#suffrage movements

[resplendentoutfit]

Women's Suffrage Movement

The movement for women's suffrage took many decades to obtain voting rights. Women fought for their rights via smart political strategy. Dynamic leadership attracted several generations of women – mothers, daughters, and grandmothers formed national organizations and made alliances that brought women into the political sphere. The fight intensified during World War I due to women's work outside the home to help the war effort. Women now saw themselves as fully deserving of the same rights as men.

A trio of outfits at the Daughters of the American Revolution Museum shows the evolution from the last gasp of Edwardian bulk to the short, simple dress of the Twenties. Left, a two-piece dress of about 1907 (Daughters of the American Revolution Museum). Center, a houndstooth suit of about 1914 (loan courtesy Shippensburg University Fashion Archives and Museum). Right, black and white day dress, 1925 (Daughters of the American Revolution Museum).

Exhibition vignette with the “Bear the Banner Proudly They Have Borne Before” banner, circa 1913-1920. National Woman’s Party. Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument, Washington, DC.

Purple, white, and gold were among the colors representing the movement. White dresses were worn by women as a representation of purity of thought and high-mindedness. Purple represented the vote and loyalty, constancy, and steadfastness. Gold stood for the torch that guides our way.

Ethel Wright (1866–1939) Christabel Pankhurst (British suffragette) • National Portrait Gallery, London

[whenweallvote]

Happy heavenly birthday to women's suffrage activist Mabel Ping-Hua Lee. 🕊️🤍 

Lee was born in Guangzhou, China in 1897, and received a visa to study in the U.S. in 1905. Seven years later, at just 16 years old, she led a parade of 10,000 people through New York protesting for women’s suffrage.

Women were granted the right to vote in New York in 1917 and across the country in 1920. However, Chinese women including Lee were not afforded voting rights until 1943 because of the Chinese Exclusion Act — which prevented Chinese immigrants from becoming U.S. citizens.

While Lee continued to advocate for women’s suffrage, it remains unclear if she ever became a U.S. citizen or was able to cast a ballot. Her work, however, was instrumental in advancing women’s rights throughout the U.S. 🙏🏾

[luminacerin]

RIP Shen Jiu, you would have loved fighting for Britney Spears freedom.

[isawthismeme]

Black people and women have been overqualified for every position in America since July 3rd, 1776. It is the progress of white people and of men to finally get over their racism and misogyny that is allowing people into those spaces. Remember that.

[haggishlyhagging]

Why were women of the present cut off from women of the past and how was this achieved? While we had been ready to believe the lessons of our own education and to accept that there was but a handful of women in the past who had protested against male power, that they were ‘eccentric’ at best, and more usually ‘neurotic’, ‘embittered’ and quite unrepresentative, then the absence of women's voices from history seemed understandable. But when it began to appear that there had been many women who had been saying in centuries past what we were saying in the 1970s, that they had been representative of their sex, and that they had disappeared, the problem assumed very different proportions.

For years I had not thought to challenge the received wisdom of my own history tutors who had — in the only fragment of knowledge about angry women I was ever endowed with — informed me that early in the twentieth century, a few unbalanced and foolish women had chained themselves to railings in the attempt to obtain the vote. When I learnt, however, that in 1911 there had been twenty-one regular feminist periodicals in Britain, that there was a feminist book shop, a woman's press, and a women's bank run by and for women, I could no longer accept that the reason I knew almost nothing about women of the past was because there were so few of them, and they had done so little. I began to acknowledge not only that the women's movement of the early twentieth century was bigger, stronger and more influential than I had ever suspected, but that it might not have been the only such movement. It was in this context that I began to wonder whether the disappearance of the women of the past was an accident.

Dale Spender, Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them

[prettyboysdontlookatexplosions]

In the North and South, women's standing as citizens had always been refracted through their normative adult status as wives, and by the state's equal or greater commitment to upholding marriage and the law of coverture. That law put women under their husbands' legal power in the interests of marital unity. The transformation of woman into wife made "citizenship--a public identity as a participant in public life--something close to a contradiction in terms for a married woman." The terms of female citizenship had always been set by the perceived necessities of marriage and its gender asymmetries between man and woman, husband and wife. In the North by i86o, agitation for the woman citizen's natural right of suffrage had, in conjunction with antislavery, already made serious political inroads. Increasingly women's continued exclusion had to be dignified by an argument. But nowhere in the nineteenth-century United States did any women's rights, not to mention demands for the vote, emerge outside of the context of antislavery politics. So in the South, where a proslavery agenda set the tone in politics and where politicians regularly dragooned marriage into the work of legitimizing slavery (as just another desirable form of domestic dependence suitable to the weak), women's status as citizens hardly mattered. There, politicians were habituated to thinking of women as existing at a remove from the body politic, as part of the family or the household, and not of the people and the citizens.

stephanie mccurry, confederate reckoning: power and politics in the civil war south

[philosophybits]

By every fact and by every argument which man can wield in defence of his natural right to participate in government, the right of woman so to participate is equally defended and rendered unassailable.

