16. Final Push for Woman Suffrage
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The first wave of suffragists were gone. It was up to a new, educated, and persistent generation of women to earn the right to vote. This final push for women's suffrage saw pageants, parades, marches, boycotts, silent sentinels, hunger strikes, in addition to all the tactics used before. When World War I broke out, women did not back down as they had during the Civil War, escalating the attention to the movement. Women's suffrage eventually passed as a war measure.
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As the women’s suffrage movement in the United States entered a new century, most of its original leaders were now gone. Elizabeth caddy Stanton, Susan B Anthony, Lucretia Mott, and the other white women Who were instrumental in the founding of the national American women’s suffrage Association we’re dead. It was up to a new generation of young college educated women to navigate the tricky dynamic of advocating for political reforms without having an official voice in politics. New leaders emerged like Carrie Catt, Ida B Wells Barnett, Alice Paul, and Lucy burns. Although their advocacy and focus may have varied, these women lead the national movement in its final push to gain women’s suffrage. State to state suffrage leaders emerged and helped advocate for reform on a state level. There are also leaders like Zitkala Sa and Mabel Ping-Hua Lee who advocated for groups that were yet to be even recognized as citizens, like Native Americans and Chinese Americans.
What were these women and their allies after? A democracy that recognized them as full citizens. Named after Susan B. Anthony who first introduced in in 1878, the amendment stated simply: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”
That one sentence took decades of work, sweat, tears, and violence to pass.
What were these women and their allies after? A democracy that recognized them as full citizens. Named after Susan B. Anthony who first introduced in in 1878, the amendment stated simply: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”
That one sentence took decades of work, sweat, tears, and violence to pass.
College Degrees: To discuss women’s suffrage in this period, it would be impossible to ignore the role that educational reforms played in the lives of the new generation of women leading the charge. Young women at the turn of the century were attending college at rates never before seen. These women entered into college classrooms were no women have done before. Most often they were not greeted with open arms. In fact they were greeted with hostility. They were often seen as taking a seat from a young man, “who would actually use his degree.“ Young female college students were ridiculed, jeered, bullied, and sexually harassed. That harassment was not only from their peers, but also from their professors. In some cases women were allowed to attend classes, but not earn degrees. Oberlin college, which was one of the first to admit women, was still incredibly discriminatory towards them. For example, on Mondays female students were released early from class so that they could do the laundry for the male students. In other places, their male professors refused to teach them. Or in one instance, as women sat for an exam, their male peers rioted in protest. Imagine taking a test in those conditions!
Colleges for women were treated like a dangerous experiment: what might these women possibly learn? Colleges that were designed for men who are modeled on the idea of a “academic village.“ Boys would cross from their dormitory to the academic buildings where they attended classes. College is designed for women however reinforced traditional ideas of modesty. There was no quad for them. Girls attended classes in buildings modeled after seminary‘s, or religious buildings.
Yet, across every field, women were joining the ranks of those college educated. Higher education for women was relatively new in the United States. Mississippi college became the first institute for higher education to actually grant a degree to women in 1831: Alice Robinson and Catherine Hall. Then in 1839, Wesleyan College opened and exclusively granted bachelors degrees for women. A decade later, Elizabeth Blackwell, who was born in England, became the first woman to earn a medical degree at an American institution. She had received 10 rejection letters from various colleges. One person even told her that if she really wanted a college degree, she should dress like a man. She did not cross-dress, instead writing, "It was to my mind a moral crusade. It must be pursued in the light of day, and with public sanction, in order to accomplish its end." In 1850, Lucy Stanton became the first Black woman to earn a degree in the US, from Oberlin College. Mary Fellows was the first woman to receive a degree from west of the Mississippi River. It wasn’t until 1873, that California declared that girls should have equal access to higher education. And that was just one state! It would take years before that same philosophy was applied across the country.
Between 1880 and 1930, 50 years, colleges of higher education went from about 50% being coed to 75%. The Ivy Leagues were some of the last hold outs, with some exception: Cornell began admitting women in 1870. But most opted for having sister colleges, like the Radcliffe to Harvard. Radcliffe contracted with Harvard professors to teach classes to the female students. But others resisted women’s education like it was the plague. Most Ivy League institutions did not give women equal access until the 1960s and 70s under the women’s movement. And even then there was much resistance. One Dartmouth alumni wrote: "For God's sake, for Dartmouth's sake, and for everyone's sake, keep the damned women out,"
At Princeton, outright misogyny ruled the day: “What is all this nonsense about admitting women to Princeton? A good old-fashioned whore-house would be considerably more efficient, and much, much cheaper."
Eventually, pragmatically, the Ivy League‘s too began to accept women into their institutions. Unfortunately it wasn’t because they suddenly embraced women’s liberation. It was because male undergraduates were opting to go to coed institutions rather than male-only institutions. In order to stay competitive and get the best male intellectuals in their doors they admitted women as a “perk” for male students– nice.
Colleges for women were treated like a dangerous experiment: what might these women possibly learn? Colleges that were designed for men who are modeled on the idea of a “academic village.“ Boys would cross from their dormitory to the academic buildings where they attended classes. College is designed for women however reinforced traditional ideas of modesty. There was no quad for them. Girls attended classes in buildings modeled after seminary‘s, or religious buildings.
Yet, across every field, women were joining the ranks of those college educated. Higher education for women was relatively new in the United States. Mississippi college became the first institute for higher education to actually grant a degree to women in 1831: Alice Robinson and Catherine Hall. Then in 1839, Wesleyan College opened and exclusively granted bachelors degrees for women. A decade later, Elizabeth Blackwell, who was born in England, became the first woman to earn a medical degree at an American institution. She had received 10 rejection letters from various colleges. One person even told her that if she really wanted a college degree, she should dress like a man. She did not cross-dress, instead writing, "It was to my mind a moral crusade. It must be pursued in the light of day, and with public sanction, in order to accomplish its end." In 1850, Lucy Stanton became the first Black woman to earn a degree in the US, from Oberlin College. Mary Fellows was the first woman to receive a degree from west of the Mississippi River. It wasn’t until 1873, that California declared that girls should have equal access to higher education. And that was just one state! It would take years before that same philosophy was applied across the country.
Between 1880 and 1930, 50 years, colleges of higher education went from about 50% being coed to 75%. The Ivy Leagues were some of the last hold outs, with some exception: Cornell began admitting women in 1870. But most opted for having sister colleges, like the Radcliffe to Harvard. Radcliffe contracted with Harvard professors to teach classes to the female students. But others resisted women’s education like it was the plague. Most Ivy League institutions did not give women equal access until the 1960s and 70s under the women’s movement. And even then there was much resistance. One Dartmouth alumni wrote: "For God's sake, for Dartmouth's sake, and for everyone's sake, keep the damned women out,"
At Princeton, outright misogyny ruled the day: “What is all this nonsense about admitting women to Princeton? A good old-fashioned whore-house would be considerably more efficient, and much, much cheaper."
Eventually, pragmatically, the Ivy League‘s too began to accept women into their institutions. Unfortunately it wasn’t because they suddenly embraced women’s liberation. It was because male undergraduates were opting to go to coed institutions rather than male-only institutions. In order to stay competitive and get the best male intellectuals in their doors they admitted women as a “perk” for male students– nice.
Doldrums: But what did all of this education have to do with suffrage? Everything. One of the best anti-suffrage arguments was not granting women the vote would introduce yet another largely uneducated, potentially illiterate, group of people into the voting population. Remember it wasn’t too long ago, and was still within recent memory of most in power that men of color were also granted suffrage. how could women, who don’t work in industry possibly vote in any informed way and issues of economics, politics, etc. The growing numbers of women graduating with college degrees was proving that narrative false. Women can be informed voters.
Among the first wave of undergraduates with bachelor's degrees was Carrie Chapman Catt who was selected as the president of NAWSA, to succeed Susan B. Anthony. Catt was a formidable choice. She dedicated her entire life to suffrage. Her first husband died shortly after their marriage from typhoid fever, and she married her second husband, who she knew from college at Iowa State. In 1887, after a short career as a legal clerk and teacher, she joined the women’s crusade. George Catt supported his wife. He viewed their gendered roles as this: his job was to provide, hers was to improve the world. They never had kids and after he died, she worked alongside her female housemate and partner, Mary Garret Hay, for the cause of women. Many many years later, when she died, she chose to be buried under a loving inscription next to Hay.
From 1900 to 1904, Catt led NAWSA, but at the end of her tenure, her husband, Susan B Anthony, and her mother all passed away leaving Catt grief stricken. Without her at the helm, NAWSA struggled. Anna Howard Shaw, who held a degree in ministry and a doctoral degree in medicine, took charge. Shaw was a fierce advocate for working class women, but not a champion for all women. She frequently spoke about nativist views, championed white women’s causes, and created a hostile environment for African-Americans within the movement. But while hostile to song, Shaw is a striking example of the importance of suffrage to queer women. After all, queer women often did not have a man providing for them and all the privileges wives had did not necessarily extend to them. Shaw, like many suffragists, lived with a longtime female partner, Lucy Elmina Anthony, the niece of Susan B. Anthony. There was no man to provide for them, so women in these partnerships lived on the often pitiful and discriminatory salaries granted to women.
All over the country they led marches and were successful in getting some states to grant women the right to vote. California gave women the right to vote in 1911 and Tye Leung Schulze made history as the first Chinese-American woman, if not the first Asian woman in the world, to vote in a democratic election. Of the event she said, “I thought long over that. I studied; I read about all your men who wished to be president. I learned about the new laws. I wanted to KNOW what was right, not to act blindly...I think it right we should all try to learn, not vote blindly, since we have been given this right to say which man we think is the greatest...I think too that we women are more careful than the men. We want to do our whole duty more. I do not think it is just the newness that makes use like that. It is conscience.”
