Thanks to Bekah Jorgensen, a blogger at the Motherhood Moment, for a wonderful interview about my new book, And Yet They Persisted: How American Women Won the Right to Vote. Check it out here and let me know what you think. You can reach me at johanna.neuman@me.com. And in case you missed it, some of […]
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 […]
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 […]
Black Suffragists Who Persevered Against White Racism
As the nation’s capital readied for Woodrow Wilson’s first inauguration in March of 1913, activist Alice Paul made plans for a large suffrage parade of floats, marchers and theatrical representations. As I note in my new book, Gilded Suffragists: The New York Socialites Who Fought for Women’s Right to Vote, states often serve as incubators for […]