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INQUISITIVE LEARNING

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Who is behindtheInvolved Learner?Jennifer Girardin began her journey as an educator in 1998, her first teaching position was in California at her alma mater, Santa Margarita High School. (Go, Eagles!) Since that time she has taught a variety of subjects in the humanities including (but not limited to) English (1-1V), Acting & Directing, and Art Appreciation (check out Jennifer's website created in 2010 for her Humanities classesand is still used by teachers around the world today!)After having taught in three different states and five different high schools, Jennifer decided it was time for a new challenge. In 2017, Jennifer stepped out of the classroom to take a position as Oldham County High School's Digital Learning Coach, where she still serves the teachers and students of #ColonelNation today.Jennifer's philosophy of education is grounded in the belief that those who are DOING are the ones who are THINKING and those who are thinking are the ones who are LEARNING. IOW, for students to learn, they must beINVOLVEDin the process. Sometimes that means physical involvement, sometimes mental. Either way,this website is a collection of strategies, activities, lessons, ideas, and resources that have been proven to promote higher levels of learning byINVOLVINGstudents.When she isn't combing the internet and social media for new ideas, Jennifer can be found at the park with her two fur babies (Henry - 15yo, Emma - 13yo), working on her latest fiber arts WIP (that's work-in-progress for you non-knitting/crocheting folk), or on her yoga mat (shout out to 502 Power Yoga).Whether you are just starting your career as an educator or a veteran looking for ways to freshen up your practice, you will find tips here that will not onlychallenge your approach to educationbutprovide tons of supportto increase studentINVOLVEMENTall while saving you time and energy to spend on things that really matter.~Namaste,JenAKA: As I buildtheInvolved Learner, you may notice some pages take you to a site called Teach 4 Tomorrow whose avatar is surprisingly similar totheInvolved Learner! That's because Teach 4 Tomorrow was my previous website. Due to numerous reasons (not the least of which is my tendency to SSO - scrap and start over), I createdtheInvolved Learner. Please be patient while I transfer the oodles of knowledge from the old site to the new but feel free to browse T4T while you are there.

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+ FAQs

RESOURCES

Student Focus

Teacher Focus

Workshop is one of the hottest buzzwords in education right now. In fact, it has been headlining education articles and studies for several years now. There is a reason it is so popular . . . it works. No matter how you adapt its core structure, (Blended Learning, Gradual Release of Responsibility-GRR, Project-Based Learning-PBL all root in the workshop model), workshoping your lessonINVOLVESstudents to create authentic and rich learning opportunities!WHAT WORKSHOP ISWHAT WORKSHOP IS NOTstructuredopportunities for student ownershipcommunity buildingcollaborativestudent-focusedassessment-drivenforgivingstrictteacher-focusedisolated experienceschaoticmeaningless gameshijackable by a handful of studentsimpossible!We all know thatthe person doing the talking/doing is the one doing the learning.The workshop model is a 4-part lesson structure that places the majority of the "doing" on the student. The entire model is designed to get studentsINVOLVED.Part 1: Opening(5-7 min)- This is where the teacher outlines the lesson. What are the learning targets? What materials will students need? What are the behavior expectations for each activity? Who is in which group?Part 2: Mini Lesson(10-15 min)- During this time, the teacher provides direct instruction for the entire class. Teachers can explain resources, lecture, present a slide deck, so on.Part 3:INVOLVEDEngagement(25-30 min)- This is where the magic happens! Students engage in activities that will guide them towards learning.Part 4: Debrief(5-10 min)- It is imperative students are given time and resources that allow them to reflect on, synthesize and name the learning gained during work time.WANT MORE?A quick Google search will provide you with dozens of articles about the structure and efficacy of the workshop model, but if you really want to dig in, I recommend,That Workshop Bookby Samantha Bennett.

FAQs

Workshop

01

I can't teach them everything they need to know in 10-15 minutes.

02

My students won't take enough ownership for them to productively work on their own.

03

Won't it be loud?

04

I can't get through all the parts of the workshop model in a 45-, 50-, 60-minute class period!

05

How do I know they are actually learning?

I can't teach them everything they need to know in 10-15 minutes!Of course not! But who said the teaching only takes place during the direct instruction part of the workshop? The entire point of this model is to arm students with just enough information for them to form their own conclusions, analyze the data, conduct the experiment, research the topic, etc. If you need help converting from sage on the stage to guide on the side, or even to chief opportunity orchestrator, check outthis article by Chris Aviles,STEM teacher at Monmouth Beach middle school in Monmouth Beach, New JerseyMaybe you are trying to tell them too much? Some students can get overwhelmed with too much instruction. Students like Baxter might need a more scaffolded approach. This is where a tactic called CATCH AND RELEASE comes in handy. Catch and Release refers to when a teacher captures the attention of the entire class after they have been released for work time. The teacher might use catch their attention to point out a common mistake he/she/they are seeing, give an additional set of directions, prompt students to move to the next activity, etc. This cycle of Catch and Release/(Direct Instruction)/Work Time, can be repeated as many times as necessary during a class period.

My students won't take enough ownership for them to productively work on their own.This is the most complaint I hear in my coaching. It is true that students seem to care more about the grade than the learning. (All hail SBG!) However, how many of us use this excuse to justify our teaching practice? Do you honestly think thatHenryis all of a sudden going to "own his learning" while you are presenting to the class or do you think you have a better chance at gettingHenryto participate if he is up, active, and his peers are pressuring him to pay attention so THEY can get a good grade?Tell students WHY they are doing the lesson. This is SO important! If teens see the reason why they need to pay attention, how that knowledge/skill is going to affect them in the future, they are much more willing to getINVOLVED.Be mindful of groups. Although groups friend sets together can be beneficial, it might help to ensure each group has students with complimentary levels of compliance.

Won't it be loud?Possibly. However, loud doesn't mean learning isn't happening. If students are talking about the content, then who cares how loud it gets! Conversely, if students are engaged in a digital learning opportunity it might be extraordinarily quiet; again, that doesn't mean learning is not happening. Stick to your behavior expectations that you set forth in your room regarding on/off task behavior regardless of the phase of the workshop lesson.

I can't get through all the parts in a 45-, 50-, 60-minute class period!The time frames listed above are just guidelines, adjust as needed for your particular schedule. If your concern goes deeper than math conversion, then rethink what you are asking students to do. Can you break down the end product to smaller chunks - chunks that are doable in a single class period YET can carry over to the next day's lesson to build upon one another until students have meaningful results? Are you doing too much of the talking/doing? Can you transfer some information from direct instruction to work time? Perhaps conveying information through a hyperdoc, Nearpod, or teacher website?

How do I know they are actually learning?This is the beauty of the workshop model - the entire lesson is designed to have student produce evidence of learning. Perhaps it will be a skill they can demonstrate, perhaps it will be a piece of writing, or a synthesizing conversation. Regardless, the teacher should be able to quickly assess each student based on the end product.TIP: not all assessment needs to be summative! If students are learning to solve an geometric proof, they may not get through the entire process in one class period. Perhaps the work time of the day focused on just drawing the figure, the second day covers listing the statements, the third day concentrates on marking up the figure, etc.This is the beauty of the workshop model - the entire lesson is designed to have student produce evidence of learning. Perhaps it will be a skill they can demonstrate, perhaps it will be a piece of writing, or a synthesizing conversation. Regardless, the teacher should be able to quickly assess each student based on the end product. TIP: not all assessment needs to be summative! If students are learning to solve an geometric proof, they may not get through the entire process in one class period. Perhaps the work time of the day focused on just drawing the figure, the second day covers listing the statements, the third day concentrates on marking up the figure, etc.

Resources

Workshop

Make a copy for your own use

+ info

RESOURCES

Student Focus

Teacher Focus

+TYPES OF QUESTIONS

Traditionally, many schools have taught students to be consumers of questions rather than producers of them (Nobis, Schulze, & Miller, 2019). Questions provide essential knowledge about our students' learning, no question about it (pun intended). However, the quality of our questions, purposefully or not, influences the types of questions our students ask. Questions reveal curiosity., which breeds inquisitiveness and an inquisitive learner is anINVOLVEDlearner.BUT I'M ALREADY ASKING QUESTIONS!Many teachers feel like they excel at asking questions and many do. However, many more focus on thenumberof questions asked as opposed to thequalityof the questions asked. When I ask teachers why are you asking questions in your class, the typical answer is, "to keep them engaged." While this is not a bad strategy, what we sometimes end up with is a class full of mostly compliant students, desperately not making eye contact while the teacher hears themselves parroted back by a few over-achievers.Questions posed by the teacher have the power to awaken (sometimes literally) and inspire, but most importantly, they model how students should approach their own learning.QUESTIONS CAN HELP STUDENTS:QUESTIONS CAN HELP TEACHERS:demonstrate depth of thinkingchallenge their assumptionsdraw conclusionsfoster divergent and innovative thinking skillsmake predictionschallenge preconceptionsexplore possibilitiesassess students' current or prior knowledgereview contentset up aworkshop lessonidentify gaps in student comprehensionguide discussion and analysisrepresent and include historically marginalized peoplesset expectations for levels of rigormodel metacognition

Types of Questions

Inquisitive Learning

Resources

Inquisitive Learning

All information in this section came from this document published by the Kentucky Department of Education. This document is a comprehensive collection of the latest data regarding Inquisitive Learning. It is a long read, but has tons of evidence supporting questioning in the classroom."Questioning Evidence-Based Instructional Practices #5." Kentucky Department of Education, 2022.

Google Classroom Random Student Selector

Source: Engadget

Easy Moves to see Substantial Shifts

provide ample thinking/wait time both after the question AND subsequent responses (did you know that teachers typically only wait 0.8 seconds before accepting responses to questions!)use digital tools such as Nearpod, Padlet, and Google Question to ensure every student's voice can be heard and honoredencourage Socratic Seconds, small group discussion where students can only ask questions of each other for a determined amount of timeassume students have questions: instead of saying, "Does anyone have any questions?" say, "What questions do you have for me?"allow students to change their answers as their learning develops

+ info

RESOURCES

Student Focus

Teacher Focus

+Discussion Structures and When To Use Them

+ Tips for ALL Structures

BUILD IN BRAIN BREAKS: Although research shows students 10 years old and older should be able to participate in academic discourse for 50-min time blocks, anyone who actually knows a teenager will assert that 50 seconds is probably more accurate. In reality, you probably want your students talking for 7-10 minutes at a time. If you are using the Workshop Model, use a Catch and Release to ask a new prompt, push the discussion further, do a whip-around status report, or perhaps just ask your students to write a one-sentence summary of what their discussion has been about so far. Brain breaks should never last longer than 2 minutes.FOCUS ON THE WHY, NOT THE WHAT:Students tend to disengage from discussions where there is a "correct" answer. Generally, once the answer is discovered, all discourse ceases. Instead, focus on the "why" or "how" of an issue (i.e. Why did Spain form an alliance with Germany at the start of WWII? How are our emotions affected by music? How does pollution affect our commute?)PROVIDESENTENCE STARTERS:Often students have thoughts but they aren't sure how to begin giving voice to them. They might be hesitant to disagree with a classmate or want to state something opposite to what has been said but don't know how to word it. Sentence starters help students get over those obstacles. Especially students likeBaxterandEmma. Baxterlikes having sentences starters to focus his thoughts whileEmmauses sentences starters as a way to participate without sounding too "nerdy."ASK STRONG QUESTIONS:No matter how many sentences starters students have, if the question is poorly worded, leading, or too topical, then the discourse might end before it even begins. Use thisCHEAT SHEETto make sure you are asking though-provoking questions.

We've all been there. Discussions can sometimes "seem more like a bad blind date than a class: awkward silences, filled only by an occasional, often irrelevant comment that just makes everyone roll their eyes and glance at their watch."~from "Stimulating Dull Discussion Sections." The Cavalier Daily. N. p., 2018. Web. 24 Jan. 2018Academic discourse appears in our classrooms in dozens of different ways - initiate, response, evaluation, turn and talk, Socratic seminars, debates, and so on. All structures carry value, the trick is figuring out when to use which structure to maximize deeper levels of learning and ensureINVOLVEMENTof each and every student.According to Zaretta Hammond and John Hattie, conversations are one of the most powerful practices teachers can use in classrooms to promote higher achievement (Hammond, 2020; Hattie, 2012). With an effect size of 0.82, academic discourse produces overTWOyears of growth inONEyear's time! (Fisher, Frey & Hattie, 2016).If you don't believe in the saying, "Who ever is doing the talking, is doing the learning," try this experiment. Think about the first time you present a particular piece of information to students; you will likely need notes or some sort of aid to help you remember the particular. The second time you present, you might only need to glance at your aids. The third time you present, you likely will not need to look at you aids at all and by the forth time, you know it so well, you are able to crack some jokes and have fun with the information. We've all been there. The same is true for students. If they never get the chance to discuss or "chew" on the information, their retention and understanding will be short-lived and topical.