Across the country, women in easter states battled against longstanding traditions and well-established patriarchal norms. Under Shaw’s leadership women’s suffrage stalled out. They’d been going state by state for decades working to get change and in those decades only nine states had granted women the right to vote: 70 years nine states. I’m no mathematician but I don’t think those are great odds. Something had to give and the women knew it. Perhaps the strategy was wrong? Between women suffragists great debate broke out. There were the old-school NAWSA women who advocated for the tried and true continued effort in the state to state campaigns. State campaigns were growing and more and more women were joining the movement at the local level. But this young, educated, and perhaps feisty generation of women were joining the movement.
Among the first wave of undergraduates with bachelor's degrees was Carrie Chapman Catt who was selected as the president of NAWSA, to succeed Susan B. Anthony. Catt was a formidable choice. She dedicated her entire life to suffrage. Her first husband died shortly after their marriage from typhoid fever, and she married her second husband, who she knew from college at Iowa State. In 1887, after a short career as a legal clerk and teacher, she joined the women’s crusade. George Catt supported his wife. He viewed their gendered roles as this: his job was to provide, hers was to improve the world. They never had kids and after he died, she worked alongside her female housemate and partner, Mary Garret Hay, for the cause of women. Many many years later, when she died, she chose to be buried under a loving inscription next to Hay.
From 1900 to 1904, Catt led NAWSA, but at the end of her tenure, her husband, Susan B Anthony, and her mother all passed away leaving Catt grief stricken. Without her at the helm, NAWSA struggled. Anna Howard Shaw, who held a degree in ministry and a doctoral degree in medicine, took charge. Shaw was a fierce advocate for working class women, but not a champion for all women. She frequently spoke about nativist views, championed white women’s causes, and created a hostile environment for African-Americans within the movement. But while hostile to song, Shaw is a striking example of the importance of suffrage to queer women. After all, queer women often did not have a man providing for them and all the privileges wives had did not necessarily extend to them. Shaw, like many suffragists, lived with a longtime female partner, Lucy Elmina Anthony, the niece of Susan B. Anthony. There was no man to provide for them, so women in these partnerships lived on the often pitiful and discriminatory salaries granted to women.
All over the country they led marches and were successful in getting some states to grant women the right to vote. California gave women the right to vote in 1911 and Tye Leung Schulze made history as the first Chinese-American woman, if not the first Asian woman in the world, to vote in a democratic election. Of the event she said, “I thought long over that. I studied; I read about all your men who wished to be president. I learned about the new laws. I wanted to KNOW what was right, not to act blindly...I think it right we should all try to learn, not vote blindly, since we have been given this right to say which man we think is the greatest...I think too that we women are more careful than the men. We want to do our whole duty more. I do not think it is just the newness that makes use like that. It is conscience.”
Across the country, women in easter states battled against longstanding traditions and well-established patriarchal norms. Under Shaw’s leadership women’s suffrage stalled out. They’d been going state by state for decades working to get change and in those decades only nine states had granted women the right to vote: 70 years nine states. I’m no mathematician but I don’t think those are great odds. Something had to give and the women knew it. Perhaps the strategy was wrong? Between women suffragists great debate broke out. There were the old-school NAWSA women who advocated for the tried and true continued effort in the state to state campaigns. State campaigns were growing and more and more women were joining the movement at the local level. But this young, educated, and perhaps feisty generation of women were joining the movement.
Paul and Burns: Two of the most notable women in this group were Lucy Burns and Alice Paul. Both of these women not only had college degrees, but had multiple college degrees. Burns studied at Vassar College and Yale University and later at the University of Berlin in Germany and Oxford College abroad. There, Burns witnessed the militancy of the British suffrage movement.
In 1909 she joined Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst's Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) where she became an expert orator, and was arrested on numerous occasions. She met Alice Paul in a London police station after both were arrested during a suffrage demonstration outside Parliament.
Paul graduated with a degree in biology from Swarthmore College (1905), and earned graduate degrees in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania (M.A., 1907; Ph.D., 1912). Years after suffrage she would also earn two law degrees, because you can’t have too many law degrees right?!
When they came home from England in 1910, Paul and Burns were disheartened at the state of women’s suffrage in the United States. They pressed NAWSA to take harder positions on suffrage and advocate for a federal amendment. The leaders in NAWSA gave Paul control over the Congressional Committee whose job was to press for a Federal Amendment to the constitution, not just a state by state approach. Between 1912 and 1913, Paul and Burns worked to organize the congressional committee and build it into a robust political force.
In 1909 she joined Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst's Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) where she became an expert orator, and was arrested on numerous occasions. She met Alice Paul in a London police station after both were arrested during a suffrage demonstration outside Parliament.
Paul graduated with a degree in biology from Swarthmore College (1905), and earned graduate degrees in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania (M.A., 1907; Ph.D., 1912). Years after suffrage she would also earn two law degrees, because you can’t have too many law degrees right?!
When they came home from England in 1910, Paul and Burns were disheartened at the state of women’s suffrage in the United States. They pressed NAWSA to take harder positions on suffrage and advocate for a federal amendment. The leaders in NAWSA gave Paul control over the Congressional Committee whose job was to press for a Federal Amendment to the constitution, not just a state by state approach. Between 1912 and 1913, Paul and Burns worked to organize the congressional committee and build it into a robust political force.
Suffrage Parade: On March 3, 1913, they held a women’s suffrage parade in Washington DC the day before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration. Paul has begun planning this since well before she was even granted a title in the women’s movement. Her planning was meticulous, she tapped every resource and connection she had in DC and in the Taft administration that was exiting, and her expert use of public relations kept suffrage and the parade in the media so frequently that people associated the parade with Wilson’s inauguration. Women were led down Pennsylvania Avenue by Inez Milholland atop a horse representing Columbia, a symbol of the United States. Following her women were grouped by alma mater demonstrating their expertise and education levels, women were then grouped by state showing that women in every state wanted the right to vote, women were also grouped by profession with various industries given somatic outfits to wear, showing the depth of the suffrage movement and how intersected so many women’s lives.
Planning for the parade was not, however, perfect. Paul had many factions within the suffrage movement to appease and made concessions to Southern suffragists at the expense of Black suffragists. Black leaders like Ida B Wells Barnett as well as Delta Sigma Theta, a black sorority from nearby Howard University, were left off of the program, and told that they could march in the back. Constrained by all the demands thrown at her, Paul said, “As far as I can see, we must have a white procession, or a Negro procession, or no procession at all.” Yikes Paul— there was of course the non-racist we all March together option… but that wasn’t what she chose.
After being told that they would have to march in the back, Wells addressed the marchers the night before. Full of tears and trembling, she stated, “if they did not take a stand now in this great democratic parade then the colored women are lost.” Grace Trout, the leader of the Illinois contingent to which Wells belonged, sided with Paul and the segregationists. Wells left the room vowing not to march at all.
Of course, she would march. This is what Ida B Wells was talking about! Wells stood on the sideline as the march began the next morning. And when the Illinois delegation walked past her, she calmly and collectively stepped into the street and joined them. This was a women's march, not a white women’s march. And women were going to get the right to vote together, not parceled off by race and class.
Mary Church Terrell, founder of the National Association of Colored Women marched with the all-Black delegation at the back. She later stated that she believed Paul and other white suffrage leaders would sacrifice Black women in order to get white women the vote. Paul of course denied that, but didn’t stop catering to racists within the movement.
As the marchers made their way down Pennsylvania Avenue things seemed to be going well. Paul had planned ahead because the DC police had threatened not to protect her and asked for a regiment to be standing by. Thankfully she had.
What started as jeers from the crowd turned into a riot. Over 100 people ended up in the hospital as the DC police abandoned their positions along the parade route and let misogynists attack the women on the street. Newspapers blamed the DC police. Women’s suffrage was on the front page! Woodrow Wilson, the new president, was not the top story. If he wanted to have a successful presidency, women’s suffrage would have to pass.
1916 Election: But Woodrow Wilson was not easy to break. While he said he supported women’s suffrage, he didn’t think that it was politically possible to pass it. We should also mention that he was formerly the president of Princeton, one of those hold out Ivy League schools that didn’t support women getting degrees. Wilson came to suffrage events and gave speeches where he supported their work, but refused to take a policy position on it. So when he was up for reelection, Paul and Burns refused to endorse him.
The suffrage parade was not all good for women’s suffrage. Paul and Burns his true colors were beginning to show and their radical tactics for achieving women’s suffrage were not supported by other women in the movement. By February 1914 Paul and Burns were ousted from NAWSA and all of the funds they had raised for the congressional committee stripped from them. They rebranded as the National Women’s Party, a rival organization with more aggressive and radical positions than Shaw’s NAWSA.
As suffrage was fracturing and dividing over tactics, Carrie Chapman Catt returned to steer NAWSA through its final push for suffrage. In 1915, she returned as president of NAWSA. Catt proposed her “Winning Plan” which compromised between the factions to simultaneously fight for suffrage at the state and federal levels. She also received a 1 million dollar bequest from New York City magazine editor and publisher Miriam Folline Leslie “for the cause of woman suffrage.”