Frederick Douglass, "Woman Suffrage Movement (1870)"

[daguerreotyping]

Sears Roebuck & Co, Holding the Reins, c. 1912 stereoview

[mote-historie]

Ralph Barton, Making the Polls Attractive to the Anti-Suffragists, Puck, 30 February 1915.

Puck was the first successful humor magazine in the United States of colorful cartoons, caricatures and political satire of the issues of the day. It was founded in 1876 as a German-language publication by Joseph Keppler, an Austrian immigrant cartoonist.[1] Puck's first English-language edition was published in 1877, covering issues like New York City's Tammany Hall, presidential politics, and social issues of the late 19th century to the early 20th century.

"Puckish" means "childishly mischievous". This led Shakespeare's Puck character (from A Midsummer Night's Dream) to be recast as a charming near-naked boy and used as the title of the magazine. Puck was the first magazine to carry illustrated advertising and the first to successfully adopt full-color lithography printing for a weekly publication.

Puck was published from 1876 until 1918. (x)

[stairnaheireann]

#OTD in 1916 – Francis Sheehy-Skeffington was apprehended while trying to stop looting during the Easter Rising and was later murdered by the British without trial.

Francis Skeffington, writer and pacifist, was born in Bailieborough, Co Cavan on the 23 December 1878 to Joseph Bartholomew Skeffington and his wife Rose née Magorian. The family moved to Co Down shortly after his birth. He was educated by his father, a schools inspector and enrolled in University College Dublin (UCD) in 1896. While he studied at UCD he became close friends with James Joyce and…

[brianfrench1995]

1918 Rally Day - Women's Suffrage Postcard

@postcardtimemachine

[dustedmagazine]

Aoife O’Donovan — All My Friends (Yep Roc)

The title track of folk songwriter Aoife O’Donovan’s fifth solo album, All My Friends, arrives loaded with prominent guests: the Knights, the Westerlies, and the San Francisco Girls Chorus. These classical artists, some of whom are also involved in the folk movement on other outings, remain as collaborators on several of the subsequent songs. The blend of O’Donovan’s songs and the varied palette provided for the arrangements creates an expansive and well-crafted ambience. It is the first time O’Donovan has produced her own work, and, with help from co-producers Darren Schneider and Eric Jacobsen, she successfully keeps a lot of balls in the air.

The lyrics are pertinent for today, exploring the trajectory of the women’s rights movement and the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment of the Constitution, granting women suffrage. A native of Newton, Massachusetts, O’Donovan grew up a stone’s throw from many places — parks, churches, coffeehouses, and out in the streets — where for decades the rights of women were advocated for strongly. In the wake of Roe being overturned, this is a practice continuing today.

O’Donovan accentuates coming together instead of airing grievances. “All My Friends” includes the verse, “Marching on, the Tennessee dawn is lifting o’er the fields. Steady on, America, you know it’s time to heal, If you open your arms you’ll feel us, warm and ready for the change, all my friends.”

She spent the summers of her childhood studying Celtic music and dancing in Ireland. The lilting tone of her voice reflects this. On “Someone to Follow,” O’Donovan sings to a baby about the challenges that await her, knowing that her daughter will face them down and make it. Combining gritty resolve and a lullaby, with a memorable hook in the chorus and an accordion solo providing an Irish inflection to the arrangement, “Someone to Follow” is a standout.

“The Right Time” has a stripped down arrangement of acoustic guitar, bass, and drums, but when it gets to the chorus, double-tracked vocals provide soaring harmonies.

“Over the Finish Line” is a duet with Anais Mitchell, referencing the travails of democracy, going so far as “America’s bleeding,” in one of the verses.

Accompanied by piano, vocal harmonies in the chorus once again urge coming together: “If I could change a mind, whose mind? If I could make something to get us o’er the finish line, We’re living in hard times, feeling hard times, living in hard times.”

