How Social Change is Made: Object Lessons From the Long History of Women’s Suffrage
There is no formula for making social change, no elixir that propels a culture toward progress. But as a historian who specializes in the study of women’s suffrage, and author of Gilded Suffragists: The New York Socialites Who Fought for Women’s Right to Vote, I believe there were several elements that distinguished the cause. One was a […]
Women Banding Together, To Win the Vote Then, To Make Social Change Now
When I first looked at GirlCrew.com, I likened it to Facebook for women — a website that facilitates reunions, eases life transitions and creates online communities. And it is all of that. But the harder I explored this new “platform for women to make new friends,” the more I realized that it also promised the […]
Should 16-Year-Olds Vote? A Suffrage Historian Weighs In
The last time the US lowered federal voting age was in 1971, when it declined from 21 to 18. The chief rationale was that 18-year-olds sent to Vietnam to fight, perhaps to die, had earned a chance to affect their country’s politics. In November 2013, Takoma Park, MD became the first in US to grant […]
How Women’s Suffrage Activists Lobbied Congress for the Vote: Lessons For Us
The Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality Monument in Washington, D.C. was once the headquarters building for the National Woman’s Party. There women — many young, many militant — planned strategy, wrote and produced the party’s newspaper, The Suffragist, and returned for rest after serving time in jail. On display for visitors these days are many markers of the […]
When Women Went to Jail for the Right to Vote — in America
It is not well known but some American women went to jail for their right to vote. In a prison that had been discarded ten years earlier as “unfit to hold a human being,” they were subjected to insect-infected food, sunless cells and in some cases brutal attack. A few went on hunger strikes and […]
Young Women Leading Revolutions? Ask 20-Something Women’s Suffrage Activist Alice Paul
A meme making its way around the Internet speaks volumes to the marvel that young students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School — not yet eligible to vote — are leading a revolution in the politics of guns. Note this list contains no women — not even Betsy Ross, who at 24, as a trained […]
Restoring Black Suffragists to Feminist History
A few weeks ago my great-niece came home from school in distress. “The teacher said I was white,” she told her mother. “But we’re not white!” In the eyes of a six-year-old, people are the color she will need to find in her crayon box to draw them — peach or beige or cocoa […]