During the election year, the NWP traveled state to state to urge people to vote against Wilson and instead endorse a candidate who would support women’s suffrage… though none emerged. Wilson and his Republican opponent Charles Evan Hughes endorsed the state by state approach to women’s suffrage. Paul met with Hughes on behalf of her members and women who could vote in various, mostly western states. After the meeting she was disappointed, she said:
“Voting women will not accept a mere endorsement of the principle of suffrage. They are solely interested in the best method of protecting their own political rights and of emancipating the rest of their sex. The Republican Party wants the women’s votes. They are essential to the success of the party next fall. But it will not receive them by default.”
The fact that a presidential candidate met with her, just shows how powerful politicking had become.
The NWP was narrowly focused, willing to endorse whichever candidate would support national suffrage. NAWSA on the other hand, backed Woodrow Wilson because of his continued effort to keep America out of World War I. Wilson won the election and within a month took the United States to war. For women on both issues, the reelection of Woodrow Wilson was a disappointment. Like in the Civil War decades before, many women became engrossed in the war movement. They served as nurses, within the new branch of the Marines for women, rolling bandages, volunteering, building victory gardens, and whatever needed to be done to support the country in war.
Planning for the parade was not, however, perfect. Paul had many factions within the suffrage movement to appease and made concessions to Southern suffragists at the expense of Black suffragists. Black leaders like Ida B Wells Barnett as well as Delta Sigma Theta, a black sorority from nearby Howard University, were left off of the program, and told that they could march in the back. Constrained by all the demands thrown at her, Paul said, “As far as I can see, we must have a white procession, or a Negro procession, or no procession at all.” Yikes Paul— there was of course the non-racist we all March together option… but that wasn’t what she chose.
After being told that they would have to march in the back, Wells addressed the marchers the night before. Full of tears and trembling, she stated, “if they did not take a stand now in this great democratic parade then the colored women are lost.” Grace Trout, the leader of the Illinois contingent to which Wells belonged, sided with Paul and the segregationists. Wells left the room vowing not to march at all.
Of course, she would march. This is what Ida B Wells was talking about! Wells stood on the sideline as the march began the next morning. And when the Illinois delegation walked past her, she calmly and collectively stepped into the street and joined them. This was a women's march, not a white women’s march. And women were going to get the right to vote together, not parceled off by race and class.
Mary Church Terrell, founder of the National Association of Colored Women marched with the all-Black delegation at the back. She later stated that she believed Paul and other white suffrage leaders would sacrifice Black women in order to get white women the vote. Paul of course denied that, but didn’t stop catering to racists within the movement.
As the marchers made their way down Pennsylvania Avenue things seemed to be going well. Paul had planned ahead because the DC police had threatened not to protect her and asked for a regiment to be standing by. Thankfully she had.
What started as jeers from the crowd turned into a riot. Over 100 people ended up in the hospital as the DC police abandoned their positions along the parade route and let misogynists attack the women on the street. Newspapers blamed the DC police. Women’s suffrage was on the front page! Woodrow Wilson, the new president, was not the top story. If he wanted to have a successful presidency, women’s suffrage would have to pass.
1916 Election: But Woodrow Wilson was not easy to break. While he said he supported women’s suffrage, he didn’t think that it was politically possible to pass it. We should also mention that he was formerly the president of Princeton, one of those hold out Ivy League schools that didn’t support women getting degrees. Wilson came to suffrage events and gave speeches where he supported their work, but refused to take a policy position on it. So when he was up for reelection, Paul and Burns refused to endorse him.
The suffrage parade was not all good for women’s suffrage. Paul and Burns his true colors were beginning to show and their radical tactics for achieving women’s suffrage were not supported by other women in the movement. By February 1914 Paul and Burns were ousted from NAWSA and all of the funds they had raised for the congressional committee stripped from them. They rebranded as the National Women’s Party, a rival organization with more aggressive and radical positions than Shaw’s NAWSA.
As suffrage was fracturing and dividing over tactics, Carrie Chapman Catt returned to steer NAWSA through its final push for suffrage. In 1915, she returned as president of NAWSA. Catt proposed her “Winning Plan” which compromised between the factions to simultaneously fight for suffrage at the state and federal levels. She also received a 1 million dollar bequest from New York City magazine editor and publisher Miriam Folline Leslie “for the cause of woman suffrage.”
During the election year, the NWP traveled state to state to urge people to vote against Wilson and instead endorse a candidate who would support women’s suffrage… though none emerged. Wilson and his Republican opponent Charles Evan Hughes endorsed the state by state approach to women’s suffrage. Paul met with Hughes on behalf of her members and women who could vote in various, mostly western states. After the meeting she was disappointed, she said:
“Voting women will not accept a mere endorsement of the principle of suffrage. They are solely interested in the best method of protecting their own political rights and of emancipating the rest of their sex. The Republican Party wants the women’s votes. They are essential to the success of the party next fall. But it will not receive them by default.”
The fact that a presidential candidate met with her, just shows how powerful politicking had become.
The NWP was narrowly focused, willing to endorse whichever candidate would support national suffrage. NAWSA on the other hand, backed Woodrow Wilson because of his continued effort to keep America out of World War I. Wilson won the election and within a month took the United States to war. For women on both issues, the reelection of Woodrow Wilson was a disappointment. Like in the Civil War decades before, many women became engrossed in the war movement. They served as nurses, within the new branch of the Marines for women, rolling bandages, volunteering, building victory gardens, and whatever needed to be done to support the country in war.
Silent Sentinels: But unlike most women, the National Women’s Party did not relent. Starting on January 10, 1917, the women’s party began sending “silent sentinels“ as they were referred to, to picket outside of the White House and keep relentless pressure on Woodrow Wilson to pass the amendment. They held "watchfires," where they burned copies of Wilson's speeches, and called him a hypocrite. They picketed six days a week, rain or shine. When the United States joined the war effort, what little support they had from onlookers in DC diminished. The suffragists were seen as unpatriotic, belittling a president while he was at war. For many, the president’s focus should have been solely on bringing American boys home, but Paul and Burns did not back down, they doubled down. They pointed out the hypocrisy of fighting for democracy abroad while American women could not fight at home. Insultingly, they used Wilson’s words against him:
“WE SHALL FIGHT FOR THE THINGS WE HAVE ALWAYS HELD NEAREST TO OUR HEARTS.”
When the United States’ ally, Russia sent a delegation to meet with Wilson and discuss their mutual role in preserving democracy, Lucy Burns and Dora Lewis held a banner that read:
“We, the Women of America, tell you that America is not a democracy. Twenty million American Women are denied the right to vote. President Wilson is the chief opponent of their national enfranchisement.”
For mothers the connection between war and suffrage were obvious: the president was drafting their sons to go to war and they had no say in it! For many women suffrage became a symbol of anti-war sentiments.
But things eventually became tense. As women picketed outside the White House, onlookers became increasingly hostile and agitated. Soldiers harassed the women. In June of 2017, police tried to confiscate the women’s banner, which obviously violated free-speech. Women resisted. They were arrested. Eventually the government came up with a scheme to charge them with blocking traffic because they were attracting so much attention. “Blocking traffic“ is a euphemism for just annoying the president. By the way, it's not a crime to annoy the president. The women argued their case in court claiming that they were “political prisoners.“ And that they were arrested because they disagreed with the ruling political party. Arrested day after day, at least 150 different women were imprisoned during this period. They refused to pay their fines and were taken to the Occoquan Workhouse prison in Virginia to work off their debts. Once released, they would be back out on the picket line the next day.
“WE SHALL FIGHT FOR THE THINGS WE HAVE ALWAYS HELD NEAREST TO OUR HEARTS.”
When the United States’ ally, Russia sent a delegation to meet with Wilson and discuss their mutual role in preserving democracy, Lucy Burns and Dora Lewis held a banner that read:
“We, the Women of America, tell you that America is not a democracy. Twenty million American Women are denied the right to vote. President Wilson is the chief opponent of their national enfranchisement.”
For mothers the connection between war and suffrage were obvious: the president was drafting their sons to go to war and they had no say in it! For many women suffrage became a symbol of anti-war sentiments.
But things eventually became tense. As women picketed outside the White House, onlookers became increasingly hostile and agitated. Soldiers harassed the women. In June of 2017, police tried to confiscate the women’s banner, which obviously violated free-speech. Women resisted. They were arrested. Eventually the government came up with a scheme to charge them with blocking traffic because they were attracting so much attention. “Blocking traffic“ is a euphemism for just annoying the president. By the way, it's not a crime to annoy the president. The women argued their case in court claiming that they were “political prisoners.“ And that they were arrested because they disagreed with the ruling political party. Arrested day after day, at least 150 different women were imprisoned during this period. They refused to pay their fines and were taken to the Occoquan Workhouse prison in Virginia to work off their debts. Once released, they would be back out on the picket line the next day.
Night of Terror and Hunger Strike: This wasn’t just feisty signs and casual arrests, it was violent and hostile. Paul and Burns were also arrested. Paul was sentenced to 7 months in Occoquan in October 1917. She began a hunger strike, which is where you don’t eat until your demands are met. Instead, the prison guards force feed her by forcing a tube down her throat and dropping raw eggs into her mouth twice a day. Then they tried to say she was insane and took her to a psychiatric hospital. The superintendent, William Alanson White, refused to admit her, stating that she was "perfectly calm, yet determined."
Outside the prison, suffragists rallied behind her. Many went to picket the White House for suffrage and also picket on behalf of Paul.