Structures & When to Use Them

Academic Discourse

1

2

3

Initiate, Response, Evaluation

Digital Discourse

Turn & Talk/Pairs

4

5

6

Debates

Small Groups

Socratic Circles

Turn and talks (aka think-pair-shares) can be helpful but two protocols need to be in place first. 1) Students needs to be comfortable with the "pair" and 2) pairing/grouping should be intentional. Often times the turn-and-talk structure is used when time is tight and teachers want kids to engage without getting out of their seats. This structure can work if teachers are purposeful with seating charts, being mindful of with whom students will be "pairing." Special consideration needs to be given to learning styles, personality types, content mastery, underrepresented student populations, and language fluency.Additionally, this strategy must be used frequently - multiple times in each class session, every day. This can promote a sense of community and trust within the group allowing for true academic discourse to happen quickly.These quick discussions are good for keeping students on task, checking for comprehension, jigsawing information, and topical thinking. They can also provide quick brain breaks (i.e. Summarize everything we've done so far in one sentence/a haiku/etc. Tell your partner one thing you'd like more clarification on.)

Although interpersonal skills are important, today's workplace requires the ability to collaborate remotely, digitally, and quite possibly asynchronously. With more and more people being allowed to work from home, digital discussion skills are now essential. However, asking students to participate in an online discussion carries some additional considerations that the other structures may not.Groups:will students participate as a whole class, multiple classes, with members of the community, in small groups?Timing: will students be expected to participate synchronously or asynchronouslyContent: whattool will students use to engage in discourse?On top of this, teachers must also spend time modeling how a digital discussion should look and its similarities and differences to in-person discussion.

This is just the fancy term for the typical "teacher-asks-a-question/prompt/ and the-student(s)-respond- back-to the teacher. Although this is the most widely used structure of "discussion" it really fits better under Inquisitive Learning.Despite the name, open-ended questions, teachers are usually looking for a specific response - relying on the ability of one or two students, to supply that response as conformation that the teacher can move on in the lesson. Although this discourse between teacher and student can be helpful in pacing and mastering complex academic vocabulary, it doesn't really teach students thinking strategies or push into deeper learning.This structure works well for Westonand those like him. However. Henry andEmma will quickly lose interest while Baxterwill likely need more processing time than the teacher is giving before accepting a response.

COMMING SOON!

Just like with pairs, it is important to allow group members to foster a sense of community and trust not only through Classroom Community activities and norms but by keeping group members consistent. Teachers need to be mindful of learning styles, personality types, content mastery, underrepresented student populations, and language fluency when grouping students. You might want to consider the following tips to encourage and maintain rigorous academic discourse.designate a facilitatorThis student should ideally have already mastered the learning target, however it is essential that the role of the facilitator be filled by different members of the groupThis person will keep the discussion going by askingopen-ended and next step questions. This person is also responsible for making sure every voice in the group participates and is heard. Additionally, this person might serve as the minute keeper - taking notes as the discussion convenes and then synthesizingthe groups learning at the end of the activity (maybe even to present to the rest of the class).ask students to record the discussiontools such as Flipgrid, Padlet, and Audio Notes (even just taking a video on someone's phone - camera on or not) can all be used to record group discussions. Even if the teacher doesn't listen/watch the recording, the idea that theymight, tends to keep most students on task.

Socratic circles have become all the rage over the past few years. Everyone is doing them but very few are doing themwell. Often what we see is a circle of students, only a few of whom are participating (the Westons), with another circle behind the first full of students who are bored out of their minds. They can be compliant (Baxters) trying to complete their guided notes sheet designed to keep them listening but not necessarily thinking, or they can be texting (the Emmas), sleeping or causing a distraction (the Henrys).In order for a Socratic Circle to really work, to get every student, in BOTH circles INVOLVED and thinking, try these tips:have a random name generator (digital, popsicle sticks, spinner) to ensure all members of the inner circle speakpair someone from the inner circle with someone from the outer circle - allow these people to chat and share ideas, but only the inner circle member can speakthe people in the outer circle generate the questions, while the people in the inner circle discuss theminstead of an inner and outer circle, create two (or more) circles in which all students are speakingif the teacher is worried about accountability, ask the groups to record the conversation - whether the teachers watches/listens to the recording is beside the point

Tips for ANY Structure

Academic Discourse

Be clear with your EXPECTATIONS. Before discourse begins, students should know:

Set and revisit NORMS. This is a great opportunity for student voice and classroom community building:

Explicitly MODEL how you envision the discussion will look and sound.

Be clear with yourEXPECTATIONS. Before discourse begins, students should know:behavior expectationswhere will we sit? are we allowed to discuss with other groups? how long do we have to discuss (atimershould be visible by all)? how many times should each person speak? who will be thefacilitatorand what will they do? what resources are we expected to use? should we be able to connect today's learning to something else? are we clarifying, analyzing, reflecting, probing?learning expectationswhat should we know by the end of the discussion? will we share our learning/how will we share our learning? do we need to create something physical by the end of our discussion, i.e. notes, poster, summary stickie?

Set and revisitNORMS. This is a great opportunity for student voice and classroom community building:ask students how they would like others to behave/respond to themselves when they are sharing their own ideasexample NORMS:be supportive by adding to the conversationbe respectful by actively listeningkeep an open mindsupport your opinions with facts or examplescreate a safe space by allowing everyone time to share

ExplicitlyMODELhow you envision the discussion will look and sound.It might be a good idea to demonstrate a discussion live in front of the class with your facilitators or a different small group/pair. Place yourself in the role of the facilitator or partner - YOU are the model you want them to emulate.Tips and Ideas for producing a clear discourse model.Record yourself and your fellow teachers in a mock (or real) discussion and analyze the video together as a class.Go over theDo's and Don'ts of DiscussionModel behavior expectations AND academic expectations - do a Think Aloud toreallybe clear what their thought process should look likeComplete a post-discussion reflection. <--click for template

Resources

Academic Discourse

All information on this page came from this document published by the Kentucky Department of Education. This document is a comprehensive collection of the latest data regarding Academic Discourse. It is a long read, but has tons of evidence supporting questioning in the classroom."Questioning Evidence-Based Instructional Practices #4." Kentucky Department of Education, 2022.

STUDENT RESOURCE: This slide deck is intended to be presented to students. It contains the WHY behind the importance of Academic Discourse, some common norms, and sentences starters to help students formulate questions and thoughtful responses.

The amazing Caitlyn Tucker created this resource:5 Strategies for Facilitating Small Group Instruction

STUDENT RESOURCE: Make a copy of this graphic organizer you can share with students to help them stay on track and makes the most of their discourse.

Digital Tools

Academic Discourse

Flipgrid

Padlet

GCQuestion

Flipgrid is thePERFECTtool to allow students to respond either synchronously or asynchronously in a discussion. Many teachers ask me, "Why would I have students responding to each other over video when they can just respond in real life?"Fair point. Mix up structures. Do some face-to-face discourse and some digitally.Video responses allow students, likeBaxter, totake a little think time before respondingwithout going through the awkward pause which bothers adults and utterly terrifies teens.Students who maynot be fluent in the English languagemight want to re-record entries before submitting. Virtual discourse allows them to practice their answers and pronunciation first.Click HEREfor thestudentversion of how to get started in Flipgrid.

Padlet is essentially an on-line bulletin board. With just a few clicks, a teacher can set up the Padlet and share the link. The students just visit the website and can post text, voice recording, video recording, a photo, a link, or a file! Depending on the teacher's preference, students can comment on each other's post or simply read them.Click HEREfor both teacher AND student instructions!

This feature of Classroom is often overlooked and I don't know why. Question allows you to ask a multiple choice or open response question to the class (or a select group of students). You can ask on the fly (or scheduled.) You can allow students to reply to one another (or not). This is a fantastic tool for digital discourse, exit slips, quick comprehension checks, and more!Click herefor student instructions.(Phone compatible!)

Your Toolbox

the STRATEGIES

+ Tips for ALL Structures

BUILD IN BRAIN BREAKS: Although research shows students 10 years old and older should be able to participate in academic discourse for 50-min time blocks, anyone who actually knows a teenager will assert that 50 seconds is probably more accurate. In reality, you probably want your students talking for 7-10 minutes at a time. If you are using the Workshop Model, use a Catch and Release to ask a new prompt, push the discussion further, do a whip-around status report, or perhaps just ask your students to write a one-sentence summary of what their discussion has been about so far. Brain breaks should never last longer than 2 minutes.FOCUS ON THE WHY, NOT THE WHAT:Students tend to disengage from discussions where there is a "correct" answer. Generally, once the answer is discovered, all discourse ceases. Instead, focus on the "why" or "how" of an issue (i.e. Why did Spain form an alliance with Germany at the start of WWII? How are our emotions affected by music? How does pollution affect our commute?)PROVIDESENTENCE STARTERS:Often students have thoughts but they aren't sure how to begin giving voice to them. They might be hesitant to disagree with a classmate or want to state something opposite to what has been said but don't know how to word it. Sentence starters help students get over those obstacles. Especially students likeBaxterandEmma. Baxterlikes having sentences starters to focus his thoughts whileEmmauses sentences starters as a way to participate without sounding too "nerdy."ASK STRONG QUESTIONS:No matter how many sentences starters students have, if the question is poorly worded, leading, or too topical, then the discourse might end before it even begins. Use thisCHEAT SHEETto make sure you are asking though-provoking questions.

As secondary educators, we are passionate about our content. In the past, a teacher's enthusiasm provided an engaging figure for students to watch and interact with for that class period. However, social media now allows our students countless hours of entertainment on-demand and interaction with people way more exciting than teachers. (I'd rather be DMing with Taylor Swift , too!) Most of these strategies on this page require little to no prep but are guaranteed to yield high levels of INVOLVEMENT. Keep a couple in your back pocket for when you have an especially squirrelly class ~or~ search specifically for a strategy that aligns with a practice on which you are focusing!

the SPREADSHEET: Column One lists dozens of strategies that are appropriate for high school students. Clicking on the title of strategy will take you to very short instructions along with ideas to modify and level up. Additionally, the practice(s) that best align with the strategy as well as suggested digital tools that will elevate the strategy are indicated.

OH NO!

You have reached a page that is under construction! Thank you for your interest. Check back soon or join the mailing list to be notified when this page goes live!

Goal

WESTON

HENRY

BAXTER

EMMA

the EXAMPLE STUDENTS

Fortuitously, my furbabies really do fall into these student stereotypes! #ilovemydogs

Weston is theperfect student. He is arule follower. He pays attention and always tries his hardest. He isrespectful and appreciates education. He strives to earn good grades and knows paying attention now will serve him well in the future.Occasionally, Weston is toohard on himself,creating undue pressure. He can beshy and reservedand doesn't much care for group projects or collaborative work (he usually ends up doing all the work himself, anyway).

Henry isincredibly bright. Hecomprehends new information quicklyand is equally gifted inmastering skillsfaster than his peers. He isnot afraid to speak in class and offer his, usually impressive, insight.Because Henry is very intelligent, hegets bored quickly.He oftencauses a disruptionbecause he has either finished his work early (and correctly) or he simplyrefuses to complete the workbecause he sees it as beneath him.

Emma ispopular and well-likedby her peers. Sheloves to connect with friendsand classmates. Emma earns average grades butdoesn't really care as long as she passes.Emma can often be found on social media, talking and texting with friends. Her phone is a permanent appendage. She ismore focused on interpersonal relationships than learning.Emma can also be a bit of a diva,demanding the attention of the teacher or her classmates.Her attention seeking behavior can be positive or negative.

Baxtertries. He tries so hard, he wears himself out. Baxter wants to learn. He wants the good grades and values education. Baxterlikes participating but can struggle sometimes with concepts which affects his self-esteem.He thinksnon-linearly, and makes creative connections.Baxter knows it sometimestakes him a little longer to capture learningthan his peers and hecan get frustratedby his lack of progress. This frustration can manifest in alack of effort and disengagement or lead him to becomeeasily distracted.

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the Involved Learner by Jennifer Girardin on Genially

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INVOVLED LEARNER the the latest delivered to Your inbox the MAILING LIST THIS MONTH'S RESOURCE the MONTHLY HIGHLIGHT STRATGIES TO FILL YOUR TOOLBOX the STRATEGIES CUSTOMIZABLE, READY TO GO LESSONS the LESSONS MEET THE CREW the EXAMPLE STUDENTS a bit about me the COACH Accessing Background Knowledge the PRACTICES Creating

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Women's Worlds in Qajar Iran | The National Endowment for the Humanities

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The National Endowment for the Humanities

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"Exploring Communities of Muslim Women," a forum sponsored by NEH and presented on May 30th by the White House Office of Public Engagement, was a scholarly yet lively exchange dealing with Muslim women's roles in society and the family, both in the past and in the present day. One of the two presentations was made by Afsaneh Najmabadi, the Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. Prof. Najmabadi holds a NEH award through the Division of Preservation and Access for her work to create a digital archive, " Women's Worlds in Qajar Iran."

This archive is making available hitherto inaccessible, primary sources related to the social and cultural history of women during the Qajar dynasty (1785-1925) in Iran. During this era, Iran experienced significant political, economic, and cultural transformations, including a new opening to other nations and cultures, particularly those of the West. The vast majority of Qajar social histories have focused almost exclusively on the struggles, achievements, and day-to-day realities of the men of that period, although many women lived culturally rich and active lives as writers, artists, and active participants in the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 and in education and legal reform.

In 2009, Professor Najmabadi received NEH funding to locate and digitize approximately 3,000 images of sources such as unpublished poetry, essays, travelogues, private letters, photographs, portrait paintings, calligraphies, marriage contracts, and legal documents created by, and reflecting the lives of, women during the Qajar era. The materials were to be provided by private families and some institutions in Iran and in the diaspora. The response to the project exceeded all expectations. The project's staff captured approximately 20,000 digital images of primary sources and has already made accessible over 11,000 at the project's Web site. The archive also contains 100 audio-clips and oral histories, as well as seven items that have been fully transcribed and translated from Persian into English with support from other funding sources. Most of the archived materials are from 30 private collections in Tehran and the diaspora, but the archive also contains images contributed by libraries and archives in Iran and other places. Because the Web site is fully bilingual in English and Persian it can be consulted by users worldwide and is often used by Iranian citizens.

