Women's History Resources: Suffrage

Rosalyn Terborg-Penn draws from original documents to take a comprehensive look at the African American women who fought for the right to vote. She analyzes the women's own stories, and examines why they joined and how they participated in the U.S. women's suffrage movement. Not all African American women suffragists were from elite circles. Terborg-Penn finds representation by working-class and professional women, from all parts of the nation, Some employed radical, others conservative, means to gain the right to vote. Black women, however, were unified in working to use the ballot to improve not only their own status, but the lives of black people in their communities.

The Buhles have carefully selected the best from the mass of material in the classic six-volume History of Woman Suffrage and included eighty-two documents in this version. The volume contains the work of many reform agitators, among them Angelina Grimke, Lucy Stone, Carrie Chapman Catt, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Anna Howard Shaw, Jane Addams, Sojourner Truth, and Victoria Woodhull, as well as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Ida Husted Harper.

A firsthand account of the National Woman's Party, which organized and fought a fierce battle for passage of the 19th Amendment. The suffragists endured hunger strikes, forced feedings, and jail terms. First written in 1920 by Doris Stevens, this version was edited by Carol O'Hare. Includes an introduction by Smithsonian curator Edith Mayo, along with appendices, an index, historic photos, and illustrations.

Treacherous Texts collects more than sixty literary texts written by smart, savvy writers who experimented with genre, aesthetics, humor, and sex appeal in an effort to persuade American readers to support woman suffrage. Although the suffrage campaign is often associated in popular memory with oratory, this anthology affirms that suffragists recognized early on that literature could also exert a power to move readers to imagine new roles for women in the public sphere.

Votes for Women brings together in one volume recent scholarship on the struggle of American women for the suffrage. Paralleling recent efforts in popular culture to restore to our national past the story of how women got the vote, these original essays present the latest and best in that history. Each of the eleven essays illuminates some aspects of the long battle that lasted from the 1850s to the passage of the suffrage amendment in 1920. From their antecedents in the minds of women like Mary Wollstonecraft and Frances Wright to the beginnings of an organization like the women who met at Seneca Falls in 1848 to the civil disobedience during World War 1 orchestrated by Alice Paul's National Woman's Party, the essential elements of a tumultuous story emerge.

A beautifully illustrated and fact-filled history of American women's drive for political equality from the 1840s to 1920 and after. Top quality reproductions of rarely seen historical photographs, posters, leaflets, and color illustrations, with over 75 profiles of leaders of this early, nearly forgotten nonviolent civil rights movement. Collectable First Edition.

This book departs from familiar accounts of high-profile woman suffrage activists whose main concern was a federal constitutional amendment. It tells the story of woman suffrage as one involving the diverse politics of women across the country as well as the incentives of the men with the primary political authority to grant new voting rights - those in state legislatures. Through a mix of qualitative and quantitative evidence, the book explains the success and failures of efforts for woman suffrage provisions in five states and in the US Congress as the result of successful and failed coalitional politics between the suffrage movement and important constituencies of existing male voters, including farmers' organizations, labor unions, and the Populist and Progressive parties.

At the start of the 19th century, women had severely limited rights. They had no control of their earnings, could not divorce a husband, had no claim of property, could not speak at public meetings, and could not vote. The women's suffrage movement, a political campaign that sought to address these problems, began around 1800 and culminated in 1920 with the passage of the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote. Led by women such as Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the members of this movement petitioned Congress, marched, and gave speeches in the face of public disapproval in an effort to achieve their goals. Women's Suffrage in America, Updated Edition provides hundreds of firsthand accounts of the women's movement - diary entries, letters, speeches, and newspaper accounts - that illustrate how historical events appeared to those who lived through them. Among the eyewitness testimonies included are those of Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, Lucretia Mott, Frederick Douglass, Helen Keller, and John Quincy Adams.

I. Antisuffrage Assumptions Regarding Woman's Sphere -- II. Antisuffrage Theories of Government -- III. Confronting the Suffragists -- IV. Organization and Tactics -- V. Antisuffrage Allies -- VI. The Antis in Congress and the Fight over Ratification -- VII. Ida Tarbell: The Making of an Anti -- VIII. Impact -- IX. Retrospect on Feminism and Antisuffrage Thought.