On November 14, 1917, 33 suffragists from the NWP were brutally beaten and tortured by 40 male prison guards, to “teach them a lesson.” This night went down in history as the “Night of Terror.” Testimony shared in a later investigation proved that the suffragists were dragged, beaten, choked, slammed, pinched, and kicked. Dora Lewis' arm was twisted behind her back. They twice slammed her into an iron bed where she fell unconscious and bleeding. Alice Cosu thought Lewis was dead and the panic caused her to suffer a heart attack. She was denied medical treatment until the next morning. Burns tried to check in with everyone and make sure they were ok. She started a roll call, which led her to be identified as the leader. The guards handcuffed her arms to the cell bars above her head, leaving her bleeding on tiptoe until they took her down. Burns and the other suffragists went on hunger strike for three days following the Night of Terror. Burns was removed and taken to a different prison where she too was force-fed by putting a tube through her nostril, a process that caused horrible nose bleeds. Burns spent more time in prison than other American suffragists. While all of this was going on, it was not public knowledge. The press had yet to find out this information, and American support of the NWP remained low.
Dudley Field Malone, worked as an attorney and campaign adviser to Wilson. He resigned to represent the Silent Sentinels in court. He also took letters that the suffragist had written in prison and secretly released them to the NWP newspaper, The Suffragist. The night of terror, Paul and Burns is treatment, and the unjust arrests of the picketers was major news across the country And helped bring support for the suffrage cause. Not only did he help get all of the women released from prison, he also had their wrongful arrests overturned by the unanimous vote. Malone would go on to marry Doris Stevens, an important and active silent sentinels imprisoned at Occoquan.
Paul wrote: "Seems almost unthinkable now, doesn't it? It was shocking that a government of men could look with such extreme contempt on a movement that was asking nothing except such a simple little thing as the right to vote."
African American Women: Meanwhile, NAWSA was busy fighting for Catt’s Winning Plan. Catt’s leadership secured several key states: New York, Michigan, Oklahoma, and South Dakota in 1917 and 1918. Catt was winning in one respect and losing in another. She consistently catered to racists within the movement.
Mary B. Talbert was a member of the NACW and NAACP. In 1915 she wrote in Crisis, “with us as colored women, this struggle becomes two-fold, first, because we are women and second, because we are colored women.”
Black women were often belittled in how they might use the vote. Nannie Helen Burroughs aptly retorted, “What can she do without it?” Burroughs and other Black women made clear that Black women “needs the ballot, to reckon with men who place no value upon her virtue, and to mould [sic] healthy sentiment in favor of her own protection.”
Adella Hunt Logan concurred, adding: “If white American women, with all their natural and acquired advantages, need the ballot, that right protective of all other rights; if Anglo Saxons have been helped by it... how much more do black Americans, male and female need the strong defense of a vote to help secure them their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?”
Racism, discrimination, and racial violence forced Black women toward civil rights activism, in addition to suffrafe. Perhaps overly optimistic, Angelina Weld Grimké, the great niece of abolitionist and suffragist Angelina Grimké Weld, stated, “injustices will end [between the sexes when woman] gains the ballot.”
Outside the prison, suffragists rallied behind her. Many went to picket the White House for suffrage and also picket on behalf of Paul.
On November 14, 1917, 33 suffragists from the NWP were brutally beaten and tortured by 40 male prison guards, to “teach them a lesson.” This night went down in history as the “Night of Terror.” Testimony shared in a later investigation proved that the suffragists were dragged, beaten, choked, slammed, pinched, and kicked. Dora Lewis' arm was twisted behind her back. They twice slammed her into an iron bed where she fell unconscious and bleeding. Alice Cosu thought Lewis was dead and the panic caused her to suffer a heart attack. She was denied medical treatment until the next morning. Burns tried to check in with everyone and make sure they were ok. She started a roll call, which led her to be identified as the leader. The guards handcuffed her arms to the cell bars above her head, leaving her bleeding on tiptoe until they took her down. Burns and the other suffragists went on hunger strike for three days following the Night of Terror. Burns was removed and taken to a different prison where she too was force-fed by putting a tube through her nostril, a process that caused horrible nose bleeds. Burns spent more time in prison than other American suffragists. While all of this was going on, it was not public knowledge. The press had yet to find out this information, and American support of the NWP remained low.
Dudley Field Malone, worked as an attorney and campaign adviser to Wilson. He resigned to represent the Silent Sentinels in court. He also took letters that the suffragist had written in prison and secretly released them to the NWP newspaper, The Suffragist. The night of terror, Paul and Burns is treatment, and the unjust arrests of the picketers was major news across the country And helped bring support for the suffrage cause. Not only did he help get all of the women released from prison, he also had their wrongful arrests overturned by the unanimous vote. Malone would go on to marry Doris Stevens, an important and active silent sentinels imprisoned at Occoquan.
Paul wrote: "Seems almost unthinkable now, doesn't it? It was shocking that a government of men could look with such extreme contempt on a movement that was asking nothing except such a simple little thing as the right to vote."
African American Women: Meanwhile, NAWSA was busy fighting for Catt’s Winning Plan. Catt’s leadership secured several key states: New York, Michigan, Oklahoma, and South Dakota in 1917 and 1918. Catt was winning in one respect and losing in another. She consistently catered to racists within the movement.
Mary B. Talbert was a member of the NACW and NAACP. In 1915 she wrote in Crisis, “with us as colored women, this struggle becomes two-fold, first, because we are women and second, because we are colored women.”
Black women were often belittled in how they might use the vote. Nannie Helen Burroughs aptly retorted, “What can she do without it?” Burroughs and other Black women made clear that Black women “needs the ballot, to reckon with men who place no value upon her virtue, and to mould [sic] healthy sentiment in favor of her own protection.”
Adella Hunt Logan concurred, adding: “If white American women, with all their natural and acquired advantages, need the ballot, that right protective of all other rights; if Anglo Saxons have been helped by it... how much more do black Americans, male and female need the strong defense of a vote to help secure them their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?”
Racism, discrimination, and racial violence forced Black women toward civil rights activism, in addition to suffrafe. Perhaps overly optimistic, Angelina Weld Grimké, the great niece of abolitionist and suffragist Angelina Grimké Weld, stated, “injustices will end [between the sexes when woman] gains the ballot.”
Ratification: Then finally, in 1918, Wilson put the weight of his presidency behind the cause of suffrage and supported a national constitutional amendment. But why the sudden change of heart? Was it the public pressure from the torture of Paul and Burns? Or was it pragmatic given how many states Catt was able to secure? We may never know. Wilson claimed he was not swayed by the “radicals” in the NWP, and stated that the amendments purpose was to help win World War I.
The amendment passed Congress the next year on August 26, 1920. It thus began a long ratification process.
Ratification in Tennessee: To ratify an amendment to the Constitution, it needs to be approved by three quarters of the states— a very high bar. Suffragists at the state level fought to have the amendment ratified. It took a year, but finally the 36th state came to ratify the amendment: Tennessee.
Tennessee was the last possible hope that the Amendment would get ratified. Like elsewhere in the country, the all male legislature met to discuss the Amendment and, yet again, debate women’s status as citizens. Harry T. Burn was one of these state representatives. He supported suffrage, but the men in his district did not. Debate in Tennessee raged on in what became known as the War of the Roses. Pro-suffrage legislators wore yellow roses, while anti-suffragists wore red. There were accounts of bribery, negotiations, and lots of drinking. Legislators would be seen wearing a yellow flower one day and a red one the next.
In this context Febb Burn, Harry’s mom wrote him a letter. She said, “Hurrah, and vote for suffrage, and don’t keep them in doubt… Don’t forget to be a good boy and help Mrs. ‘Thomas Catt’ with her ‘rats.’ Is she the one that put rat in ratification? Ha! No more from Mama this time. With lots of love.”
Her son, wearing the red anti-suffrage flower, and with his mothers letter in his pocket, dramatically changed his vote in favor of suffrage. Pandemonium followed.
When things calmed, the roll call resumed. Anti-suffragists appeared to be winning. Then, after sitting silently through his turn, Banks Turner broke his silence as the antis were clearly winning and cast a vote: “Mr. Speaker, I wish to be recorded as voting Aye.”
Women’s suffrage passed by ONE vote at the very last second. The chamber was in uproar, but the vote was won.
By the end of this era, so much remained in question. What would happen for these newly enfranchised women? Would there emerge a women’s voting block? Would women of color be granted full access to the vote, or would they too be subjected to discrimination at the polls? How long would it take for noncitizens, Chinese and indigenous women to gain the vote? What would the next battles for women’s liberation look like?
The amendment passed Congress the next year on August 26, 1920. It thus began a long ratification process.
Ratification in Tennessee: To ratify an amendment to the Constitution, it needs to be approved by three quarters of the states— a very high bar. Suffragists at the state level fought to have the amendment ratified. It took a year, but finally the 36th state came to ratify the amendment: Tennessee.
Tennessee was the last possible hope that the Amendment would get ratified. Like elsewhere in the country, the all male legislature met to discuss the Amendment and, yet again, debate women’s status as citizens. Harry T. Burn was one of these state representatives. He supported suffrage, but the men in his district did not. Debate in Tennessee raged on in what became known as the War of the Roses. Pro-suffrage legislators wore yellow roses, while anti-suffragists wore red. There were accounts of bribery, negotiations, and lots of drinking. Legislators would be seen wearing a yellow flower one day and a red one the next.
In this context Febb Burn, Harry’s mom wrote him a letter. She said, “Hurrah, and vote for suffrage, and don’t keep them in doubt… Don’t forget to be a good boy and help Mrs. ‘Thomas Catt’ with her ‘rats.’ Is she the one that put rat in ratification? Ha! No more from Mama this time. With lots of love.”