The NEH recently provided a second award to Harvard University to continue expansion of this archive. During this second phase, the project team aims to broaden the geographical and thematic scope of the archived sources. For example, one of the collections would reflect life in the city of Qazvin, a former capital of Iran, while materials from families that followed the Baha'i and Zoroastrian faiths would expand the archive's coverage of religious diversity in Iran during the Qajar era. By allowing users worldwide to examine firsthand materials created by Qajar women, this project promises to provide important insights into the women's lives during this critical period of Iranian history.

Further Reading

To learn more about the May 30th event, read the article written by our Chairman, Jim Leach, for the White House blog.

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"Exploring Communities of Muslim Women," a forum sponsored by NEH and presented on May 30th by the White House Office of Public Engagement, was a scholarly yet lively exchange dealing with Muslim women's roles in society and the family, both in the past and in the present day.

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Ready-To-Go Lesson from CLASSKICK

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Classkick is a free app that shows teachers in real-time exactly what students are doing and who needs help so they can provide instant feedback.

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A collection of 75 FLIPGRID activities emphasizing the importance of creating opportunities for girls to pursue their potential.

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Respect Her Crank! - Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden | Smithsonian

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Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden | Smithsonian

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Black music has the ability to lullaby listeners with melodic whispers, unearth pain with crying keys, and bring bodies to their feet in celebration with breakbeats. The range in sound and emotion within Black music is driven, in part, by the ingenuity of Black women. ARTLAB's latest series, Respect Her Crank!: Sounds of Blackness , explores the roles of Black women in American music history through weekly virtual workshops in music production, songwriting, graphic design, and surprise workshops from community partners.

Respect Her Crank!: Sounds of Blackness workshops are tailored for educators (but open to all) on Tuesdays and exclusively for teens on Thursdays. Do not miss out on this groundbreaking opportunity to learn about Black women's contribution to music. Select the links below to learn more about each set of workshops, operating from February-June 2021.

ASL interpretation is provided at all Thursday workshops. If you require ASL for a Tuesday workshop, please contact hirshhornexperience@si.edu.
This project received support from the Smithsonian American Women's History Initiative .

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Respect Her Crank! - Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden | Smithsonian

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ARTLAB's latest series, Respect Her Crank!: Sounds of Blackness, explores the roles of Black women in American music history through weekly virtual workshops for teens and educators in music production, songwriting, graphic design, and surprise workshops from community partners from February-June 2021.

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An Eye for Art - Studying Nature - Georgia O'Keeffe

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An Eye for Art - Exploring Portraits - Elisabeth-Louise Vigee Le Brun

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Woman Suffrage and the 19th Amendment Primary Source | National Archives

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Beginning in the mid-19th century, several generations of woman suffrage supporters lectured, wrote, marched, lobbied, and practiced civil disobedience to achieve what many Americans considered a radical change in the Constitution - guaranteeing women the right to vote. Some suffragists used more confrontational tactics such as picketing, silent vigils, and hunger strikes. Read more...

Primary Sources
Links go to DocsTeach, the online tool for teaching with documents from the National Archives.
Teaching Activities

Additional Background Information

In July 1848 Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott organized the first women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, NY. The Seneca Falls Convention produced a list of demands called the Declaration of Sentiments. Modeled on the Declaration of Independence, it called for broader educational and professional opportunities for women and the right of married women to control their wages and property. After this historic gathering, women's voting rights became a central issue in the emerging debate about women's rights in the United States.

Many of the attendees to the convention were also abolitionists whose goals included universal suffrage - the right to vote for all adults. In 1870 this goal was partially realized when the 15th amendment to the Constitution, granting black men the right to vote, was ratified. Woman suffragists' vehement disagreement over supporting the 15th Amendment, however, resulted in a "schism" that split the women's suffrage movement into two new suffrage organizations that focused on different strategies to win women voting rights.

The National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) was formed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in May of 1869 - they opposed the 15th amendment because it excluded women. In the year following the ratification of the 15th amendment, the NWSA sent a voting rights petition to the Senate and House of Representatives requesting that suffrage rights be extended to women and that women be granted the privilege of being heard on the floor of Congress.

The second national suffrage organization established in 1869 was the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), founded by Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. The AWSA supported the 15th Amendment and protested the confrontational tactics of the NWSA. The AWSA concentrated on gaining women's access to the polls at state and local levels, in the belief that victories there would gradually build support for national action on the issue. While a federal woman suffrage amendment was not their priority, an 1871 petition, asking that women in DC and the territories be allowed to vote and hold office, from AWSA leadership to Congress reveals its support for one.

In 1890, the NWSA and AWSA merged into the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). It became the largest woman suffrage organization in the country and led much of the struggle for the vote through 1920, when the 19th Amendment was ratified. Stanton became its president; Anthony became its vice president; and Stone became chairman of the executive committee. In 1919, one year before women gained the right to vote with the adoption of the 19th amendment, the NAWSA reorganized into the League of Women Voters.

The tactics used by suffragists went beyond petitions and memorials to Congress. Testing another strategy, Susan B. Anthony registered and voted in the 1872 election in Rochester, NY. As planned, she was arrested for "knowingly, wrongfully and unlawfully vot[ing] for a representative to the Congress of the United States." She was convicted by the State of New York and fined $100, which she insisted she would never pay. On January 12, 1874, Anthony petitioned Congress, requesting "that the fine imposed upon your petitioner be remitted, as an expression of the sense of this high tribunal that her conviction was unjust."

Wealthy white women were not the only supporters of women's suffrage. Frederick Douglass, formerly enslaved and leader of the abolition movement, was also an advocate. He attended the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. In an editorial published that year in The North Star, the anti-slavery newspaper he published, he wrote, "...in respect to political rights,...there can be no reason in the world for denying to woman the elective franchise,..." By 1877, when he was U.S. marshal for the District of Columbia, Douglass's family was also involved in the movement. His son, Frederick Douglass, Jr.; daughter, Mrs. Nathan Sprague; and son-in-law, Nathan Sprague, all signed a petition to Congress for woman suffrage "...to prohibit the several States from Disfranchising United States Citizens on account of Sex."

A growing number of black women actively supported women's suffrage during this period. They organized women's clubs across the country to advocate for suffrage, among other reforms. Prominent African American suffragists included Ida B. Wells-Barnett of Chicago, a leading crusader against lynching; Mary Church Terrell, educator and first president of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW); and Adella Hunt Logan, Tuskegee Institute faculty member, who insisted in articles in The Crisis, a publication of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), that if white women needed the vote to protect their rights, then black women - victims of racism as well as sexism - needed the ballot even more.

In the second decade of the 20th century, suffragists began staging large and dramatic parades to draw attention to their cause. One of the most consequential demonstrations was a march held in Washington, DC, on March 3, 1913. Though controversial because of the march organizers' attempt to exclude, then segregate, women of color, more than 5,000 suffragists from around the country paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue from the U.S. Capitol to the Treasury Building.

Many of the women who had been active in the suffrage movement in the 1860s and 1870s continued their involvement over 50 years later. In 1917, Mary O. Stevens, secretary and press correspondent of the Association of Army Nurses of the Civil War, asked the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee to help the cause of woman suffrage by explaining: "My father trained me in my childhood days to expect this right. I have given my help to the agitation, and work[ed] for its coming a good many years."

During World War I, suffragists tried to embarrass President Woodrow Wilson into reversing his opposition and supporting a federal woman suffrage amendment. But in the heated patriotic climate of wartime, such tactics met with hostility and sometimes violence and arrest. Frustrated with the suffrage movement's leadership, Alice Paul had broken with the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) to form the National Woman's Party (NWP). It employed more militant tactics to agitate for the vote.

Most notably, the NWP organized the first White House picket in U.S. history on January 10, 1917. They stood vigil at the White House, demonstrating in silence six days a week for nearly three years. The "Silent Sentinels" let their banners - comparing the President to Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany - speak for them. Many of the sentinels were arrested and jailed in deplorable conditions. Some incarcerated women went on hunger strikes and endured forced feedings. The Sentinels' treatment gained greater sympathy for women's suffrage, and the courts later dismissed all charges against them.

When New York adopted woman suffrage in 1917 and President Woodrow Wilson changed his position to support an amendment in 1918, the political balance began to shift in favor of the vote for women. There was still strong opposition to enfranchising women, however, as illustrated by petitions from anti-suffrage groups.

Eventually suffragists won the political support necessary for ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. For 42 years, the measure had been introduced at every session of Congress, but ignored or voted down. It finally passed Congress in 1919 and went to the states for ratification. In May, the House of Representatives passed it by a vote of 304 to 90; two weeks later, the Senate approved it 56 to 25.

Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan were the first states to ratify it. On August 18, 1920, it appeared that Tennessee had ratified the amendment - the result of a change of vote by 24 year-old legislator Harry Burn at the insistence of his elderly mother. But those against the amendment managed to delay official ratification. Anti-suffrage legislators fled the state to avoid a quorum, and their associates held massive anti-suffrage rallies and attempted to convince pro-suffrage legislators to oppose ratification. However, Tennessee reaffirmed its vote and delivered the crucial 36th ratification necessary for final adoption. While decades of struggle to include African Americans and other minority women in the promise of voting rights remained, the face of the American electorate had changed forever.
Materials created by the National Archives and Records Administration are in the public domain.

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Beginning in the mid-19th century, several generations of woman suffrage supporters lectured, wrote, marched, lobbied, and practiced civil disobedience to achieve what many Americans considered a radical change in the Constitution - guaranteeing women the right to vote. Some suffragists used more confrontational tactics such as picketing, silent vigils, and hunger strikes.

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Women's Rights Primary Sources | DocsTeach

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DocsTeach is a product of the National Archives education division. Our mission is to engage, educate, and inspire all learners to discover and explore the records of the American people preserved by the National Archives. The National Archives and Records Administration is the nation's record keeper.

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Women in Science and Technology Primary Source |  Library of Congress

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The resources in this primary source set are intended for classroom use. If your use will be beyond a single classroom, please review the copyright and fair use guidelines.

Teacher's Guide

To help your students analyze these primary sources, get a graphic organizer and guides: Analysis Tool and Guides

Background

Scientific discovery has a long history; each new breakthrough has built upon the work of countless individuals across years, decades, or even centuries. Many of the people who contributed to developments in science and technology were women: researchers like Chien Shiung Wu, astronomers like Maria Mitchell, and computer scientists like Grace Hopper are all celebrated today for their achievements. At the same time, many other women in science are not as widely known. This primary source set highlights some of the work that American women have done in science, technology, and medicine, whether their names are widely known today or not.

Women in science and technology have often had to struggle against gender-based discrimination and exclusion. Some found themselves directed toward fields that were considered "women's work," such as nursing or home economics. In computer science, for a time software and coding were viewed as work suitable for women, while men were seen as better suited to working on computer hardware. In some cases, women's contributions were downplayed, concealed, or attributed to male collaborators or employers. Researching women's roles in science and technology often involves looking closely at moments of great scientific progress and identifying the women who have been excluded from historical accounts and news coverage, or who appear only in the background.

The items in this set also provide opportunities to explore the many different kinds of work that are involved in scientific endeavor or technological development. Although there is a common idea of a scientist as a lone genius pursuing a "eureka" moment in a lab, or as a lecturer in a university hall, or as an entrepreneur building a world-changing device in their parents' garage, such images don't reflect the daily reality of many scientists, engineers, and medical workers. Some of the women represented in this set worked to manufacture chemical compounds, to keep airplanes in the air, or to provide nursing services for patients. Many women working in these fields may have pursued their work simply as an opportunity for employment or for public service. During wartime, many women were called into technological and scientific work to support the nation's war effort.

Suggestions for Teachers

Choose a photograph for students to analyze. Different students or groups may analyze different photos. Compare it to photos of male scientists. How are these scientists portrayed differently?

Select a few items in different formats, such as a newspaper article, a video, and a photograph, and allow time for students to analyze them, either alone or with a partner. Ask students to compare how these women are portrayed in the media. What language is used to describe them? How are the images framed? What was the intended message? How do these portrayals compare to more current news stories about women in science or technology? What information do these portrayals leave out?

Ask students to scan the bibliographic information for photographs and list the names of the women shown. How many of them are named? How many are anonymous? Invite students to consider: What is the effect when the women are not named?

Ask students to compare the two images of students in classrooms. Then, ask them to reflect on their own experiences in science classrooms, and compare their experiences to what they see in these pictures. How has science education changed over time? If they were to pose for a photograph in a science class to show their work, what setting would they choose and what people or objects would they want to include in the photo?

Allow time for students to examine and consider several items from the set. Ask them: What stories emerge from women in science? What's missing from these items? Encourage students to research to learn more about one of the women featured in the set, or to identify and learn more about other women who contributed to advances in science or technology.

Additional Resources

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Women in Science and Technology | Classroom Materials at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress

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The resources in this primary source set are intended for classroom use. If your use will be beyond a single classroom, please review the copyright and fair use guidelines. To help your students analyze these primary sources, get a graphic organizer and guides: Analysis Tool and Guides Scientific discovery has a long history; each new breakthrough has built upon the work of countless individuals across years, decades, or even centuries.

