entire episode below, or at WNYC’s website.

The Tennessee Woman Suffrage Heritage Trail

In 1920, Tennessee became the decisive 36th state to vote in favor of granting women the right to vote.

100 years later, local women have created an online resource filled with information about the suffrage fight in Tennessee, as well as maps directing visitors wishing to visit important suffrage-related sites in the state. The website also features a timeline of the women’s suffrage effort in the state, historical context, and video of suffrage events in Tennessee.

The resource was created by Paula Casey, a publisher and speaker on women’s suffrage, and Jacque Hillman, the owner/designer of Reconfigured Art Jewelry and senior partner in The HillHelen Group LLC Publishing Co.

Casey and Hillman also advocated for the creation of a number of statues in Tennessee that honor leaders in the fight for women’s voting rights.

They explained why they created the Tennessee Woman Suffrage Heritage Trail in an Op-Ed published in The Commercial Appeal:

As the 19th Amendment’s centennial in 2020 draws closer, there will be increased interest in this nonviolent revolution. We have put together the Tennessee Woman Suffrage Heritage Trail (tnwomansuffrageheritagetrail.com) to identify those sites and people who were instrumental in the woman suffrage movement.

Check out the entire website here.

New York Heritage’s Digital Archive on Women’s Suffrage in NY

The New York Heritage research portal has created a wide-ranging digital archive of materials on the women’s suffrage movement in New York.

This archive of records from libraries in New York and across the country touches on everything from the indigenous roots of the women’s suffrage movement to the men who backed suffrage to the Women’s March of 2017. It features original photographs, pamphlets, posters, speeches, articles and more.

The digital archive was put together by Julia Corrice,  Susan Goodier, and Sally Roesch Wagner of the South Central Regional Library Council. Their partners were the Empire State Library Network and New York Heritage Digital Collections. Humanities New York provided funding.

Explore the entire archive here.

Meneese Wall’s Suffrage Art Prints and Notecards

Meneese Wall, a graphic artist and designer based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, has created a series of signed art prints and notecards to commemorate and celebrate the upcoming 2020 centennial of the 19th Amendment’s passage.

Inspired by historical events, people, quotes and memorabilia from the suffrage movement, Meneese’s graphic illustrations are paired with text that give historical context to her work. To date, Meneese has featured the likes of Susan B. Anthony, Alice Paul, and pro-suffrage journals like The Suffragist and The Woman Voter, and she continues to create new pieces throughout the lead-up to the centennial.

To learn more about Meneese and her work, visit her website here and her artwork catalogue here.  Meneese encourages communication, so you can email her at meneese@meneesewall.com.

Meneese has graciously allowed this website to feature 17 of her suffrage pieces:

 

 

 

Library of Congress Archives of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton

The Library of Congress digitized and organized thousands of documents of suffrage leaders Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

The collection spans the years 1840 to 1906, and includes 500 items from Anthony’s papers and 1,000 items from Stanton’s papers.

The Library of Congress wrote about some of the highlights included in the archives:

  • An official report and newspaper clippings of the historic 1848 convention for women’s rights in Seneca Falls, New York;
  • A pamphlet printed by Frederick Douglass’ North Star newspaper after Douglass attended the convention and spoke forcefully for women’s suffrage;
  • Stanton’s handwritten draft of her controversial “The Woman’s Bible,” which nearly divided the suffrage movement when it was published in 1895;
  • Twenty-five volumes of handwritten diaries kept by Anthony on her activities and events of the day, such as President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination;
  • Scrapbooks with newspaper clippings, programs and other accounts of the time that would be impossible to re-create today;
  • Correspondence on the multivolume “History of Woman Suffrage,” the first three volumes of which the two women co-edited with Matilda Joslyn Gage;
  • Speeches and correspondence on the temperance and antislavery movements.

Browse the Stanton papers here. Read the Anthony papers here. Each link includes finding aids for the archives as well as teaching resources.

 

Frances E. W. Harper: A Black Suffragist, Abolitionist and Author

In a piece for the Women’s Media Center, English professor Koritha Mitchell exhorts the reader to learn about Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Mitchell’s piece on Harper’s life is a good place to start that education.

Harper was a dedicated activist, poet, public speaker and author who fought for suffrage, the abolition of slavery and civil rights.

Mitchell highlights Harper’s split with suffragists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She writes:

Even though she commanded considerable audiences, Watkins Harper remained subject to racism, making her refusal to abandon predominantly white organizations all the more admirable. In 1869, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton effectively left the American Equal Rights Association because it was supporting the Fifteenth Amendment, which would institute black male suffrage before white women won the vote. Refusing to follow Anthony and Stanton, Watkins Harper noted that she could not rely on white women to prioritize the concerns of their nonwhite sisters.

Indeed, Stanton had drawn a clear line years earlier, in the December 1865 issue of the National Anti-Slavery Standard. She explained that white women had been staunch supporters of securing “freedom for the Negro.” However, in light of emancipation, the Negro is no longer “lowest in the scale of being,” and “it becomes a serious question whether we had better stand aside and see ‘Sambo’ walk into the kingdom first.”

Such remarks may have sparked Harper’s 1866 observation: “I do not believe that white women are dew-drops just exhaled from the skies. I think that like men they may be divided into three classes, the good, the bad, and the indifferent.” Always uncompromising, Harper continued to command respect. She spoke at the 1888 International Council of Women convention. This gathering was organized by Anthony and Stanton’s National Woman Suffrage Association for the purpose of linking women’s organizations from around the world. (It still exists today.)