Her son, wearing the red anti-suffrage flower, and with his mothers letter in his pocket, dramatically changed his vote in favor of suffrage. Pandemonium followed.
When things calmed, the roll call resumed. Anti-suffragists appeared to be winning. Then, after sitting silently through his turn, Banks Turner broke his silence as the antis were clearly winning and cast a vote: “Mr. Speaker, I wish to be recorded as voting Aye.”
Women’s suffrage passed by ONE vote at the very last second. The chamber was in uproar, but the vote was won.
By the end of this era, so much remained in question. What would happen for these newly enfranchised women? Would there emerge a women’s voting block? Would women of color be granted full access to the vote, or would they too be subjected to discrimination at the polls? How long would it take for noncitizens, Chinese and indigenous women to gain the vote? What would the next battles for women’s liberation look like?
Draw your own conclusions
Library of Congress
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Were white suffragists racist?
In the last few decades increasing numbers of historians have begun to question the legacy of the women suffrage movement. What is it a women’s movement? Or a white women’s movement? In this inquiry students examine two articles written for the suffrage centennial celebration. Students will pull specific evidence from each and form their own conclusion. There is also a second inquiry using mostly primary sources and arguing the same question. 
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Were women given the vote?
Teaching with film can be powerful for students. Iron Jawed Angels and PBS' The Vote both show the LONG and grueling struggle to earn the vote that over three generations of women underwent. Students will use the film to explore questions about women's role in their own liberation in order to address the question, were women given the vote? 
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Library of Congress
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Why did Woodrow Wilson change his mind?
Sometimes what presidents say is different than what they mean. Students will examine two of Woodrow Wilson's speeches on woman suffrage, given three years apart, and place them in historical context of World War I and the suffrage movement. They will then decide if the reasons he gave in support of woman suffrage are really the reasons, or if there was something, or someone else who influenced him-- hint hint. This lesson would go well with Iron Jawed Angels or The Vote.
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Library of Congress
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Despite her centrality to the final push for the vote-- many American's don't know Alice Paul's name. In some cases, women like Paul were intentionally excluded from historical events. Why?
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What arguments did Native women use to fight for suffrage and citizenship?
The 19th Amendment passed, but Native Americans were not considered citizens. Native women had long held positions of power and reverence in their communities. It was time the United States recognized them. In this inquiry, students explore the arguments Native women used to fight for suffrage and citizenship.
What arguments did Chinese women use to fight for suffrage and citizenship?
The 19th Amendment passed, but many Chinese Americans were unable to vote due to the impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act. White suffragists capitalized on progressive reforms happening in China and brought Chinese immigrants into the fold to teach them about women's status in China. In this inquiry, students explore the arguments Chinese women made to fight for suffrage and citizenship.
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Lesson Plans from Other Organizations
- The National Women's History Museum has lesson plans on women's history.
- The Guilder Lehrman Institute for American History has lesson plans on women's history.
- The NY Historical Society has articles and classroom activities for teaching women's history.
- Unladylike 2020, in partnership with PBS, has primary sources to explore with students and outstanding videos on women from the Progressive era.
- The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media has produced recommendations for teaching women's history with primary sources and provided a collection of sources for world history. Check them out!
- The Stanford History Education Group has a number of lesson plans about women in US History.
Period Specific Lesson Plans from Other Organizations
- Stanford History Education Group: The 19th Amendment was passed seventy-two years after the Seneca Falls Convention. This fact demonstrates the strong opposition that women’s suffrage faced. In this lesson, students study a speech and anti-suffrage literature to explore the reasons why so many Americans, including many women, opposed women's suffrage.
- C3 Teachers: This inquiry leads students through an investigation of voting rights in America. By investigating the compelling question “Was the vote enough?” students evaluate both sides of the early twentieth century quest to expand suffrage to women. The formative performance tasks build on knowledge and skills through the course of the inquiry and help students determine if getting the vote was enough to give women full social and political equality. Students create an evidence-based argument about whether or not the vote is enough.
- C3 Teachrs: This inquiry examines the emergence of the women’s suffrage movement in the 19th century as an effort to expand women’s political and economic rights, and it extends that investigation into the present. The compelling question “What does it mean to be equal?” provides students with an opportunity to examine the nature of equality and the changing conditions for women in American society from the 19th century to today. Each supporting question begins by asking about 19th-century women’s rights and then asks about contemporary gender equality. The relationship between women’s rights and gender equality is a central focus of this inquiry. Students begin the inquiry by exploring the legal limits placed on women in the 19th century and how efforts to gain rights were undertaken by women at the Seneca Falls Convention.
- C3 Teachers: This inquiry leads students through an investigation of the women’s suffrage movement in New York State as an example of how different groups of people have gained equal rights and freedoms over time. Through examining the role women played in society before the 20th century and the efforts made by women to gain the right to vote, students will be prepared to develop arguments supported by evidence that answer the compelling question “What did it take for women to be considered ‘equal’ to men in New York?” Subsequent inquiries could be developed around other groups who have struggled to gain rights and freedoms, including, but not limited to, Native Americans and African Americans.
- Gilder Lehrman: Over the course of two lessons, students will analyze primary source documents in order to examine the factors that contributed to the exclusion of American women from the right to vote and the battle for full enfranchisement. They will read and interpret complex documents, engage in discussions, and, in order to demonstrate comprehension, answer critical thinking questions.
- National Women’s History Museum: Was the woman suffrage movement inclusive? This lesson seeks to explore the role of Black women in the Women’s Suffrage Movement and their exclusion from the generally accepted Women’s Suffrage narrative. Students will examine primary and secondary sources to explore some of the unsung heroes of the Women’s Suffrage Movement and the contributions of these unsung heroes to the movement. As a summative assessment, students will create an exhibit detailing the contributions of a Black Suffragist.
- Gilder Lehrman: The American women’s suffrage movement has always been identified with its two founders, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, whose strong, enthusiastic leadership defined the movement. When they retired from active participation in the cause, the loss of that personal connection naturally affected the movement’s future. The transition was not an easy one. As the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), the organization that Stanton and Anthony had led, headed into the twentieth century, it lost the dynamism and direction of the nineteenth-century association. Successors had difficulty measuring up to Stanton and Anthony, and the organization was unable to develop a focused plan for its difficult campaign. Alice Paul joined the fray in 1910. Did she pick up where Stanton and Anthony left off? The answer to that question is not obvious. Almost anyone familiar with the suffrage movement has a notion of Stanton and Anthony’s leadership, but most people know far less about Alice Paul, whose contributions are not often remembered in the movement’s history. Investigation into Paul’s life and contributions reveals that she had a very different approach to the battle for the vote; that she was a radical compared to the NAWSA leaders who succeeded Stanton and Anthony; and that she devoted her life to winning the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and, later, to the effort to secure the enactment of the Equal Rights Amendment. Any history of the women’s suffrage movement that fails to take into account Alice Paul and her organization, the National Woman’s Party, is incomplete. Using the classroom as a historical laboratory, students can use primary and secondary sources to research the history of Alice Paul, her associates, and the NWP. The students can be historians; they can discover the history of Alice Paul and her fight for women’s suffrage.
- Edcitement: An article originally published in the 1991 Session Weekly of the Minnesota House of Representatives recalls the arguments put forth in objection to the Minnesota Equal Suffrage Association's decision, early in the 20th century, to push for the right of women to vote in presidential elections. One lawmaker declared that all-male voting was "designed by our forefathers." Later, Rep. Thomas Girling argued that "women shouldn't be dragged into the dirty pool of politics." Approving such a measure, he said, would "cause irreparable damage at great expense to the state." When the Senate took up the bill, one member asserted that "disaster and ruin would overtake the nation." Suffrage would lead inevitably to "government by females" because "men could never resist the blandishments of women." Instead, he recommended that women "attach themselves to some man who will represent them in public affairs." Though such arguments may now sound rather ridiculous to some, they are closely related to entrenched views of women that took more than a century to overcome (assuming one agrees they have been overcome). Understanding the positions of the suffrage and anti-suffrage movements—as expressed in archival broadsides, speeches, pamphlets, and political cartoons—will help your students better appreciate the struggle for women's rights and the vestiges of the anti-suffrage positions that lasted at least through the 1960s and, perhaps, to the present day.
- PBS and DPLA: This collection uses primary sources to explore the campaign for women's suffrage through the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.
- National History Day: Ida B. Wells (1862-1931) was born to slave parents in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on July 16, 1862, two months before President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. As a young girl, Wells watched her parents work as political activists during Reconstruction. In 1878, tragedy struck as Wells lost both of her parents and a younger brother in a yellow fever epidemic. To support her younger siblings, Wells became a teacher, eventually moving to Memphis, Tennessee. In 1884, Wells found herself in the middle of a heated lawsuit. After purchasing a first-class train ticket, Wells was ordered to move to a segregated car. She refused to give up her seat and was forcibly removed from the train. Wells filed suit against the railroad and won. This victory was short lived, however, as the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the lower court ruling in 1887. In 1892, Wells became editor and co-owner of The Memphis Free Speech and Headlight. Here, she used her skills as a journalist to champion the causes for African American and women’s rights. Among her most known works were those on behalf of anti-lynching legislation. Until her death in 1931, Ida B. Wells dedicated her life to what she referred to as a “crusade for justice.”