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Mathematics and Primary Sources: Historic Codes, Ciphers, and Computational Thinking, Part II – the Women Codebreakers of WWII | Teaching with the Library of Congress

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Sending and cracking secret messages dates back to the foundation and exploration of the country. But did you know that much of the cryptographic work that helped the United States win World War II was accomplished by female codebreakers? The Library of Congress Veterans' History Project (VHP) contains numerous oral histories that your students can examine to learn more about these groundbreaking women, and Megan Harris and Lisa Taylor of the Veteran's History Project highlighted some of them in recent blog posts. By conducting their own analyses of these interviews, students can construct an authentic understanding of what work and life was like for these women, while gaining insights into the mathematical and computational thinking necessary to be a successful codebreaker.

Begin by asking students to listen to excerpts from interviews with Ann Caracristi and Ann Ellicott Madeira, choosing from the sections identified below.

After they have listened to the clips, students can:

Record their observations, reflections and questions on the Library's Primary Source Analysis tool. Remind students that they can pause, rewind, and re-listen to recordings as much as they need to;

Research the Library's collections for insights into what pre-war life was like for college educated women such as those recruited to be codebreakers. Many, for instance, were recruited out of college while studying to become teachers;

Write a descriptive piece, including details from their observations and research, showing a "day in the life" of a female codebreaker.

In Part I of this series, we discussed how George Washington and Thomas Jefferson used cryptography. After reviewing their approaches:

Ask students to compare and contrast their methods with the methods discussed by Caracristi and Madeira.

Challenge students to send and receive a note using "additives" and "false math" as described in the VHP interviews.

Based on their experiences, what insights have students gained about the history and evolution of cryptography?

The stories of numerous other female cryptographers are also available within the VHP, such as Donna Southall, Marjorie Scott, and Elizabeth Bigelow Stewart, offering opportunities for interested students to expand their exploration of the topic.

Let us know in the comments what your students discover!

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Mathematics and Primary Sources: Historic Codes, Ciphers, and Computational Thinking, Part II - the Women Codebreakers of WWII

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Sending and cracking secret messages dates back to the foundation and exploration of the country. But did you know that much of the cryptographic work that helped the United States win World War II was accomplished by female codebreakers?

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Framing the Lives of Civil War Nurses | Teaching with the Library of Congress

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Framing the Lives of Civil War Nurses | Teaching with the Library of Congress

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My hope is that my work to create source materials on Civil War nurses situates nurses in the heart of the Civil War and proves their importance in the growing war historiography.

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Women and Art

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How is feminism expressed? What forms does feminism take on a personal level (by an individual) or on a larger scale (by a society)? How does gender inequality intersect with injustices related to race, ethnicity, religion, age, or other markers of identity (visible or invisible)? What tactics have artists used to confront gender inequality?
The Guerrilla Girls is an activist group formed in 1985 whose members are female artists, curators, and writers. Their work focuses attention on gender and racial discrimination in the art world through demonstrations, performances, and "public service messages." When Racism & Sexism are No Longer Fashionable, What Will Your Art Collection Be Worth? (1989) comments on the fact that many US museums have been built their collections around the work of white, male artists. The text suggests that their work has been overvalued-in the art market and culturally-while female artists and artists of color have been undervalued. Another work, The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist (1988) describes the frustrations and ironies of trying to succeed in a world that does not value your contributions. Using humor and data, it points to the systemic gender and racial bias in the works audiences see in museum collections.

During the late 1960s and 1970s, women in the United States mobilized to demand gender equality in their civic, educational, home, and professional lives. The women's movement was part of a climate of social activism and questioning inspired by the civil rights movement and, later, by protests against the Vietnam War. The social activism of the period extended to the art world, as female artists began to confront and defy long-standing biases and traditional gender roles that had limited their careers.

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Put Her On A Pedestal » Monumental Women

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Which woman from the past do you think deserves to be put on a pedestal? Now's your chance to show us. Be a part of this exciting community-driven project. Learn. Draw. Share. Celebrate!

STEP 1 - Pick a Woman From the Past

Who do you want to honor? Read about the monumental NYC women from our Women's Rights History Trail or do your own research. Ask your parents, teachers or friends for suggestions! Find someone who inspires you.

This is your canvas. Bring your favorite monumental woman to life!

STEP 3 - Create Your Artwork

Get creative! Have fun while learning about and celebrating monumental women who moved history forward. Let us know why your person is so special.

STEP 4 - Upload It!

Send your artwork to us! Make sure to include your Monumental Woman's name, your name, the date, and your signature. (See examples below of completed submissions.) Then, email it to: info@monumentalwomen.org. Drawings emailed to us by March 31, 2022 may be selected to be featured on our website and social channels and you could win some Monumental Women "swag"!

Let's Get Started!

1. Pick a Woman From the Past
Here's a list to get you started.

2. Download Our Template (or use a plain white piece of paper)

3. Create Your Artwork
When you're finished with your drawing, make sure to write in her name, your name, the date and sign your signature. See some examples below.

4. Upload It
We'd love to see your design and learn about who you think deserves to be put on a pedestal. Send us a copy of your design to info@monumentalwomen.org.

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Monumental Women "Put Her On A Pedestal" Art and History Project Which woman from the past do you think deserves to be put on a pedestal? Now's your chance to show us. Be a part of this exciting community-driven project. Learn. Draw. Share. Celebrate! STEP 1 - Pick a Woman From the Past Who do ...

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Curriculum - Women & the American Story

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Introduction Women's history is American history. Too often, though, it is the left-out part, appearing only now and then in familiar profiles and at predictable high points. But women, despite legal and cultural barriers, have been actively engaged in every phase of the nation's

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UNLADYLIKE2020

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UNLADYLIKE2020 is a series of 26 short films and a one-hour documentary (which premiered on PBS's American Masters), profiling diverse and little-known American women from the turn of the 20th century, and contemporary women who follow in their footsteps.

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National Women's History Museum

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In 1942, at the age of 17, Maria Tallchief moved to New York City to pursue her dreams of becoming a dancer. With luck, grit, and determination she joined the famed Ballet Russe Monte Carlo as an apprentice and moved quickly through the ranks, dancing first in the corps de ballet and later performing leading roles.  Tallchief is widely considered America's first major prima ballerina.

You can learn more about Maria Tallchief (Osage Nation), featured on a new quarter from the US Mint, and other Indigenous women in our featured biographies this month.
Use the NWHM's compendium of online biographies to spark curiosity and dig deeper into women's impact throughout our shared national history. Explore more here.

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A renowned leader in women's history education, the National Women's History Museum brings to life the countless untold stories of women throughout history and serves as a space for all to inspire, experience, collaborate, and amplify women's impact.

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Surprisingly resourceful site filled with ONE-minute videos, podcasts, readings, interactive maps, and lesson plans | US National Park Service

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Women in America first collectively organized in 1848 at the First Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, NY to fight for suffrage (or voting rights). Organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, the convention sparked the women's suffrage movement. Not everyone followed the same path in fighting for women's equal access to the vote, and the history of the suffrage movement is one of disagreements as well as cooperation.

While women were not always united in their goals, and the fight for women's suffrage was complex and interwoven with issues of civil and political rights for all Americans, the efforts of women like Ida B. Wells and Alice Paul led to the passage of the 19th Amendment. Signed into law on August 26, 1920, the passage of the 19th Amendment was the result of decades of work by tens of thousands across the country who worked for change.

Use this site to discover some of the stories of women and men who fought for women's suffrage rights. You'll also find resources for children and adults, including essays on suffrage, storymaps, and lesson plans.

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19th Amendment - Women's History (U.S. National Park Service)

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Women in America first collectively organized in 1848 at the First Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, NY to fight for suffrage (or voting rights). Organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, the convention sparked the women's suffrage movement.

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Explore  |  Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote  |  Exhibitions at the Library of Congress  |  Library of Congress

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We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal. . . . In entering upon the great work before us, we anticipate no small amount of misconception, misrepresentation, and ridicule; but we shall use every instrumentality within our power to effect our object.-Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Declaration of Sentiments, 1848

The campaign for women's voting rights lasted more than seven decades. Considered the largest reform movement in United States history, its participants believed that securing the vote was essential to achieving women's economic, social, and political equality. Culminating 100 years ago in the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the fight for women's suffrage was not for the fainthearted. Determined women organized, lobbied, paraded, petitioned, lectured, and picketed for years. Suffragists were ridiculed, patronized, and dismissed by opponents, yet they persisted. Some were assaulted and endured the harsh confines of prison for daring to claim rights equal to men, but they would not be denied.

The movement questioned the country's commitment to democracy, exposed the nation's longstanding class, regional, and racial divides, and challenged existing gender stereotypes. Arguments and strategies for and against women's suffrage varied over time and place. Proponents forged uneasy alliances and overcame countless controversies. Although few of the women who began the suffrage campaign before the Civil War lived long enough to witness its final victory in August 1920, their work was carried on by their daughters, granddaughters, and other women whom they had inspired, nurtured, and taught. Their collective story is one of courage, perseverance, savvy, creativity, and hope that continues to inspire women today. #ShallNotBeDenied

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Explore | Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote | Exhibitions at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress

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We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal. . . . In entering upon the great work before us, we anticipate no small amount of misconception, misrepresentation, and ridicule; but we shall use every instrumentality within our power to effect our object.

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Grassroots Perspectives on the Civil Rights Movement: Focus on Women | NEH-Edsitement

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Grassroots Perspectives on the Civil Rights Movement: Focus on Women

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It is hard to imagine any movement more important for understanding the meaning of freedom and equal rights in the U.S. than the civil rights struggle in the post-World War II era.

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Helen Keller Archival Collection | NEH-Edsitement

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Classroom Connections

The Helen Keller Archive includes lesson plans that introduce middle and high school students to archival work, engage them in primary source analysis, and help them develop critical historical thinking skills.

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This resource provides access to classroom materials available at the Helen Keller Archive Digitization Project and resources for including the Americans with Disabilities Act within discussions about civil rights in the United States.

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Old Friends Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony Made History Together | The National Endowment for the Humanities

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The National Endowment for the Humanities

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"It is fifty-one years since we first met, and we have been busy through every one of them, stirring up the world to recognize the rights of women," Susan B. Anthony wrote her friend Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1902.

The letter, in honor of Stanton's eighty-seventh birthday, was printed in Pearson's Magazine. It continued: "We little dreamed when we began this contest, optimistic with the hope and buoyancy of youth, that half a century later we would be compelled to leave the finish of the battle to another generation of women. But our hearts are filled with joy to know that they enter upon this task equipped with a college education, with business experience, with the fully admitted right to speak in public-all of which were denied to women fifty years ago. They have practically one point to gain-the suffrage; we had all."

Anthony's reflections reveal a friendship that was public and political but also private and genuine. From their activist beginnings in the antislavery and temperance movements to their leadership of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), the two women-Anthony as an on-the-ground organizer and strategist and Stanton as a writer, thinker, and commentator-were an inseparable force.

The women had first met in 1851 when Anthony traveled to an antislavery meeting in Seneca Falls, New York, where Stanton had organized the first national woman's rights convention there in 1848. In remembering the day Amelia Bloomer introduced them on a street corner, Stanton said, "There she stood with her good, earnest face and genial smile, dressed in gray delaine, hat and all the same color, relieved with pale blue ribbons, the perfection of neatness and sobriety. I liked her thoroughly, and why I did not at once invite her home with me to dinner, I do not know."

Both women were in their thirties: Anthony had been teaching, and Stanton was married to abolitionist Henry B. Stanton. Their involvement in the antislavery movement had cultivated a shared interest in broader equality issues, and each was passionate about the right of women to participate in the governing process and have control over their own lives. Anthony was inspired by Stanton's vision for advancing women, and Anthony's organizing skills were soon apparent to Stanton, who had young children and could not travel regularly. Together, they launched a national woman's suffrage movement, published the newspaper The Revolution, and lectured, lobbied, and protested for equal rights.

Remembering their earlier struggles, Anthony closed her letter: "And we, dear old friend, shall move on the next sphere of existence-higher and larger, we cannot fail to believe, and one where women will not be placed in an inferior position, but will be welcomed on a plane of perfect intellectual and spiritual equality." The sentiment was timelier than anyone expected. Stanton, who had been homebound and in ill health but still publishing commentaries, died before the letter was published on October 26, 1902, two-and-a-half weeks before her birthday.

In her letter, Anthony sounds optimistic, despite her lament that only in death will they experience equality. She seems confident in the suffrage movement's new leaders. There is a sense that things can only move forward for women.

In fact, the previous five years had tested the two women's faith in progress. As they were handing over the reins to a new generation of suffragists, America went to war with Spain, gained control of new island territories, and set up governments that limited women's rights. On the mainland, a post-Reconstruction backlash against African-American civil rights was growing stronger in the South. By the turn of the century, Anthony and Stanton worried the fight for equality was moving backward. Overall, voting rights for anyone other than white men were becoming more restricted, not less. Women's gains in the workplace-as public school teachers, for instance-were also under fire. And the elder suffragists weren't sure their young coworkers understood the threat.