Read Mitchell’s full piece at the Women’s Media Center here.

WNYC had a segment on Harper’s clash with white suffragists in July 2012.

To learn more about the life of Harper, here are some links to scholarly work, including some free articles:

Frances Watkins Harper and the Search for Women’s Interracial Alliances, chapter five in Susan B. Anthony and the Struggle for Equal Rights. Full PDF for free here.

Harper, Historiography, and the Race/Gender Opposition in Feminism, Pilot Scholars. Full PDF for free here.

Reconstructing the Nation: Frances Harper, Charlotte Forten, and the Racial Politics of Periodical Publication, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society. Full PDF for free here.

The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Harriet Jacobs, Frances Harper, Anita Hill, American Literature.

“The White Women All Go for Sex”: Frances Harper on Suffrage, Citizenship, and the Reconstruction South, African American Review.

“In the Sunny South”: Reconstructing Frances Harper as Southern, Southern Quarterly.

“Are Women People?” The Poetry of Alice Duer Miller

“Are women people?” It’s a question you may have seen floating around the Internet lately, an absurd line calling attention to patriarchy, sexism and the dehumanization of women.

But the line did not come out of nowhere. It has a very specific history that begins with Alice Duer Miller.

Miller was a Barnard College-graduate who made her mark as a writer for publications like Harper’s and Scribner’s. She also advised the New Yorker and wrote screenplays. Later in life, she wrote the story-poem “The White Cliffs,” a work published in 1940 that encouraged the U.S. to join England in World War II. It became her most famous work and was turned into a movie.

The line “Are women people?” is the title of a series of pieces she wrote for the New York Tribune, the newspaper owned by the Whig Party advocate Horace Greeley, from 1914-1917, the year New York voted to give women the right to vote.

Those columns featured Miller’s poetic, satirical send-ups of those who were anti-suffrage. For instance, here’s Miller’s poem “Why We Oppose Pockets for Women”:

1. Because pockets are not a natural right.

2. Because the great majority of women do not want pockets. If they did they would have them.

3. Because whenever women have had pockets they have not used them.

4. Because women are required to carry enough things as it is, without the additional burden of pockets.

5. Because it would make dissension between husband and wife as to whose pockets were to be filled.

6. Because it would destroy man’s chivalry toward woman, if he did not have to carry all her things in his pockets.

7. Because men are men, and women are women. We must not fly in the face of nature.

8. Because pockets have been used by men to carry tobacco, pipes, whiskey flasks, chewing gum and compromising letters. We see no reason to suppose that women would use them more wisely.

The Hairpin has printed more of her columns here.

Miller’s “Are Women People” poems were collected and published in a book called Are Women People? A Book of Rhymes for Suffrage Times. You can read the entire book for free here on Project Gutenberg, a website featuring free books for download.

A pair not published in the book concern the abrupt resignation of Dudley Field Malone in September 1917 from his plum patronage post in the Woodrow Wilson administration, expressly to protest the president’s unwillingness to support the federal women’s suffrage amendment. Three years later, Malone would marry Doris Stevens, the suffrage leader and Alice Paul’s aide de camp. This is the poem that appeared in the Tribune on September 16, 1917:

Some men believe in suffrage

In a peculiar way,

They think that it is coming fast

But should not come to-day.

And others work and speak for it,

And yet you’ll sometimes find

Behind their little suffrage speech

A little axe to grind.

They put their Party interests first,

And suffrage well behind.

Of men who care supremely

That justice should be shown,

Who do not balk at sacrifice,

And make the cause their own,

I know, I think, of only one,

That’s Dudley Field Malone.

 

And, a month later, on October 14, 1917. she wrote of Byron Newton, Wilson’s choice for Malone’s successor at the port:

To Byron R. Newton

“Every true woman knows . . . Those things which God Almight and Nature designed them to do . . . ” Anti-suffrage interview of Mr. Newton

O, Mr. Newton, are you really sure

You know what each true woman knows and thinks?

No wonder that you go your way secure,

A wise young Oedipus to that old sphinx.

The woman question: it cannot perplex

Your intuition: many men are loath

To boast of understanding either sex,

But you, I gather, understand them both.

You, if I read you rightly, understand

Not only all that women know and hope,

But everything which God and Nature planned

In evolution. So, we cry with Pope:

‘Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:

God said, ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light.”

 

She ends her column with the following:

“The former Collector of the Port Dudley Field Malone resigned his post because the Administration was not taking a sufficiently active stand on woman suffrage. The new Collector is a violent anti-suffragist. If the Administration becomes more aggressive in its suffrage policy, will Mr. Newton show the same sincerity and courage that Mr. Malone showed—and resign?”

 

You can also read her columns in original newspaper form by utilizing the Fulton History website. Search “Alice Duer Miller” “Are Women People” for a list of her newspaper poems, which you can then read in PDF form. If you know the newspaper page and date of the column, you can also search by that.

If you have access to academic databases, you can read English scholar Mary Chapman’s analysis of Miller’s poetry and politics in this piece for the journal American Literary History. You can also search for that article on JStor.

The Journal of American Culture published this analysis of Miller’s humorous poetry.

 

The Suffrage Activists of Brooklyn

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.