- Unladylike: Learn about Mary Church Terrell, daughter of former slaves and one of the first African American women to earn both a Bachelor and a Master’s degree, who became a national leader for civil rights and women’s suffrage, in this video from Unladylike2020. Terrell was one of the earliest anti-lynching advocates and joined the suffrage movement, focusing her life’s work on racial uplift—the belief that blacks would end racial discrimination and advance themselves through education, work, and community activism. She helped found the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Support materials include discussion questions and teaching tips for research projects. Primary source analysis activities emphasize how the content connects to racial justice issues that continue today, including a close reading of the Emmett Till Antilynching Bill of 2020. Sensitive: This resource contains material that may be sensitive for some students. Teachers should exercise discretion in evaluating whether this resource is suitable for their class.
Remedial Herstory Editors. "16. FINAL PUSH FOR WOMAN SUFFRAGE." The Remedial Herstory Project. November 20, 2022. www.remedialherstory.com.
Primary AUTHOR: |
Kelsie Brook Eckert
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Primary Reviewer: |
Dr. Alicia Gutierrez-Romine
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Consulting TeamKelsie Brook Eckert, Project Director
Coordinator of Social Studies Education at Plymouth State University Dr. Barbara Tischler, Consultant Professor of History Hunter College and Columbia University Dr. Alicia Gutierrez-Romine, Consultant Assistant Professor of History at La Sierra University Jacqui Nelson, Consultant Teaching Lecturer of Military History at Plymouth State University Dr. Deanna Beachley Professor of History and Women's Studies at College of Southern Nevada |
EditorsReviewersColonial
Dr. Margaret Huettl Hannah Dutton Dr. John Krueckeberg 19th Century Dr. Rebecca Noel Michelle Stonis, MA Annabelle L. Blevins Pifer, MA Cony Marquez, PhD Candidate 20th Century Dr. Tanya Roth Dr. Jessica Frazier Mary Bezbatchenko, MA |
Survey's on U.S. Women's History
Berry and Gross tell a survey of black women in the United States.
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Susan Ware tells a short introduction to women's history in the United States.
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Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz tells a survey of indigenous people in the United States.
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Jill Lepore tells a survey of the United States.
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Gail Collins tells a survey of Women in the United States.
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Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie M. Harris place sexuality at the center of slavery studies, spanning early colonialism through the civil war.
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In From Back Alley to the Border, Alicia Gutierrez-Romine examines the history of criminal abortion in California.
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Jan Manion tells the history of women in male clothing who married other women between the Colonial Era and WWI.
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Native American Cultures
Stockel interviews Apache women and stories are told of women warrior ancestors.
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A collection of essays examining power and gender status in native cultures.
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Dive into the history of Cherokee women, and their long standing traditions.
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A collection of historical and contemporary women of Indigenous heritage who have contributed to the survival and success of their families, communities--and the United States of America.
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Colonial Era 1600-1775
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By examining the lives of six specific women in the Salem Witch Trials, Marilynne Roach shows readers what it was like to be present throughout this horrific time and how it was impossible to live through it unchanged. Roach believes that the individuals involved are too often reduced to stock characters and stereotypes when accuracy is sacrificed to indignation.
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In The Jamestown Bride, Jennifer Potter recounts the lives of the women in Jamestown, but without the resource of letters or journals she turns to the Virginia Company's merchant lists -- which were used as a kind of sales catalog for prospective husbands -- as well as censuses, court records, the minutes of Virginia's General Assemblies, letters to England from their male counterparts, and other such accounts of the everyday life of the early colonists.
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Kathleen Brown examines the origins of racism and slavery in British North America from the perspective of gender. Both a basic social relationship and a model for other social hierarchies, gender helped determine the construction of racial categories and the institution of slavery in Virginia.
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Carol Berkin's multicultural history reconstructs the lives of American women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries-women from European, African, and Native backgrounds-and examines their varied roles as wives, mothers, household managers, laborers, rebels, and, ultimately, critical forces in shaping the new nation's culture and history.
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Revolutionary Period 1763-1783
Women of all classes and races were not only supporters and opponents of the American Revolution, they actively promoted, engaged, wrote, fought, and were deeply impacted by the outcome of the American Revolution. There are a lot of perspectives to consider, and we can only brush the surface.
Liberty's Daughters is widely considered a landmark book on the history of American women and on the Revolution itself. Norton brilliantly portrays a dramatic transformation of women's private lives in the wake of the Revolution. This fascinating human story includes lively anecdotes and revealing details from the personal papers of 450 eighteenth-century families.
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Holton describes the origins and crucial battles of the Revolution from Lexington and Concord to the British surrender at Yorktown, always focusing on marginalized Americans—enslaved Africans and African Americans, Native Americans, women, and dissenters—and on overlooked factors such as weather, North America’s unique geography, chance, misperception, attempts to manipulate public opinion, and (most of all) disease.
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They baked New England's Thanksgiving pies, preached their faith to crowds of worshippers, spied for the patriots during the Revolution, wrote that human bondage was a sin, and demanded reparations for slavery. Black women in colonial and revolutionary New England sought not only legal emancipation from slavery but defined freedom more broadly to include spiritual, familial, and economic dimensions.
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The American Revolution was a home-front war that brought scarcity, bloodshed, and danger into the life of every American. In this book, Carol Berkin shows us how women played a vital role throughout the conflict. This incisive and comprehensive history illuminates a fascinating and unknown side of the struggle for American independence.
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Mercy Otis Warren’s book is one of the earliest histories of the American Revolution, and the first to be written by a woman. It charts the progress of the entire revolution, from the imposition of the Stamp Act in 1765 through to ratification of the Constitution in 1787.This book provides brilliant insight into the history of the American Revolution from the perspective of a contemporary who was able to talk to the key figures involved. This book should be essential reading for anyone interested in the Revolutionary period and how the United States was founded.
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Early Republic 1783-1815
Following the American Revolution, US culture morphed and shifted. Women in this new republic found new roles and expectations as mothers: for to give power to the masses in a democracy, meant men needed to be educated, and their mothers needed to do it. The ideal of a Republican Mother emerged and the dynamic women of the colonial and revolutionary eras became a thing of the past.
"A New England Girlhood" is the autobiography of poet Lucy Larcom. Arriving in Lowell, Massachusetts, in the 1830s after the death of her shipmaster father, eleven-year-old Lucy Larcom went to work in a textile mill to help her family make ends meet. Originally published in 1889, her engaging autobiography offers glimpses of the early years of the American factory system as well as of the social influences on her development.
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In 1762, John Adams penned a flirtatious note to “Miss Adorable,” the 17-year-old Abigail Smith. In 1801, Abigail wrote to wish her husband John a safe journey as he headed home to Quincy after serving as president of the nation he helped create. The letters that span these nearly forty years form the most significant correspondence―and reveal one of the most intriguing and inspiring partnerships―in American history.
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In Mere Equals, Lucia McMahon narrates a story about how a generation of young women who enjoyed access to new educational opportunities made sense of their individual and social identities in an American nation marked by stark political inequality between the sexes.
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Antebellum 1815-1861
The Antebellum Period is full of historical events and movements. From the rise of the abolitionist movement, the Mexican-American War, and the Trail of Tears.
In Patriots, Prostitutes, and Spies, John M. Belohlavek tells the story of women on both sides of the Mexican-American War (1846-48) as they were propelled by the bloody conflict to adopt new roles and expand traditional ones.
American women "back home" functioned as anti-war activists, pro-war supporters, and pioneering female journalists. Others moved west and established their own reputations for courage and determination in dusty border towns or bordellos. |
Bridging women's history, the history of the South, and African American history, this book makes a bold argument about the role of white women in American slavery. Historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers draws on a variety of sources to show that slave‑owning women were sophisticated economic actors who directly engaged in and benefited from the South's slave market.
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This book traces the lived experiences of women lawbreakers in the state of Pennsylvania from 1820 to 1860 through the records of more than six thousand criminal court cases. By following these women from the perpetration of their crimes through the state’s efforts to punish and reform them, Erica Rhodes Hayden places them at the center of their own stories.
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The brave pioneers who made a life on the frontier were not only male—and they were not only white. The story of African-American women in the Old West is one that has largely gone untold until now. The stories of ten African-American women are reconstructed from historic documents found in century-old archives. Some of these women slaves, some were free, and some were born into slavery and found freedom in the old west.
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Civil War & Reconstruction 1861-1877
The role of women throughout the American Civil War was diverse and widespread. No matter whether one was black or white, southern or northern, women were vital in the war efforts. Some were soldiers, nurses, or took control over their farms and families stations that the men usually would.
Through richly detailed letters from the time and exhaustive research, Wickenden traces the second American revolution these women fought to bring about, the toll it took on their families, and its lasting effects on the country. Riveting and profoundly relevant to our own time, The Agitators brings a vibrant, original voice to this transformative period in our history.
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This lively and authoritative book opens a hitherto neglected chapter of Civil War history, telling the stories of hundreds of women who adopted male disguise and fought as soldiers. It explores their reasons for enlisting; their experiences in combat, and the way they were seen by their fellow soldiers and the American public.
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Historians of the Civil War often speak of "wars within a war"—the military fight, wartime struggles on the home front, and the political and moral battle to preserve the Union and end slavery. In this broadly conceived book, Thavolia Glymph provides a comprehensive new history of women's roles and lives in the Civil War—North and South, white and black, slave and free—showing how women were essentially and fully engaged in all three arenas.
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When Confederate men marched off to battle, southern women struggled with the new responsibilities of directing farms and plantations, providing for families, and supervising increasingly restive slaves. Drew Faust offers a compelling picture of the more than half-million women who belonged to the slaveholding families of the Confederacy during this period of acute crisis, when every part of these women's lives became vexed and uncertain.