The sixth and final volume of the Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Susan B. Anthony Papers Project, An Awful Hush, 1895-1906, offers an intimate look at how Stanton and Anthony confronted these issues at the end of their lives. Through a selection of personal letters, articles, and other papers, the book documents their last political project together and their concerns about the future of the suffrage movement. The book also shows the tenacity with which the two worked until their deaths and how each still depended on the other to debate new ideas and spearhead action. Their letters to each other reveal what made the partnership work: unfailing respect for each other, scathing honesty when one thought the other was wrong, and a commitment to take on challenges as a team.

One such challenge came in early 1896, when delegates at the NAWSA convention passed a resolution to denounce Stanton's two-volume work The Woman's Bible, a collection of commentaries by Stanton and others on religion and women's subjugation. In the controversial best-seller, Stanton analyzed scripture and rebutted those who used the Bible to justify denying women rights. Some more conservative members of the suffrage association disapproved of the book, and others thought it detracted from their suffrage goal.

At the time, Anthony was president of the association, having succeeded Stanton four years earlier. She had no desire to champion Stanton's Bible and saw no reason for the convention to take up the issue. "Anthony did not like the book, but she certainly agreed with Stanton on religion," says Ann D. Gordon, editor of the Papers project and research professor emeritus of history at Rutgers University. Anthony opposed the book on strategic grounds-she felt it was a damaging digression from their suffrage work. But in a letter to Stanton, she disparaged those "who voted for this interference with personal rights" of their "co-worker." She wrote: "No, my dear, instead of my resigning and leaving those half-fledged chickens without any mother, I think it my duty and the duty of yourself and all the liberals to be at the next convention and try to reverse this miserable, narrow action."

Reaction to The Woman's Bible, along with poor health, isolated Stanton from the suffrage movement toward the end of her life, but Anthony remained her eyes and ears on the ground. Stanton continued to write, and her unrelenting critiques of religion-and other topics that Anthony felt were tangential to suffrage-fueled an ongoing disagreement between them. "How many topics can you associate with suffrage and still win? Susan B. Anthony almost always wanted a clean ticket," Gordon says.

Take a letter Anthony sent Stanton from the 1896 California campaign for suffrage, which was ultimately unsuccessful: "You say 'women must be emancipated from their superstitions before enfranchisement will be of any benefit,' and I say just the reverse, that women must be enfranchised before they can be emancipated from their superstitions." Superstition, in this case, referred to women's irrational belief in oppressive religion. Anthony believed that when women could vote and be participants in civic society, other types of "emancipation" would follow. "Women would be no more superstitious today than men, if they had been men's political and business equals and gone outside the four walls of home and the other four of the church into the great world, and come in contact with and discussed men and measures on the plane of this mundane sphere, instead of living in the air with Jesus and the angels," she argued.

Determined to preserve that "clean ticket," Anthony refused to introduce any other issues into the California campaign. She had finally succeeded in convincing the Women's Christian Temperance Union to stay out, she reported. "Now, for heaven's sake, don't you propose a 'Bible invasion,'" she wrote Stanton. "I shall not circulate your 'Bible' literature a particle more than Frances Willard's prohibition literature."

"People see a fight and assume they're not getting along," Gordon says. "I don't think these two ever gave up on each other." Anthony wrote in another letter from California, "Oh how I have longed for you at my side to put into your matchless sentences the words that wait the saying-none of the young women are good-clear, crisp writers. . . . the two of us together being an invincible team-I feel every day-like Sampson shorn of his locks-without you."

Anthony relied on Stanton's "matchless sentences," and Stanton knew Anthony would keep things moving and focused. While preparing for the fiftieth anniversary of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention for women's rights, Anthony wrote Stanton: "I hope you are concentrating your every thought on the addresses which you wish to make to go down to history as your final and most complete utterances on the question of the enfranchisement of women. I wish it were possible for me to be in two places and do two things at once. If it were, I should certainly be with you and keep you stirred up," she wrote. "If possible, you should overtop and surpass anything and everything you have written or spoken before. Now my dear, this is positively the last time I am ever going to put you on the rack and torture you to make the speech or the speeches of your life."

In the end, Stanton's poor health-including near blindness-kept her from attending the February 1898 celebration in Washington, D.C., but she wrote an address that suffrage leader Clara Colby read. Toward the end of the speech, Stanton asserted: "The suffrage question is practically conceded. With full suffrage in four States, municipal suffrage in another, and school suffrage in half the States of the Union . . . the opposition with their flimsy protests and platitudes are wandering in fields where long ago the harvests were gathered and garnered."

Later that year, however, a confluence of events seemed to call Stanton's assertion into question. At its 1898 convention, the American Federation of Labor-historically a backer of woman's suffrage-heard a resolution that called on Congress to remove all women from government jobs and set a precedent for keeping women in the home. Delegates shot it down, but its mere introduction was disconcerting. The Chicago and Northwestern Railroad adopted a new policy of "promoting from within," and, to avoid having women in management, fired many female employees. A commission led by University of Chicago president William Rainey Harper to study Chicago's public schools claimed that pay raises won by the teachers' union for the majority female workforce were unearned. Harper said men should be paid more because they showed "superior physical endurance," and he advocated promoting men to better paid positions over women.

All this followed the short Spanish-American War, which resulted in U.S. control of islands in the Caribbean and Pacific. At the same time, the United States annexed the sugar-rich Hawai'ian Islands after helping to take down the monarchy. Congress was deciding what type of governance to foist on the territories. On the mainland, Jim Crow legislation was in full swing in the South. In this same decade, the Supreme Court had affirmed "separate but equal" in Plessy v. Ferguson, and Southern states had begun passing laws to limit black men's suffrage. The country's political language was thick with references to race and sex, writes Gordon. "War and empire complicated the whole nation's understanding of what it meant to talk about the consent of the governed."

To Stanton and Anthony, one thing was clear: The country was in danger of regressing. While women in some states were winning elections for municipal office, the proposed constitution for Hawai'i was more discriminatory than any state's. Not only were women denied voting rights, they were banned from holding public office. Stanton and Anthony thought this set a dangerous precedent for suffrage. "They look at this [and think,] 'It's like my whole adult life has been erased,'" Gordon says.

Younger suffragists didn't seem to get it. Anthony was appalled that her potential successors had nothing to say. "I really believe I shall explode if some of you young women don't wake up. . . . Do come into the living present & work to save us from any more barbaric male governments," she wrote one activist. "Our souls ought to be on fire-& yet no one seems awake to the threatening signs of the times," she wrote to another.

Of course, she could count on Stanton to be on fire. "The old Slave Ocrats are bound to push out every man & woman of color from the enjoyment of civil rights," Anthony wrote her friend. Every day she saw another instance of "colorphobia & sexphobia" that she thought Stanton should write about. Yet she questioned Stanton's insistence that religion was the root of discrimination: "On every hand American civilization-which we are introducing into Isles of the Atlantic & Pacific-is putting its heel on the head of the negro race-Now this barbarism does not grow out of ancient Jewish Bibles-but out of our own sordid meanness!! and the like of you ought to stop hitting poor old St Paul . . . Nobody does right or wrong because Saint Paul [tells] them to-but because of their own black "true inwardness"-The trouble is in ourselves to day-not in men or books of thousands of years ago." She chided Stanton: "I do wish you could centre your big brain on the crimes we ourselves as a people are responsible for-to charge our offenses to false books or false interpretations-is but a way of seeking a "refuge of lies." Anthony signed off "lovingly yours."

For all their debate, the two women always agreed on the basics. So they teamed up for a last political project with the proposed Hawai'ian constitution in their crosshairs. In their 1899 open letter to Speaker of the House Thomas B. Reed, who had previously been a supporter of woman's suffrage, they wrote: "The women of Hawaii should be accorded the highest position occupied by any in the United States. . . . By limiting all official positions to 'male' citizens there is a new depth to women's degradation we of the States have not yet experienced."

Today, many historians believe Stanton and Anthony's advocacy amounts to collaboration with the imperial project, writes Gordon, but the two women saw it as good political strategy, she says. They operated on the conviction that "my Congress should not treat women this way." Their "Petition for the Women of Hawaii," which ran in The Sun in New York and other national publications, read: "As in four States of the Union women now enjoy civil and political equality, to create a male oligarchy, by restricting the right to vote and hold office to men, would be to ignore all the steps of progress made during the last fifty years and reestablish at the very dawn of the new century a government based upon the invidious distinctions of sex, which have ever blocked the way to a higher civilization."

They encouraged women to sign and send the petition to Congress, noting, "When the emancipation of black men was under discussion the Women's Loyal League sent 400,000 petitions to Congress in favor of that measure. Shall we do less for the political freedom of the women of Hawaii?"

In the end, Hawai'i's new government was instituted as written. But Stanton and Anthony had weathered numerous defeats together-for them, it was all part of a long revolution. The next year, in 1900, Anthony retired as president of NAWSA, though she would continue to crisscross the country, agitating. On the occasion of her eightieth birthday that year, Stanton wrote her a poem that ran in national newspapers. She remembered their first meeting and instant inseparability: "We've traveled West, years together, \ Day and night, in stormy weather." Stanton remembered "sleighs, ox-carts, and coaches, \ Besieged with bugs, and roaches." She closed the poem looking forward:

United down life's hill we'll glide,

Whate'er the coming years betide-

Parted only when first in time

Eternal joys are thine or mine.

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Old Friends Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony Made History Togeth

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"It is fifty-one years since we first met, and we have been busy through every one of them, stirring up the world to recognize the rights of women," Susan B. Anthony wrote her friend Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1902. The letter, in honor of Stanton's eighty-seventh birthday, was printed in Pearson's Magazine.

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The Forgotten Suffragists | The National Endowment for the Humanities

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The National Endowment for the Humanities

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As the senators' names were read in alphabetical order, the women checked each vote against the tallies they had painstakingly tabulated over many months. When they got through the C's, Maud Wood Park, chair of the National American Woman Suffrage Association's (NAWSA) Congressional Committee, no longer had to consult her list. She knew it all by heart. Every affirmative vote was cast as promised. After three generations of activism, the Senate passed the Nineteenth Amendment, 56 yeas to 25 nays, with two votes to spare. The New York Times reported that the gallery broke out into two straight minutes of "deafening applause." The celebrations were short-lived, however, as suffrage leaders turned immediately to ratification and the no less urgent matter of securing their legacy.

For the next several months, Park, Helen Hamilton Gardener, and their NAWSA colleagues vied with their nemesis, Alice Paul and her National Woman's Party (NWP), to take credit for the congressional passage and to ensure that their respective versions of suffrage history would prevail. Since splitting in 1914, the NAWSA and the NWP (initially called the Congressional Union) had pursued contrasting paths to the vote. The NAWSA worked closely with President Woodrow Wilson and remained strictly nonpartisan. The NWP staged protests at the White House and elsewhere, and campaigned against Democrats (the party in power). For their increasingly bold tactics, NWP members were imprisoned in filthy, substandard facilities where they suffered multiple abuses, including forced feedings. Some members of Congress vowed to oppose the Nineteenth Amendment because NWP members picketed the commander-in-chief during a war; NAWSA leaders denounced the NWP upstarts, fearing their protests hindered the chances of congressional passage. After June 4, each organization claimed priority for what was, in retrospect, a shared victory brought about by the labors of generations of women.

A shared fear that the nation would ultimately grant the suffrage movement scant historical attention heightened the rivalry between the NWP and the NAWSA. If only one or two names would be remembered, each group wanted to ensure it was one of their own. The NAWSA and the NWP arranged competing celebrations and press events, including separate ceremonies, in August 1920, for Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby to sign the Nineteenth Amendment into law after it had been ratified by 36 states. To avoid entering this skirmish, Colby signed the historic document by himself at home.

Today, the names, faces, and organizational affiliations of these women are long forgotten. The suffrage centennial promises to reintroduce us to several of them, including Gardener, and to remind us of their triumphs and failures. The anniversary also provides an opportunity to reflect on the stories we tell about ourselves as a nation, and to consider whose contributions we remember and whose we don't. No one understood the political importance of historical memory better than the leaders of NAWSA and the NWP, whose competing, yet equally limited, versions of history have shaped how the story of the Nineteenth Amendment has been told, to the extent that it has been told at all.

Within days of congressional passage, NAWSA leaders secured a commitment from the Smithsonian to mount the first permanent exhibit on suffrage history-by which they meant NAWSA history. In various letters to Smithsonian officials, the women clarified that this exhibit must not mention in any way, shape, or form the NWP or Alice Paul. And it did not occur to them to include the contributions of the countless women who worked for the vote beyond NAWSA-especially women of color, who were generally shunned by both the NAWSA and the NWP.

The Smithsonian accepted the NAWSA artifacts-consisting of Susan B. Anthony's portrait (which the museum had refused as of "no special interest" just the year before), Anthony's red shawl, and a few other mementos-and arranged them on the small table on which Elizabeth Cady Stanton had drafted the Declaration of Sentiments in 1848. But the museum downplayed the significance of the small exhibit, titling it simply "An Important Epoch in American History."

Incensed that NAWSA appeared to be winning the battle for memory, Alice Paul immediately began planning what she hoped would be an even more substantial testament to the suffrage movement. She commissioned Adelaide Johnson-who became known as the "sculptor of suffrage" after she crafted busts of Anthony, Stanton, and Lucretia Mott for the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago-to recreate her sculptures of the three pioneers. Though Anthony and Stanton had led NAWSA, Paul believed that she was their rightful heir.

Paul aimed to place the busts in the Capitol Rotunda in celebration of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. After suffering an improbable series of mishaps-from cracked marble to earthquakes to railroad strikes-Johnson completed her statue in Italy and shipped it back to America just in time for the elaborate ceremony Paul had organized.

