Nellie Bly for the New York Evening Journal at the 1913 Washington DC Suffrage Rally

Here is Nellie Bly’s article in the March 3, 1913, issue of the New York Evening Journal, writing about her experience as a sentry in the Washington DC Suffrage rally and parade the day before President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration. The University of Texas at Austin has the fullest run of the newspaper. Bly was never a card-carrying suffragist but clearly pro women’s rights. In 1896, she wrote about the suffrage convention of that year, also hosted in Washington DC, as well as about “Women of the Pulpit” and Susan B. Anthony in what is considered a seminal interview.

There is more about Bly’s article about the 1913 parade  in this article by Brooke Kroeger for the Gotham Center for New York History, titled “When the Suffrage Movement Got Its Makeover On.”

Hyperallergic on Cambridge’s Stash of British Suffrage Movement Posters

The art and culture news site Hyperallergic published a piece featuring Cambridge University’s discovery of British suffrage movement posters meant to rally support for women’s voting rights.

Author Claire Voon writes:

In 2016, staffers at Cambridge University Library discovered an old, brown parcel in its collections. Opening the package revealed that it had originally reached the library around 1910, and for over a century, its contents had gone unnoticed. Mysteriously addressed to “the Librarian,” the parcel held a bundle of well-preserved suffrage posters from the early 1900s. Its sender was Marion Phillips, a major figure of the suffrage movement in Britain, who was elected to parliament in 1929.

For the first time since the discovery, the library has organized a display featuring a selection of the posters. The small exhibition marks the centenary of the Representation of the People Act, which granted British women the right to vote — women over 30, that is, who met minimum property qualifications. (It wasn’t until 1928 that the full electoral equality was attained.)

The article also features 13 of the posters on display at Cambridge.

Read the whole article here.

Virtual Resource on Suffrage Leader Alice Paul

This website on suffrage activist Alice Paul was created by author and activist Zoe Nicholson (who is also the creator of the performance “Tea With Alice & Me“.)

It features a wealth of material on Paul, who utilized non-violent civil disobedience tactics to help win suffrage in the U.S.

The website has chapters on Paul’s life and political philosophy, photos, a bibliography of books and articles on Paul and video and audio.

Browse the whole website here.

Smithsonian Interviews Elaine Weiss on Tennessee’s Role in the Suffrage Fight

The book The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote, published in March 2018, tells the fascinating story of the fight over suffrage in Tennessee, the last state needed to secure a Constitutional amendment to give women full voting rights.

Smithsonian published an informative interview with the book’s author, Elaine Weiss. The interview discusses, among other topics, the role race played in the debate over suffrage in Tennessee, the money behind the anti-suffrage forces, and what conventional wisdom gets wrong about the suffrage movement.

Read the full interview here.

Video: Suffragists From the Stage

“Suffragists From the Stage” is a performance of pro-suffrage quotes that American actresses uttered during the fight for voting rights, a history lesson wrapped in a theatrical performance.

The performance by contemporary actresses features the words of figures like Mary Shaw, Fola La Follette, and Izetta Jewel,  accompanied by a slideshow to give more context to the speeches. The featured women were prominent stage actresses who used their platforms to advocate for women’s suffrage.

“Suffragists From the Stage” has been put on a number of times in New York.

This video is a sample of what you would see if you attended the performance:

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.

British National Archives: Documents and Multimedia on Suffrage

To mark the 100th anniversary of British women of property winning the right to vote, and the 90th anniversary of all women getting to vote in Britain, the National Archives created a website filled with primary source documents, videos and teaching resources.

Among the notable aspects of the site is a section detailing how website visitors can comb through government documents on the suffrage movement, including some documents that you can view online. These documents detail “the government’s response to militant activities and civil disobedience such as destruction of property, tax evasion and census boycotts.” There are also links to archival footage of suffrage actions and newspaper reports.

It also includes new films—like the one below created by young people in collaboration with filmmaker Nigel Kellaway—on the British suffrage movement.

Check out the entire website here.

Cosmopolitan: 50 Top Moments of Feminism, in Pictures

To mark the centennial of the British decision to grant women of property the right to vote, Cosmopolitan magazine put together a resource marking highlights of feminism over the past 100 years in pictures.

The gallery the magazine published has images that include the funeral of Emily Wilding Davison, a militant suffrage activist who had been repeatedly arrested and force-fed by authorities, and the arrest of Emmeline Pankhurst, a British suffrage leader. (See below for the picture.)

Check out the full gallery here.

Documentary on Inez Milholland: “Forward Into Light”

This fifteen-minute documentary tells the story of Inez Milholland, an important player in the suffrage movement, as well as a death penalty abolitionist and advocate for the poor.

Along with Alice Paul, Milholland was part of the radical wing of the suffrage movement, using disruptive tactics that rankled some other suffrage leaders who thought radical tactics like protesting President Woodrow Wilson would alienate the elected officials suffragists’ needed to win voting rights. As the website for “Forward Into Light” explains:

Known for her elegance, beauty and public presence, [Milholland] led a big march down Fifth Avenue for New York Suffrage in 1912. On the heels of that great spectacle, Inez was drafted by Alice Paul to lead the NAWSA radical parade to disturb the inauguration of the newly elected Democrat, Woodrow Wilson. March 3, 1913. Inez led 8,000 women down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House.

Though Milholland fell ill in 1916, she decided to complete an already-planned speaking tour. She died after speaking at a suffrage event in Los Angeles. The “Forward Into Light” website explains that Milholland “[s]tanding at the podium…wobbled and fell to the floor, gasping her famous last public words, ‘Mr. President, How Long Must Women Wait for Liberty?’”

“Forward Into Light” can be ordered for $4.95 at the website. The site also offers other resources, such as links to further research and photos.

Watch a trailer for the film here:

The Suffrage Postcard Digital Humanities Project: Images of Masculinity and Fatherhood in Pro- and Anti-Suffrage Postcards of the Early 20th Century

The Suffrage Postcard Project is a digital archive of suffrage-related postcards mostly from the United States in the early 20th century.

The project “looks at illustrations and images of masculinity and fatherhood that circulated in early twentieth-century pro- and anti-suffrage postcards.”

The website features hundreds of individual postcards, as well as collections of postcards on the same theme.

In addition, the Suffrage Postcard Project features a bibliography of reading materials on the visual history of the suffrage and feminist movements.

The project is the creation of Dr. Kristin Allukian, an Assistant Professor of English at the University of South Florida, and Dr. Ana Stevenson, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the International Studies Group at the University of the Free State, South Africa.

Explore the entire website here.