There is one cover, Bob Dylan’s “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” describing the beating death of an African American woman by a white tobacco farmer in 1963, the year the song was written. The assailant got six months in jail. The Knights join O’Donovan in a rich arrangement that combines “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” with Dylan’s song, underscoring the inclusion of Black Lives Matter in O’Donovan’s meditations on America’s current challenges. It is a rousing conclusion to All My Friends, a relevant and compelling recording.

Christian Carey

[greypetrel]

Watching Poldark with my mother, who is allegedly not into history. We're in 1790s Cornwall.

Elizabeth: "But I just married, whatever should I do in my days?"

Mother: "Those poor women, it must have been so boring, they had nothing to do save bearing children!"

Me: "ACTUALLY-"

*slams Mary Wollstonecraft-Shelley on the table, Anne Radcliffe, Jane Austen, mantua making, Anne Clavering and others and we're talking of just England- Concluding that it was fucking Queen Victoria that ruined it.*

[haggishlyhagging]

There is no adequate way to convey the contribution that Elizabeth Cady Stanton made: she talked and wrote volumes, and Alice S. Rossi (1974) has said of her that: ‘There was probably not another woman in the nineteenth century who put her tongue and pen to better use than Elizabeth Stanton’ (p. 382). Fundamental to her beliefs was the insistence that women must abandon the mentality of oppression in which they had been socialised; they must learn to value themselves, to insist on their own needs, to repudiate self-effacement and sacrifice, which they could do without jeopardising their strength of being able to provide emotional support.

That women should give up guilt was one of her tenets, that they should learn to express their justifiable anger was another. ‘She was not a woman easily threatened by new experiences’, says Rossi (1974) and among her prescriptions for a healthy womanhood was one she clearly followed herself, but which it would take many decades for medicine and psychiatry to learn. She insightfully put her finger on an important cause of hysteria and illness among the women of her day, in an 1859 letter to a Boston friend: ‘I think if women would indulge more freely in vituperation, they would enjoy ten times the health they do. It seems to me they are suffering from repression’ (Stanton and Blatch, 1922: 11, 73-74 (Rossi, 1974, p. 381)).

To Elizabeth Cady Stanton, women's anger was not only valid, and necessary, but rational: ‘I am at boiling point,’ she once wrote to Susan B. Anthony, and, ‘If I do not find some day the use of my tongue on this question I shall die of an intellectual repression, a woman's rights convulsion’ (Theodore Stanton and Harriet Stanton Blatch, 1922, vol. II, p. 41).

She began her public lecturing (and writing) career in much the same spirited manner in which she was to continue, when, upon hearing that she was preparing to go an a lecture tour, her father came to ask if this were true. She told him that it was: ‘“I hope,” he continued, “You will never do it in my lifetime, for if you do, be assured of one thing, your first lecture will be a very expensive one”’ (for he would disinherit her). She replied: ‘I intend … that it shall be a very profitable one’ (ibid, p. 81). She could not be bought by male approval, or the promise of male rewards in return for good behaviour.

At no stage did she fall into the trap of believing that woman's position was the consequence of ignorance among men and that all that was necessary was for women is to present their case, and men, instantly enlightened, would be won to women's cause. She had no delusions about male justice. She understood that men held the power and that, short of women going off on their own and starting an alternative society (never an option for Stanton although she created her own female enclave from which she drew her emotional support), men had to be confronted, and coerced into giving it up. Because her style was not conciliatory, because she did not seek to persuade men that she was respectable and worthy, because she did not try to convince them that men themselves would be better off when women were enfranchised, and that nothing would change, for women would still continue to be the home-makers, child-rearers, and domestic servants, she was often considered unacceptable not only by men, but by many women who took a more cautious approach. She insisted on delivering her speeches criticising marriage as an institution, she insisted on advocating divorce law reform (despite the fact that she was branded, and discredited as, an advocate of free love), and her outspokenness, and her outrage were often a source of embarrassment to some of the women towards the end of the nineteenth century who were trying to allay and soothe the fears of men - in the hope that, no longer frightened, they would grant women the vote.

-Dale Spender, Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them

[rurinnfane]

My local Pokémon Go group was having a costume contest today alongside the Gigantamax debut, and the costumes didn’t have to be Pokémon themed, so I wore my suffragette costume complete with a votes for women sash

And like 75% of the people I saw around town that commented on the costume gave me variations on “hell yeah, I’m a feminist! I always vote for women!”

Then there was the guy who said “yeah women’s right to vote, but like for Trump right?”

😭 bro…….