But congressional approval proved trickier than Paul had anticipated, as Sandra Weber details in The Woman Suffrage Statue. In part, this was because Johnson decided to sculpt Anthony, Stanton, and Mott together in a single marble monument weighing more than seven tons. Such an enormous statue-called the Portrait Monument-complicated transportation and placement. Congressional leaders worried that the floor of the Rotunda could not support such a heavy statue. Others questioned the Portrait Monument 's artistic merit, dubbing it "Three Ladies in a Bathtub."

Carrie Chapman Catt, the former president of NAWSA, added her own disapproval. She urged Congress to refuse the statue-not so much for its artistry but because she did not want Alice Paul to have occasion to gloat in the Capitol that the NWP had delivered the Nineteenth Amendment.

Finally, after the statue had languished just outside the Capitol for several days, the Joint Library Committee agreed to let the Portrait Monument be unveiled in the Rotunda. On February 15, 1921, the one hundred and first birthday of Susan B. Anthony, thousands of women crammed into the Rotunda for this historic occasion, and thousands more lined up outside. Various speakers declared the Portrait Monument a permanent reminder not only of women's long struggle for the vote but also of their new status as equal citizens. As with NAWSA's Smithsonian exhibit, however, the NWP ceremony presented a partisan version of suffrage history-which is to say that it skewed many people's sense of the history it enshrined. One day after the Portrait Monument was publicly presented, congressional officials transferred it to a storage area underneath the Rotunda, known as the Crypt, where it remained for the next 76 years.

For the past hundred years, the Smithsonian's NAWSA exhibit and the Portrait Monument (which was moved back upstairs in 1997 after women's groups raised the necessary funds) have provided the main national remembrances of the suffrage movement. Susan B. Anthony's image appeared on a three-cent stamp in 1936, a fifty-cent stamp in 1955, and a silver dollar, produced in limited quantities, beginning in 1979. The Women's Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls, New York, opened in 1980 to commemorate the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, the memory of which Stanton and Anthony carefully crafted in their multivolume History of Woman Suffrage and elsewhere, as the historian Lisa Tetrault has established. And, in 2016, President Barack Obama declared the Sewall-Belmont House, the long-term headquarters of the NWP, a national monument. But these tributes are a far cry from a complete history of the movement.

For starters, the truncated version of suffrage history centering on Anthony, Stanton, and Paul elides the larger complexities of the long struggle for the vote-which was, fundamentally, a battle for women's autonomy-and glosses over the fact that the Nineteenth Amendment did not enfranchise all women. Black women in the South, Native American women, and other women of color remained disfranchised for years, if not decades, after 1920. Moreover, singling out only NAWSA and NWP leaders limits the story of suffrage to the efforts of white women, when women of color also made vital contributions to the cause.

Such limited commemorations have also failed to pierce our shared historical narratives, which still focus predominately on Founding Fathers, Civil War battles, and presidents. Following the federal government's lead, history textbooks continue to give short shrift to suffrage (along with women's history as a whole), presenting it in sidebars or optional units, as a 2017 report by the National Women's History Museum documented. Neither the textbook version of suffrage history nor the NAWSA and NWP versions capture the breadth and depth of the movement or its increasingly significant lessons for us today.

Fortunately, as the 2020 suffrage centennial approaches, several national exhibitions have opened-or will soon open-that promise to upend, complicate, and diversify our understanding of the movement's history.

The National Portrait Gallery's stunning "Votes for Women: A Portrait of Persistence," curated by Kate Clarke Lemay, opened on March 29. As the first national centennial exhibit, "Votes for Women" has set the bar high for subsequent commemorations. The exhibit takes as its point of departure the various origins of the movement-including but also displacing the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention-and foregrounds the many strands of activists and activism that led to the eventual ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. Significantly, the exhibit presents the amendment not as the terminus of women's struggle for citizenship rights but as its midpoint. The final room reminds visitors that the Nineteenth Amendment did not become a reality for all women until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, and it suggests, via video monitor, various ways in which women's rights continue to be challenged.

The exhibit also highlights, in rare and beautiful portraits, several African-American women who worked for the vote along with other civil rights, through women's clubs, church groups, and civic organizations, including the National Association of Colored Women, founded in 1896 and led by Mary Church Terrell. For those who look carefully, the exhibit advances a thoughtful argument about the challenges of centering those whose portraits, papers, and artifacts do not tend to be preserved in archives or museums.

On May 10, 2019, the National Archives opened "Rightfully Hers: American Women and the Vote," which runs through January 2021 and is accompanied by a traveling exhibit entitled "One Half of the People: Advancing Equality for Women." Curated by Corinne Porter, "Rightfully Hers" features the Archives' collections of suffrage material-from countless petitions women sent to Congress to state ratification certificates to the Nineteenth Amendment itself. The exhibit tells the complicated story of women's attempt to secure the vote before and after 1920, including a 1938 pamphlet documenting voting restrictions in the South, a 1946 affidavit from a Navajo Indian woman who was not allowed to register to vote, and the 2013 Supreme Court decision in Shelby v. Holder, which reversed provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. A goal of the exhibit and related programming is to encourage all Americans to be "election ready," even providing visitors the opportunity to register to vote on site.

To coincide with the one hundredth anniversary of congressional passage, the Library of Congress will open "Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote" on June 4. Drawing on the library's vast manuscripts related to suffrage (many of which have recently been digitized), this exhibit will include a varied assortment of materials, from moving pictures to sheet music to foundational documents such as a rare printed version of the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments.

The U.S. Senate Historical Office has organized a series of talks and tours and will soon unveil an online exhibit of primary documents and explanatory essays analyzing the Nineteenth Amendment's circuitous, 41-year-long path through the Senate. Under the auspices of the 2020 Women's Vote Centennial Initiative, several public and private museums, historical sites, and partner groups have created a clearinghouse website, comprehensive calendar, and classroom resources.

Next year, the Smithsonian American History Museum will debut "Creating Icons: How We Remember Women's Suffrage" on March 6. The centerpiece of the exhibit, curated by Lisa Kathleen Graddy, will be the Susan B. Anthony portrait acquired from NAWSA in 1919, along with material highlighting the NWP and other organizations. Displays will contrast the "famous" with the "forgotten" to press the question of what we remember and what we forget.

This impressive slate of national commemorations offers a stark contrast to the previous 99 years of relative silence. Each of these exciting projects links the Nineteenth Amendment to the longer, ongoing struggle for voting rights. Another shared goal is the commitment to showcase women beyond the triumvirate of Anthony, Stanton, and Paul. Each museum introduces visitors to fascinating women they may never have heard of before-from Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, who declared, in 1866, that it was impossible to separate racial discrimination from sex discrimination because "we are all bound up together," to Zitkala-Sa, a member of the Sioux Nation, who helped lead the Society of American Indians to advocate for the citizenship rights of Native Americans (granted by Congress in 1924) to the tens of thousands of women whose names appear in the historical record only because they petitioned Congress for the right to vote.

One impetus for the plethora of suffrage centennial exhibits in Washington is the Smithsonian-wide American Women's History Initiative, "Because of Herstory," an outgrowth of the 2016 Congressional Commission Report on the American Museum of Women's History. Another explanation for the newfound interest in women's history at the national level is that, for the first time, many premier institutions-including the Smithsonian American History Museum, the Library of Congress, and the National Portrait Gallery-are led by women.

Beyond museum leadership, the record number of women in Congress have introduced several measures to commemorate the centennial. In 2017, Congress established the Women's Suffrage Centennial Commission to "ensure a suitable observance of the centennial of the passage and ratification of the 19th Amendment." Senators Marsha Blackburn and Kirsten Gillibrand, together with House counterparts Representatives Elise Stefanik and Brenda Lawrence, have even proposed the creation of a suffrage centennial coin.

But the larger question remains: To what extent will these centennial commemorations inspire a more comprehensive overhaul of our shared historical narratives? Will our textbooks, museums, and monuments soon equally include the experiences and contributions of women-not just Stanton, Anthony, and Paul-and present the history of women as vitally intertwined with the history of America as a whole?

After nearly a hundred years of national amnesia regarding the women's suffrage movement (despite decades of scholarship by myriad historians), the ongoing and upcoming exhibits in Washington-along with many new books and state and local commemorations-suggest that we are now ready not only to remember women's suffrage in a nuanced way that foregrounds race but also to fully incorporate women-of all backgrounds, races, and ethnicities-into our national narratives and into the centers of political power. Beyond the vote, exhibits, and statues, this is what the suffragists wanted all along.

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As the senators' names were read in alphabetical order, the women checked each vote against the tallies they had painstakingly tabulated over many months. When they got through the C's, Maud Wood Park, chair of the National American Woman Suffrage Association's (NAWSA) Congressional Committee, no longer had to consult her list.

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Winning the Vote: A Divided Movement Brought About the Nineteenth Amendment | The National Endowment for the Humanities

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The National Endowment for the Humanities

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"Woman's Suffrage by the proposed Sixteenth Amendment is before the nation for consideration," one newspaper heralded. Demanding their enfranchisement through a constitutional amendment, "women," another column remarked, "strike out in a new path." Women had been demanding the vote for some time, but this new approach was extremely far-fetched.

Although we assume today that voting is a basic right of citizenship, enshrined somewhere in the Constitution, the original Constitution actually sidestepped the issue entirely. It did not define or safeguard any individual's right to vote. Rather, at the nation's founding, individual states held jurisdiction over making (and regulating) voters within their boundaries. Women were now saying that this should be reversed-that the federal government, not the states, should make women into voters.

Roughly fifty years after a handful of suffragists conceived the idea, it became a hard-fought reality. In 1920, states ratified the Nineteenth Amendment and thereby guaranteed voting rights to women across the country. Or so it is said.

As the so-called women's suffrage amendment approaches its one hundredth birthday, it remains poorly understood-even among those who celebrate it. Just what did the Nineteenth Amendment do? Why is this long-lived campaign alternately revered and maligned? And why do the constitutional issues it helped to open remain so unsettled? Answers to all these questions require a look back at this spectacular campaign, replete with triumphs, reversals, infighting, heartbreak, and joy.
The Origins of a Federal Amendment
Although women demanded the vote as far back as the 1840s, they did not call for a federal amendment until after the Civil War, when a new battle over the status of recently emancipated freed people split the nation. What rights should former slaves have, if any? Rejecting most of African Americans' demands upon freedom, a band of congressmen nevertheless supported freedmen's demands to vote. They proposed to accomplish this through amending the Constitution.

Passing Congress in 1869, the Fifteenth Amendment declared that voting "shall not be denied or abridged . . . on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." When ratified in 1870, the amendment struck down state requirements that voters be "white," enfranchising black men nationwide. This creation of voters through federal amendment had never before been tried.

Congressional passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, however, tore apart the feminist-abolitionist community and split the movement. Often working together in the same prewar coalitions, women's rights and antislavery advocates regrouped after the Civil War to form the American Equal Rights Association (AERA). The AERA advocated the enfranchisement of both African Americans and women, as twin demands.

When the Fifteenth Amendment advanced only one of those goals, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony-leading suffragists-balked. At the group's 1869 annual convention, the pair refused to support the amendment's ratification because it omitted women. Frederick Douglass-who had escaped slavery and, by this point, become the nation's leading African-American statesman-defended the amendment as an important step forward. Sparks flew as the trio sparred.

Stanton trotted out racist defenses for her opposition. She railed against "ignorant" black manhood voting before "educated" white womanhood. And she hurled racial epithets, calling black men "Sambo." Not only would (to her mind) unfit freedmen be allowed to vote, she warned, but immigrant men too, increasing the ranks of "ignorant," incompetent voters to epidemic proportions.

Anthony backed up Stanton. If the vote was to be given "piece by piece," Anthony shouted, "then give it first to women, to the most intelligent & capable of the women at least"-clearly meaning native-born white women and displaying her own deeply held sense of racial hierarchy.

Douglass countered. Ongoing vigilante violence across the South gave black men greater priority, he argued. "I do not see how any one can pretend that there is the same urgency in giving the ballot to the woman as to the negro," he began. "With us, the matter is a question of life or death. . . . When women, because they are women, are hunted down . . . when they are dragged from their houses and hung upon lamp-posts; when their children are torn from their arms, and their brains dashed out upon the pavement, . . . then she will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own."
A Divided Movement Is Born
Angrily, Stanton and Anthony bolted from the AERA and formed a new organization, the National Woman Suffrage Association. Stanton and Anthony used their National Association to oppose the Fifteenth Amendment and advocate for their newly conceived idea for a Sixteenth Amendment, granting women's suffrage.

In their eyes, the Fifteenth Amendment had only one redeeming feature: It had nationalized suffrage, shifting voting regulation from the states to the federal government. This meant suffragists no longer had to labor at the state level, attempting to remove the word "male" from the voting qualifications in each and every state-an excruciatingly onerous fight. Now they could focus all their energies on a single citadel, the U.S. Constitution.

Not all suffragists agreed with Stanton and Anthony's constitutional logic, however. Their rivals in the AERA, which included most of its leading membership, countered the pair by forming an opposing American Woman Suffrage Association. Overseen by Lucy Stone-a prominent white reformer and peer of Stanton and Anthony-the American Association not only supported the Fifteenth Amendment, but also insisted the vote must still be won in the individual states. They rejected Stanton and Anthony's arguments that constitutional authority around voting in the U.S. had been remade. The Fifteenth Amendment had been no more than a postwar exigency, ratified in order to redress the evil legacies of slavery.