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Freedom's Women examines African American women's experiences during the Civil War and early Reconstruction years in Mississippi. Exploring issues of family and work, the author shows how African American women's attempts to achieve more control over their lives shaped their attitudes toward work, marriage, family, and community.
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Emilie Davis was a free African American woman who lived in Philadelphia during the Civil War. She lived an average life in her day, but what sets her apart is that she kept a diary. Her daily entries from 1863 to 1865 touch on the momentous and the mundane: she discusses her own and her community’s reactions to events of the war, such as the Battle of Gettysburg, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the assassination of President Lincoln, as well as the minutiae of social life in Philadelphia’s black community.
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Karen Abbott illuminates one of the most fascinating yet little known aspects of the Civil War: the stories of four courageous women—a socialite, a farmgirl, an abolitionist, and a widow—who were spies. Using a wealth of primary source material and interviews with the spies’ descendants, Abbott seamlessly weaves the adventures of these four heroines throughout the tumultuous years of the war.
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Women in the Reconstruction Era, which followed the American Civil War, faced many new challenges. Freedwomen struggled to find their place in society due to separated families, mistreatment from former masters, racism, and no substantial help. Some White Northern women helped with the Freedman's Bureau and fought to help African American's where they could. Whereas, White Southern women worked towards honoring their dead and mythologizing the Confederacy.
This book examines the problems that Southern women faced during the Reconstruction Era, in Part I as mothers, wives, daughters or sisters of men burdened with financial difficulties and the radical Republican regime, and in Part II with specific illustrations of their tribulations through the letters and diaries of five different women.
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In this first critical study of female abolitionists and feminists in the freedmen's aid movement, Carol Faulkner describes these women's radical view of former slaves and the nation's responsibility to them. Moving beyond the image of the Yankee schoolmarm, Women's Radical Reconstruction demonstrates fully the complex and dynamic part played by Northern women in the design, implementation, and administration of Reconstruction policy.
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The advocates of woman suffrage and black suffrage came to a bitter falling-out in the midst of Reconstruction, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton opposed the 15th Amendment because it granted the vote to black men but not to women. How did these two causes, so long allied, come to this? Based on extensive research, Fighting Chance is a major contribution to women's history and to 19th-century political history--a story of how idealists descended to racist betrayal and desperate failure.
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The Wild West 1876-1897
On May 30, 1899, history was made when Pearl Hart, disguised as a man, held up a stagecoach in Arizona and robbed the passengers at gunpoint. A manhunt ensued as word of her heist spread, and Pearl Hart went on to become a media sensation and the most notorious female outlaw on the Western frontier.
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Hard-drinking, hard-living poker players and prostitutes of the new boom towns; wives and mothers traveling two and a half thousand miles across the prairies in covered-wagon convoys, some of them so poor they walked the entire route.
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Born a slave in eastern Tennessee, Sarah Blair Bickford (1852–1931) made her way while still a teenager to Montana Territory, where she settled in the mining boomtown of Virginia City. Race and the Wild West is the first full-length biography of this remarkable woman, whose life story affords new insight into race and belonging in the American West around the turn of the twentieth century.
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In Women of the Northern Plains, Barbara Handy-Marchello tells the stories of the unsung heroes of North Dakota's settlement era: the farm women. Enlivened by interviews with pioneer families as well as diaries, memoirs, and other primary sources, Women of the Northern Plains uncovers the significant and changing roles of Dakota farm women who were true partners to their husbands, their efforts marking the difference between success and failure for their families.
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Soiled Doves tells the story of the grey world of prostitution and the women who participated in the oldest profession. Colorful, if not socially acceptable, these ladies of easy virtue were a definite part of the early West--wearing ruffled petticoats with fancy bows, they were glamorous and plain, good and ad and many were as wild as the land they came to tame.
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Daughters of Joy will prove to be a gold mine of information, since the author's massive research makes the book a primary source as well as a thoughtful study of soiled doves on the frontier.....Butler has portrayed the stark realities of prostitution in the American West With sensitivity and insight.
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The Progressive Era 1897-1920
Following the Civil War, Americans were still divided on many many socio-political topics--including universal suffrage. Although female suffragist fought tooth and nail for the right other women fought just as hard against it. Women of all backgrounds played important roles on both sides of the journey to suffrage.
Women of color, especially African American women, were fighting for their right to vote and to be treated as full, equal citizens of the United States. Their battlefront wasn't just about gender. African American women had to deal with white abolitionist-suffragists who drew the line at sharing power with their black sisters. They had to overcome deep, exclusionary racial prejudices that were rife in the American suffrage movement. And they had to maintain their dignity--and safety--in a society that tried to keep them in its bottom ranks.
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Woodrow Wilson lands in Washington, DC, in March of 1913, a day before he is set to take the presidential oath of office. He is surprised by the modest turnout. The crowds and reporters are blocks away from Union Station, watching a parade of eight thousand suffragists on Pennsylvania Avenue in a first-of-its-kind protest organized by a twenty-five-year-old activist named Alice Paul. The next day, The New York Times calls the procession “one of the most impressively beautiful spectacles ever staged in this country.”
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Comprised of historical texts spanning two centuries, The Women's Suffrage Movement is a comprehensive and singular volume with a distinctive focus on incorporating race, class, and gender, and illuminating minority voices. At a time of enormous political and social upheaval, there could be no more important book than one that recognizes a group of exemplary women--in their own words--as they paved the way for future generations.
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Ever wonder what our foremothers were doing while our forefathers were making recorded history? And what did these women do to claim their social and political power to change their circumstances? We Demand the Right to Vote: The Journey to the 19th Amendment introduces readers to American women's first civil rights movement known as "Women's Suffrage"--women's 72-year struggle for social and political equality that culminated in their winning the right to vote via the 19th Amendment.
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Early in the twentieth century, maternal and child welfare evolved from a private family responsibility into a matter of national policy. Molly Ladd-Taylor explores both the private and public aspects of child-rearing, using the relationship between them to cast new light on the histories of motherhood, the welfare state, and women's activism in the United States.
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During the Progessive Era, a period of unprecedented ingenuity, women evangelists built the old time religion with brick and mortar, uniforms and automobiles, fresh converts and devoted protégés. Across America, entrepreneurial women founded churches, denominations, religious training schools, rescue homes, rescue missions, and evangelistic organizations.
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World War I 1914-1918
The significant roles women played during World War I implored Americans to take a hard look at gender equality. The contributions and sacrifices made by women during this time ignited the demand for social change, which ultimately led to the ratification of the 19th Amendment.
Into the Breach uses excerpts from diaries, memoirs, letters, and newspaper accounts to depict the experiences of wartime nurses, entertainers, canteen workers, interpreters, and journalists
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The Curies’ newly discovered element of radium makes gleaming headlines across the nation as the fresh face of beauty, and wonder drug of the medical community. From body lotion to tonic water, the popular new element shines bright in the otherwise dark years of the First World War.
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In 1916, at the height of World War I, brilliant Shakespeare expert Elizebeth Smith went to work for an eccentric tycoon on his estate outside Chicago. The tycoon had close ties to the U.S. government, and he soon asked Elizebeth to apply her language skills to an exciting new venture: code-breaking. Fagone unveils America’s code-breaking history through the prism of Smith’s life, bringing into focus the unforgettable events and colorful personalities that would help shape modern intelligence.
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When World War I began, war reporting was a thoroughly masculine bastion of journalism. But that did not stop dozens of women reporters from stepping into the breach, defying gender norms and official restrictions to establish roles for themselves—and to write new kinds of narratives about women and war.
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Suffrage
A political combat memoir like no other, suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt takes us to the front lines of the Votes for Women battlefields — in the states and in Congress — as American women fight for the franchise. With candor and flashes of wry humor, Catt offers sharp insights into the social, political, and economic forces arrayed against her cause, revealing the strategies that finally brought the suffragists' seven-decade campaign to dramatic victory.
Following a handful of remarkable women who led their respective forces into battle, along with appearances by Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding, Frederick Douglass, and Eleanor Roosevelt, The Woman's Hour is an inspiring story of activists winning their own freedom in one of the last campaigns forged in the shadow of the Civil War, and the beginning of the great 20th-century battles for civil rights.
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The women’s suffrage movement, much like many other civil rights movements, has an important and often unrecognized queer history. In Public Faces, Secret Lives Wendy L. Rouse reveals that, contrary to popular belief, the suffrage movement included a variety of individuals who represented a range of genders and sexualities. However, owing to the constant pressure to present a “respectable” public image, suffrage leaders publicly conformed to gendered views of ideal womanhood in order to make women’s suffrage more palatable to the public.
In Vanguard, acclaimed historian Martha S. Jones offers a new history of African American women's political lives in America. She recounts how they defied both racism and sexism to fight for the ballot and how they wielded political power to secure the equality and dignity of all persons. From the earliest days of the republic to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and beyond, Jones excavates the lives and work of Black women.
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From social clubs in New York's Chinatown to conferences for Native American rights, and in African American newspapers and pamphlets demanding equality for Spanish-speaking New Mexicans, a diverse cadre of extraordinary women struggled to build a movement that would truly include all women, regardless of race or national origin.
No Votes for Women explores the complicated history of the suffrage movement in New York State by delving into the stories of women who opposed the expansion of voting rights to women. Susan Goodier finds that conservative women who fought against suffrage encouraged women to retain their distinctive feminine identities as protectors of their homes and families, a role they felt was threatened by the imposition of masculine political responsibilities. She details the victories and defeats on both sides of the movement from its start in the 1890s to its end in the 1930s, acknowledging the powerful activism of this often overlooked and misunderstood political force in the history of women's equality.