Black women, who long had a tradition of independent organizing, moved in and out of both organizations, but mostly they pursued their own vision of rights work, often in collaboration with black men. While they sometimes sought alliances with white women and supported suffrage, black women often found the two mainstream suffrage organizations too narrow, incapable of expressing their broader and racially informed visions for justice.
Two Approaches to Amending Constitutions
Although ratification settled the battle over the Fifteenth Amendment, the question of which constitutions to revise in order to win women's suffrage remained open.

The American Association worked to get the word "male" removed from the list of voter qualifications in states' governing charters. To remove it, many states required that the proposal pass two successive state legislative sessions. Some legislatures met only every other year, however. And where the proposal passed one session of a state legislature, it might not pass the second, meaning the process would have to begin all over again. In other cases, efforts to win women the vote had to pass a state referendum, going before the all-male voters of the state.

Although cumbersome, these strategies showed signs of promise when, in 1869, the same year the AERA split, Wyoming enfranchised women. A year later, in 1870, Utah did the same. Elsewhere, state constitutional conventions and state legislatures routinely took up the issue.

The National Association, by contrast, experimented with how the federal government might be leveraged to secure a citizen's right to vote. Because amending the Constitution was enormous work, in the early 1870s, they began trying out interpretations that the Constitution already enfranchised women. Voting was a basic right of federal citizenship, they argued, and, as citizens, women were entitled to vote. In 1875, however, the Supreme Court pushed back, deciding in Minor v. Happersett that voting was a privilege, not a right.

This ruling was devastating for the pursuit of voting on the explicit grounds of "rights." The National Association's petitions for an amendment were now patterned on the Fifteenth Amendment, emphasizing nondiscrimination. Just as that amendment banned states from discriminating in voting on the basis of "race," their congressional petitions requested an amendment that would effectively strike down as unconstitutional all state qualifications that voters be "male."

Amending the U.S. Constitution, however, would not be easy or simple. A federal amendment first had to have a congressional sponsor, a congressman (as all were men) to introduce it into the legislative session. Next, it had to pass both chambers of Congress (in the same session) by a two-thirds majority. Ratification, in turn, was its own herculean task, requiring approval by three-fourths of the states. And there could be no incremental victories. It was all or nothing.

The amendment appeared to gain traction in 1878, when Senator Aaron Sargent-a Republican from California, whose wife, Ellen, was an ardent suffragist-introduced the amendment into Congress for the first time:

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.

Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

For almost a decade, however, the amendment remained stalled in committee until, in 1887, the Senate rejected it by a hefty margin.

Winning women the vote could not be accomplished by a single vote. Suffragists had to wade through layers and layers of power and process. There were endless politicians to coddle and cajole, not to mention the always-scarce resources needed for their voluminous campaigns. This was exhausting work, and keeping momentum alive, over decades, was itself a full-time job.
The Difference the States Made
After almost twenty years of little progress, the state strategy once again bore fruit. Colorado enfranchised women in 1893. Idaho followed suit in 1896. By the close of the nineteenth century, women were voting on equal terms with men in four states.

Although the state and federal campaigns were separate strategies, they were often two sides of the same coin. The federal amendment would likely never have passed if the individual states had not begun enfranchising women in rapid succession around the turn of the century.

Added to the original six states or territories came another eight, all west of the Mississippi: Washington in 1910; California in 1911; Arizona, Kansas, and Oregon in 1912; the Territory of Alaska in 1913; along with Montana and Nevada in 1914. By 1915, western women were voting in massive numbers. Then key eastern states began to fall. In 1917, New York suffragists scored a huge victory when the Empire State agreed to remove "male" from its voting requirements. A year later, Michigan did the same. Then came Oklahoma and South Dakota.

A host of other states began extending partial suffrage rights to women. Women could vote in certain types of elections, but not in all elections-meaning not on equal terms with men. Nevertheless, women began to vote in states that had not even amended their state constitutions. Women gained what was called "school suffrage" (voting on school matters), "municipal suffrage" (voting in municipal or city matters), and "presidential suffrage" (voting for U.S. president). By 1920, there were only eight states in which women were not already voting in some fashion.

Unfortunately, most of the aged, original, nineteenth-century suffragists died before these cascading state victories. Stone died in 1893, Stanton in 1902, and Anthony in 1906. Few who had inaugurated the fight would live to see these victories.

Yet as the word "male" was struck from state voter clauses, many states began to formally strip away poor-white and non-white men's ballots. In 1890, white supremacists in Mississippi passed the first of the Jim Crow restrictions-poll taxes, literacy tests, and more-whereupon other states followed. By 1913, many states across the nation (not just in the South) had placed significant new restrictions upon voting. Although these tests were often selectively administered against men of color-Latino, black, and immigrant-their precise language nowhere mentioned race, giving such restrictions plausible deniability of being, in fact, race-based, and thus making them legal under the Fifteenth Amendment.

For black women suffragists who had also inaugurated this fight-such as Sojourner Truth (died 1883) and Sarah Parker Remond (died 1894)-such laws represented not only dreams deferred, but dreams destroyed. These new laws did what vigilante violence had not been able to fully accomplish: Throwing most men of color off the voter rolls, until their voting numbers dwindled to almost nil.
A Federal Amendment Won
Some say Alice Paul brought the fight back to Congress. In 1890, just as Mississippi threw men off the voter rolls, the National and the American Associations unified, forming the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Anthony handpicked Carrie Chapman Catt to lead the organization. Catt was a longtime activist who had risen through the suffrage ranks under Anthony's tutelage. Catt, however, believed that a direct fight for a federal amendment was unwinnable, and that the battle had to proceed state by state. When enough states fell, she predicted, so too would a federal amendment.

Alice Paul, meanwhile, was impatient. A much younger suffragist who had cut her teeth in militant suffrage activism in Great Britain, Paul believed that a direct fight for the federal amendment should be revived. Paul clashed with Catt and soon left NAWSA to form her own suffrage organization, the National Woman's Party (NWP).

The NWP not only demanded a federal amendment-immediately-but they did so in ways that made Catt cringe. Their brash, militant tactics were an about-face from Catt's careful diplomacy. Paul and her NWP comrades were responsible for much of the gripping drama that we associate with the final push for the Nineteenth Amendment.

In 1913, they held a massive suffrage parade in Washington, D.C.-the largest peaceful protest ever assembled on D.C. streets to that point. To skewer President-elect Woodrow Wilson for his opposition to women's suffrage, they held their parade on the eve of his inauguration, upstaging him. Crowds physically attacked the marchers, and scores of women were sent to the hospital.

Then, beginning in 1917, Paul and her allies began peacefully picketing the White House. When decorum dictated they lay down their signs as the United States entered World War I, they went right on picketing. Wilson had had enough. He had the women arrested on trumped-up charges of "obstructing traffic." But as one group of women went to jail, another row of picketers took up their posts. Soon over a hundred women were put in jail, where some began hunger strikes. The prison ordered the women force-fed, as the correction officers gruesomely poured liquid nutrients down tubes forced into their throats.

These "silent sentinels" ceased their protests only when, in 1918, Congress agreed to bring the federal amendment to a vote. When that vote failed, they posted themselves back outside the White House. Wilson, meanwhile, finally declared his support.

By 1919, the tides had turned. On May 21, the House passed the amendment by a relatively large 42-vote margin. And, on June 4, the Senate followed suit, 56 for and 25 against. The amendment had carried and was headed to the states for ratification.

Although the story often focuses on Paul and the NWP for reasons of sheer drama, Catt's plodding ground game had been just as important. The scores of women already voting across the nation had convinced many that women's suffrage would not throw the world off its axis. Those voting women had also helped send pro-women's suffrage politicians to Congress. The networks Catt and NAWSA had built in the states, moreover, proved critical to this next fight.

The 14-month ratification effort had a promising start. Then panic set in. The quick succession of ratifying states slowed, then stopped-one short of the 36 states needed. Five excruciating months went by, as no states considered it. That fall, the governor of Tennessee shocked everyone by calling a session of the Tennessee legislature to affirm his state's opposition.

Because Tennessee was a southern state, known for its fierce opposition to women voting, prospects looked grim. Battalions of suffragists and armies of their opponents descended on Nashville, the state capital. Lobbying went on through the night preceding the vote. As roll call began the next day-August 18, 1920-it seemed clear the amendment would not pass.

But upon receiving a letter from his mother, urging his support-and instructing him "to be a good boy"-Harry T. Burn, the Tennessee legislature's youngest member, at only twenty-four, changed his vote. Burn declared his support. His courage caused one more defection from the opposition. And, shocking everyone, the Tennessee legislature approved ratification by a two-vote margin. The long and arduous fight for a federal amendment-which had taken decades, involved millions of women, and exacted an enormous toll-was finally over.

Newspapers trumpeted victory. "SUFFRAGE WINS," read the front page of one, "Tennessee House Ratifies . . . Giving Women of Entire Nation [the] Vote." "The federal suffrage amendment has granted women the right to vote," read another.
The Still Elusive "Right to Vote"
Victory, however, was not as conclusive as celebrations made it seem. There exists-then and now-considerable slippage between what the amendment did and what Americans claim for it. The amendment, like the U.S. Constitution, neither creates nor extends any "right to vote." The amend-ment had also not secured voting for "women of the entire nation."

In fact, discrimination in voting was still perfectly legal, as long as it was not explicitly based on "race," and now "sex." Otherwise, states were free to discriminate in whatever ways they chose. And discriminate they did-all across the country.

Turn-of-the-century laws that had disenfranchised black men in the South now also prevented black women from voting. Although the qualification of "sex" no longer barred them, selectively applied literacy tests, poll taxes, and more still did.

Nevertheless, black women showed up en masse across the South to test these limits, displaying enormous resistance to the edifice of white supremacy. In some cases, black women defied the odds and managed to vote. But, like black men, they were largely prevented from doing so. When Indiana Little, a Birmingham schoolteacher, went to register in 1926, white officials arrested her on charges of vagrancy. And when Susie Fountain, of Pheobus, Virginia, attempted to take that state's literacy test, the white registrar handed her a blank sheet of paper. Naturally, she failed.

Discriminatory laws kept women of color from voting in the North and West as well. During the early 1900s, native-born whites in both regions worked to "purify" the electorate of "problem voters," which largely meant immigrants and voters of color. Numerous northern and western states expanded their residency requirements for voting, tightened registration requirements, and shortened registration windows. Twelve northern and western states-from New York to California-also added literacy tests to their state requirements for voting. Like those in the South, these tests were often selectively administered against voters of color, including women. Yet because neither "race" nor "sex" was mentioned in the letter of these laws, they were also perfectly constitutional. Still others, particularly Asian, Pacific Islander, and indigenous women, were barred from voting by restrictions on their citizenship.

This countervailing reality of women's ongoing disenfranchisement underscores just what had been lost when the amendment text had shifted to enshrine only nondiscrimination instead of a constitutionally given right to vote. As white suffragists watched the Fifteenth Amendment crumble after the 1890s, why hadn't they ditched this single-grounds, nondiscrimination approach and revised the text to demand a citizen's right to the ballot? The narrow wording of the Nineteenth Amendment, unchanged since 1878, was likely a concession to multiple factors, including that women understood after the Minor decision that decisively claiming a "right to vote" was unlikely to pass, given how radically it would remake the Constitution. At the same time, this was also a concession to American racism.

Many white suffragists believed that discrimination in voting on other grounds was desirable. Stanton, for example, had always supported an educational test for voters, something on full display in her 1869 objections to the Fifteenth Amendment. The same was true for other suffragists, and this text allowed for discrimination on myriad grounds, as long as the reason was not "sex."

When millions of women protested their continued disenfranchisement after 1920, the mainstream, largely white suffrage organizations refused to listen. White women declared victory. And, in the process, they-just as their amendment had-tacitly condoned the continued operations of American racism.

Meanwhile, scores of women continued their fight for this elusive right, something they would not secure until the 1965 passage of the federal Voting Rights Act, which, together with subsequent reauthorizations, tore down many of their obstacles to the ballot.

For all its merits, the Nineteenth Amendment, like the Fifteenth Amendment, did not radically remake the Constitution into a guarantor of voting rights, even though this is routinely claimed. It is certainly true that the amendment's opening line references such a right-"the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied"-but that mention is an illusion, having no fixed reference point in the Constitution, then or now. The United States is, in fact, one of the few constitutional democracies that extends no such right in its governing charter.

As centennial celebrations gear up around the Nineteenth Amendment, we will hear again and again about how women won the right to vote in 1920. It makes for a great story, full of drama and triumph. And it was a tremendous, historic victory that affirmed in various ways that women were, and should be, part of the body politic, at least in principle.

But the real story is considerably more complicated. Because states, and not the federal government, appoint voters, millions of women were already voting before 1920. And because what women technically won was only nondiscrimination in voting on the basis of "sex," millions of women still could not vote after 1920. Given this, we cannot pinpoint a single date when women won the vote, reflecting just how localized voter governance is in the United States.

Subsequent to 1920, various court cases, federal laws, and two more constitutional amendments (barring poll taxes and lowering the voting age to 18) have continued to bar state-level disenfranchisement in significant ways, but none of those federal measures have yet assured Americans of a "right to vote." Securing that perceived right, which the fights for both the Fifteenth and the Nineteenth amendments cleaved opened, remains the unfinished work of this hard-fought historical legacy.