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Native American women
Based on an Athabascan Indian legend passed along for many generations from mothers to daughters of the upper Yukon River Valley in Alaska, this is the suspenseful, shocking, ultimately inspirational tale of two old women abandoned by their tribe during a brutal winter famine.
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In this haunting and groundbreaking historical novel, Danielle Daniel imagines the lives of women in the Algonquin territories of the 1600s, a story inspired by her family’s ancestral link to a young girl who was murdered by French settlers.
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Daunis Fontaine must learn what it means to be a strong Anishinaabe kwe (Ojibwe woman) and how far she’ll go for her community, even if it tears apart the only world she’s ever known.
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Colonial Women
Amari's life was once perfect. Engaged to the handsomest man in her tribe, adored by her family, and fortunate enough to live in a beautiful village, it never occurred to her that it could all be taken away in an instant. But that was what happened when her village was invaded by slave traders. Her family was brutally murdered as she was dragged away to a slave ship and sent to be sold in the Carolinas. There she was bought by a plantation owner and given to his son as a "birthday present".
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A riveting historical novel about Peggy Shippen Arnold, the cunning wife of Benedict Arnold and mastermind behind America’s most infamous act of treason.
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A young Puritan woman—faithful, resourceful, but afraid of the demons that dog her soul—plots her escape from a violent marriage in this riveting and propulsive novel of historical suspense.
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Revolutionary Era Women
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Rebellious Frannie Tasker knows little about the war between England and its thirteen colonies in 1776, until a shipwreck off her home in Grand Bahama Island presents an unthinkable opportunity. The body of a young woman floating in the sea gives Frannie the chance to escape her brutal stepfather--and she takes it.
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Antebellum Women
Born on a plantation in Charles City, Virginia, Pheby Delores Brown has lived a relatively sheltered life. Shielded by her mother’s position as the estate’s medicine woman and cherished by the Master’s sister, she is set apart from the others on the plantation, belonging to neither world.
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The House Girl, the historical fiction debut by Tara Conklin, is an unforgettable story of love, history, and a search for justice, set in modern-day New York and 1852 Virginia.
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Moments after Lisbeth is born, she’s taken from her mother and handed over to an enslaved wet nurse, Mattie, a young mother separated from her own infant son in order to care for her tiny charge. Thus begins an intense relationship that will shape both of their lives for decades to come.
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The Civil War and Reconstruction
Conjure Women is a sweeping story that brings the world of the South before and after the Civil War vividly to life. Spanning eras and generations, it tells of the lives of three unforgettable women: Miss May Belle, a wise healing woman; her precocious and observant daughter Rue, who is reluctant to follow in her mother’s footsteps as a midwife; and their master’s daughter Varina.
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Set in the midst of the Civil War, The Thread Collectors follows two very different women whose paths collide unexpectedly. In New Orleans, Stella, a young Black woman, sews maps that help enslaved men escape and join the Union Army. Lily, a Jewish woman in New York City, creates a quilt for her husband, a Union soldier stationed in Louisiana. When she goes months without hearing from him, she decides to journey to Louisiana to find him.
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Josephine N. Leary is determined to build a life of her own and a future for her family. When she moves to Edenton, North Carolina, from the plantation where she was born, she is free, newly married, and ready to follow her dreams.
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The wild West and Second Industrial Revolution
The day of her wedding, 17 year old Ada’s life looks good; she loves her husband, and she loves working as an apprentice to her mother, a respected midwife. But after a year of marriage and no pregnancy, in a town where barren women are routinely hanged as witches, her survival depends on leaving behind everything she knows.
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When Kate Thompson’s father is killed by the notorious Rose Riders for a mysterious journal that reveals the secret location of a gold mine, the eighteen-year-old disguises herself as a boy and takes to the gritty plains looking for answers and justice.
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In this gripping historical, Chance exposes the horrors women faced in late 19th-century New York when they dared to show passion of any kind or repudiate society's norms.
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The Progressive Era
Since childhood, Anita Hemmings has longed to attend the country’s most exclusive school for women, Vassar College. Now, a bright, beautiful senior in the class of 1897, she is hiding a secret that would have banned her from admission: Anita is the only African-American student ever to attend Vassar. With her olive complexion and dark hair, this daughter of a janitor and descendant of slaves has successfully passed as white, but now finds herself rooming with Louise “Lottie” Taylor, the scion of one of New York’s most prominent families.
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It's 1913 and Laura Lyons lives with her husband, superintendent of the New York Public Library building, and their two children in an apartment located in the grand building on 5th Avenue. But Laura wants more—she applies to the Columbia Journalism School and her world is cracked open. She discovers a radical, all-female group where women loudly share their opinions on suffrage, birth control, and women's rights. Soon, Laura finds herself questioning her traditional role as wife and mother.
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In City of Lies, con woman Elizabeth Miles is desperately trying to escape men that are after her in 1917 Washington D.C. so she joins a suffragist parade in front of the White House only to get swept up, arrested and sent to the Occoquan, VA women’s prison with the other marchers.
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World War 1
Inspired by real women, this powerful novel tells the story of two unconventional American sisters who volunteer at the front during World War I.
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A group of young women from Smith College risk their lives in France at the height of World War I in this sweeping novel based on a true story—a skillful blend of Call the Midwife and The Alice Network—from New York Times bestselling author Lauren Willig.
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December 1917. As World War I rages in Europe, twenty-four-year-old Ruby Wagner, the jewel in a prominent Philadelphia family, prepares for her upcoming wedding to a society scion. Like her life so far, it’s all been carefully arranged. But when her beloved older brother is killed in combat, Ruby follows her heart and answers the Army Signal Corps’ call for women operators to help overseas.
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How to teach with Films:
Remember, teachers want the student to be the historian. What do historians do when they watch films?
- Before they watch, ask students to research the director and producers. These are the source of the information. How will their background and experience likely bias this film?
- Also, ask students to consider the context the film was created in. The film may be about history, but it was made recently. What was going on the year the film was made that could bias the film? In particular, how do you think the gains of feminism will impact the portrayal of the female characters?
- As they watch, ask students to research the historical accuracy of the film. What do online sources say about what the film gets right or wrong?
- Afterward, ask students to describe how the female characters were portrayed and what lessons they got from the film.
- Then, ask students to evaluate this film as a learning tool. Was it helpful to better understand this topic? Did the historical inaccuracies make it unhelpful? Make it clear any informed opinion is valid.
Documentaries
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Ascent of Woman: is a documentary about prehistoric and Ancient women's history across cultures.
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Witches: A Century of Murder is about the witch trials that plagued England under Kings James IV and I and Charles I.
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Taking Root is a documentary about the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, Wangari Maathai. She was from Kenya and her work was on environmental protection.
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Feature Length Movies
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The Last Duel highlights the way that rape was handled in medieval Europe. It barely passes the Bechdel Test, with main actors being the male characters, but the whole theme of sex, sexuality, and gender dynamics cannot be ignored.
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Elizabeth tells the story of Elizabeth's Golden era.
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Mary Queen of Scots is a film about the relationship between the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I of England and her Catholic cousin Mary Queen of Scots who challenged her throne.
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Catherine the Great is about the career of Catherine of Russia and her challenges as a female leader.
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The Favorite is about the interesting palace life of Queen Anne and her closest female confidants. This film expands upon rumors of lesbianism within the court.
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The Woman King is a film about the Dahomey "Amazons," women warriors who fought European imperialism in West Africa.
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Albert Nobbs is a film about the life of a poor woman living in 19th century Ireland who cross dresses in order to improve her station.
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Victoria and Abdul is a film about the interesting relationship between Queen Victoria and Abdul Karim, an Indian man who earned her confidence.
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Suffragette tells the stories of English women who grappled with a way to have their voices heard in the early movement.
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The Danish Girl is historical fiction based losely on the life and marriage of a transgender pioneer.
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A Call to Spy is about the first British and American women spies that worked on the ground in France during WWII.
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Frida is a film about the first Mexican woman to have her work displayed at the Louvre in Paris, FR.
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Television Series
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The White Queen and the series that follow are based on a historical fiction novel about the rise of the Tudor family in England. The main characters are the women, who through marriage gain and lose the crown.
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The Serpent Queen tells the story of Queen Catherine de Medici of France and the complexities of being a queen regent.
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The Tudors tells the story of Henry VIII and each of his six wives. Remember the old school tale: divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.
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Victoria is a TV series about the rise and career of Queen Victoria, whose reign spanned much of the 19th century.
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The Crown is a TV series that shows the rise and career of the current Queen of England, Elizabeth II. Her reign began shortly after WWII.
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Bibliography
Collins, Gail, America's Women: Four Hundred Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines. New York, William Morrow, 2003.
DuBois, Ellen Carol, 1947-. Through Women's Eyes : an American History with Documents. Boston :Bedford/St. Martin's, 2005.Indians Editors. “NATIVE AMERICAN WOMEN.” Indians. N.D. http://indians.org/articles/Native-american-women.html.
Ware, Susan. American Women’s History: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
DuBois, Ellen Carol, 1947-. Through Women's Eyes : an American History with Documents. Boston :Bedford/St. Martin's, 2005.Indians Editors. “NATIVE AMERICAN WOMEN.” Indians. N.D. http://indians.org/articles/Native-american-women.html.
Ware, Susan. American Women’s History: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