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Winning the Vote: A Divided Movement Brought About the Nineteenth Amendment

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"Woman's Suffrage by the proposed Sixteenth Amendment is before the nation for consideration," one newspaper heralded. Demanding their enfranchisement through a constitutional amendment, "women," another column remarked, "strike out in a new path." Women had been demanding the vote for some time, but this new approach was extremely far-fetched.

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How Black Suffragists Fought for the Right to Vote and a Modicum of Respect | The National Endowment for the Humanities

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The National Endowment for the Humanities

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Read her remarks from 1889 and you might believe she saw the future or at least had the capacity to call it into being: "I believe there are as great possibilities in women as there are in men. . . . We are marching onward grandly. . . . We love to think of the great women of our race-the mothers who have struggled through poverty to educate their children. . . . There are many wives who are now helping to educate their husbands at school, by taking in sewing and washin. . . I believe in equalizing the matter. Instead of going to school a whole year, he ought to stay at home one half, and send his wife the other six months. . . . I repeat, we want a grand and noble womanhood, scattered all over the land. There is a great vanguard of scholars and teachers of our sex who are at the head of institutions of learning all over the country. We need teachers, lecturers of force and character to help to teach this great nation of women."

These remarks, delivered before a conference of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, marked a debut for Brown as an advocate of women's rights, including the right to vote. If finding the start of a suffragist's career in a church sanctuary surprises, it is only because the route to women's suffrage taken by black women is still too often relegated to the margins or obscured by misunderstanding. Consider how black women did not take part in the mythical 1848 women's meeting in Seneca Falls, New York. When we look for them in that year, we find that, instead, some of them were already at work demanding women's rights, but they were doing so in black churches rather than in women's conventions. And what about 1920 and ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment? Study of that hallmark moment reveals that, while some black women in the North and West had reason to celebrate, it was but a brief pause in their ongoing struggle for voting rights. Especially for black women in southern states, the struggle for the vote extended for decades more, to 1965, when the Voting Rights Act would finally topple barriers constructed by Jim Crow.

Hallie Quinn Brown's call for a vanguard that would empower a "great nation" of black women expressed a vision that would guide her to yet another pivotal moment in the history of black women and the vote. In 1923, in the wake of the Nineteenth Amendment's ratification, Brown took pen to paper and denounced a proposal by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) to dedicate a monument to the mythical black mammy of the South-a figure in servant's garb cradling a white infant. Her words cut: Rather than loyal supplicants, "slave women were brutalized, the victims of white man's caprice and lust. Often the babe torn from her arms was the child of her oppressor." As president of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), Brown spoke the thoughts of many thousands, descendants of enslaved women who derided the hypocrisy of white southerners who in "one generation held the black mammy in abject slavery [and in] the next would erect a monument to her fidelity." She doubted the "deep reverence and gratitude" professed to undergird the monument. White southern women would better "make restitution," Brown advised, by interceding with their husbands and fathers to "with one hand upraised . . . stop mob rule and lynching."

The "mammy" figure, rather than new, was part of a long-standing Lost Cause myth that relied on the fiction that enslaved people had been docile, content, and loyal to slaveholders. But by 1922, the notion of a "Monument to the Faithful Colored Mammies of the South" won the interest of Congress, where a bill had proposed to authorize the Washington, D.C., chapter of the UDC to install such a figure on public grounds "as a gift to the people of the United States." Black Americans saw through to the irony of such a framing and cried foul. The monument was mere propaganda aimed to distract the nation from real, twentieth century needs: adequate homes, schools, and heath care. Brown joined others in opposition-from grassroots activists to leaders like W.E.B. DuBois-and the bill died of inaction.

The "mammy" monument controversy erupted at a historic crossroads. It was one part a story about how the UDC promoted the Lost Cause. It was also a story about the emerging power of the NAACP. Hallie Quinn Brown's role points to yet one more story about how black women organized to win political power, including the vote, and then used it. As leader of the era's largest organization of black women, the NACW, Brown condemned the monument for its degrading caricature of an African-American woman. Her insight derived from the spirit expressed in Anna Julia Cooper's 1892 black feminist manifesto: "Only the black woman can say when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enter[s] with me."

I recently revisited the life of Hallie Quinn Brown after having long known her as part of a generation of black women activists who battled Jim Crow in its early decades. Students of African-American women's history know Brown best by way of her 1926 edited collection of biographical essays, Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction, which remains a useful reference. But finding Brown leading a challenge to the "mammy" monument made me rethink what I knew. I am at work on a history of black women and the vote, and one thing has already become clear: I must always look for early twentieth-century black suffragists in unexpected places. The racism they encountered in better remembered suffrage organizations, such as the National American Women's Suffrage Association (NAWSA) or the National Women's Party (NWP) meant that too few women like Brown worked through those organizations. To tell their stories, I must follow their lead.

Brown and women like her came to the cause of women's suffrage by paths that ran through African-American-led institutions: Antislavery societies, churches, and women's clubs. Committed to winning political rights in the early twentieth century, most black women remained just where they had begun, in black-led institutions, testing ideas and building political savvy. Those that could-mostly women in northern and western states, where Jim Crow did not exclude them from politics-signed on as supporters of the Republican party. Their purpose was often distinct. Black women sought the vote to further what they termed human rights, meaning the rights of women and men alike. They were rarely single-issue in their concerns; they battled for political rights while also advocating for temperance, education, prison reform, and the rights of working people. They especially attended to troubles that arose at the crossroads of race and gender. When Brown railed against the prospect of a "mammy" monument in the nation's capital, she did so knowing that the promotion of such a false and degrading image undercut black women's political aspirations. She was part of a "great vanguard" prepared to fight back and further empower a "great nation of women."

For Brown, women's education was foundational. Though she was free born in 1849 in Pittsburgh, Brown's parents had been enslaved. To better educate their children, the household migrated to Chatham in Canada during Brown's teen years, where the family lived alongside fugitive slaves and dissident black emigrants who had abandoned the United States. By 1870, in the wake of the Civil War and during early Reconstruction, Brown returned to the U.S., where she enrolled at Wilberforce University in Ohio. After graduation, Brown's career as an educator took her to public schools, north and south, and to Allen University in South Carolina and Alabama's Tuskegee Institute. Along the way, she studied elocution, and in 1893 Brown settled in as a professor at her alma mater, Wilberforce. It would be her institutional home for the next decade.

"Give her your votes," insisted Gertrude Bustill Mossell, referring to Brown in 1892. Mossell admonished those men who saw Brown's womanhood as a bar to her holding the office of the secretary of education in the AME Church: "Let the sex have its representation for we all know they willingly accept more than their share of the taxation." With that-a run for office-Brown was baptized into women's politics, part of a maelstrom in which, alongside her, other churchwomen were claiming the right to hold office by way of ordination into the ministry. The resulting debates consumed and nearly tore apart the AME Church community. Brown learned valuable lessons: In her aim to assume power she had allies, women like Mossell, and, at the same time, she could expect opposition.

Brown's early political education was earned in battles over the public representation of black women. At stake was whether black women would exercise rights as full citizens. As with many of her generation, Brown was drawn out from familiar settings such as the classroom and church, as their benevolent work took a sharply political turn and their leadership consolidated at a national level. First, there was a controversy during the planning of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, when the sponsors failed to include African-American planners or themed exhibits. Brown managed to be appointed a clerk in the fair's department of publicity and promotion and then used her position to expose the degree to which those in charge intended to leave black Americans invisible and unaccounted for. In the same years, Brown led the women of the Colored League of Washington, D.C., to the first meeting of what would become the National Association of Colored Women. The women had been galvanized when James Jacks, then president of the Missouri Press Association, publicly ridiculed Ida B. Wells and her antilynching campaign and then impugned all black women, branding them prostitutes, thieves, and liars. Jacks's letter ignited a "pressing . . . need of our banding together if only for our protection."

In the decades leading to passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, Brown grew to be a sophisticated activist who moved along intertwined paths, the sort of journey shared by many black suffragists. She appears to have avoided any sustained association with NAWSA or the NWP. The antiblack racism that ran through such organizations likely kept her at a distance. Brown did not, however, operate in deference to a divide between black and white women, nor did she avoid suffrage politics. Temperance brought her to London, where she spoke at the 1895 convention of the World's Woman's Christian Temperance Union, one of only three black American women to do so. In the summer of 1900, Brown was in London to attend the International Congress of Women, where she heard women's suffrage debated and reported favorably on an exchange in which antiwomen's suffrage ideas were "torn to shreds."

Black women's clubs became the heart of Brown's public work. There, by 1899, leaders were heralding the movement for women's suffrage as "the pioneer force for woman's emancipation and progress." By 1901, NACW president Mary Church Terrell won an "ovation" for her remarks on "The Justice of Women Suffrage": "Woman's rights were not protected as they should be. Not until woman . . . had the ballot to be used for her protection and self-defence [sic] can she hope to secure the rights and privileges to which she is entitled." Brown, in 1904, helped write a resolution which provided "that the women of our Association prepare themselves by the study of civic government and kindred subjects for the problems of city, State, and National life that they may be able to perform, intelligently, the duties that have come to some and will come to others in the natural progress of the Woman Suffrage movement." In 1911 and 1912, she headed the NACW's "Suffrage" department and, in 1920, Brown assumed the association's presidency.

Looking ahead from 1920, Brown charged the women of the NACW with picking up where the movement for the Nineteenth Amendment had left off. The enfranchisement of hundreds of thousands of black women, the majority in the American South, was not yet complete. Brown led thousands of clubwomen with the same vision that had initially drawn her to the podium in 1889. Historian Nikki Brown explains that Brown's aim was to harness black women's votes and thus win them influence in the Republican party and in Washington, D.C. Brown urged black women to regard the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment as an opening for an acquisition of power: "Let us remember that we are making our own history. That we are character builders; building for all eternity. Woman's horizon has widened. Her sphere of usefulness is greatly enlarged. Her capabilities are acknowledged. . . . Let us not ask: what shall we do with our newly acquired power? Rather, what manner of women are we going to be?" She framed women's votes as a next chapter in the long struggle for black political rights: "We stand at the open door of a new era. For the first time in the history of this country, women have exercised the right of franchise. The right for which the pioneers of our race fought, but died without the sight."

Brown's opposition to the UDC's "mammy" monument fit precisely at the confluence of a victory for women's suffrage and the ongoing work of civil rights. And a new moment demanded a new strategy. Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction, published in 1926, leveled one of Brown's most robust and enduring shots at those who doubted black women's suitability as voters. The book was styled as what historian Brittney Cooper has termed a "listing." It was a disruptive volley that countered limited visions of the body politic as one consisting of white women and also of men, black and white. Brown collaborated with more than 25 other women to produce-across 250 pages and more than 60 biographical sketches, essays, and poems-an argument about the past, present, and future of black women. The book demolished myths and brought to light the lives of real women-their ideas and their activism. As Brown put it in her introduction, Homespun Heroines aimed to inspire young people to "cleave more tenaciously to the truth and to battle more heroically for the right." On the horizon, Brown suggested, was a time when universal womanhood suffrage would be realized.

Mammy-as a subservient, content and enduringly loyal slave-was exposed as pure fiction. The biographies in Homespun Heroines introduced enslaved women who recognized their exploitation, resisted at great personal risk, and were committed to their own families rather than to those of slaveholders, even when subjected to forced, prolonged separation. Dinah Cox battled in court for over 14 years when her late owner's family refused to free her as his will provided. Upon her manumission, Charlotta Gordon MacHenry Pyles and her family risked a treacherous journey from Kentucky, through Missouri, finally arriving in the free state of Iowa. Once settled, Pyles set out to purchase family members who remained enslaved and reunited loved ones separated by sale. Harriet Tubman freed herself, returned at great risk to liberate her family and neighbors on Maryland's Eastern Shore, and then aided Union army officials, working as a "scout," and "outwitting the Confederates." Lucretia Harper Simpson had been separated from her entire family while enslaved in Kentucky and, when the war came, she and three other young women took their chance and crossed the river into Ohio. These women were neither docile nor content. Nor were they loyal, at least not to those who had held them in bondage.

Citizenship was a birthright for which black women were prepared. The women of Homespun Heroines were paradigmatic voters, women of independence and integrity. For many, formal education had bestowed the insight, reason and discernment that suited them for citizenship. Others, especially those born enslaved, still managed to make manifest qualities-piousness, fidelity, benevolence, selflessness, and compassion-that evidenced their suitability as citizens and voters. Elizabeth Smith had won her education despite violent opposition to the presence of young black women at Prudence Crandall's school in Canterbury, Connecticut. Caroline Sherman Andrews-Hill, though enslaved, stole learning as the household's white children were being taught, only to be banned from working nearby during lesson time. Anne E. Baltimore, Mary Burnett Talbert, and Mary J. Patterson attended Oberlin College. So did Fannie Jackson Coppin, who took the "gentleman's course," despite advice that she do otherwise.

Black women had earned the vote, Homespun Heroines argued. They had as suffragists aided all American women to secure a constitutional amendment. Sojourner Truth had been a "zealous advocate for the enfranchisement of women" who "saved the day and won the victory for women," at an 1851 suffrage convention. Harriet Tubman had taken up the cause of women's suffrage, allied with the Empire State Federation of Colored Women's Clubs to whom she sent a last message before her death: "Tell the women to stick together. God is fighting for them and all will be well!" Journalist Mary Ann Shadd Cary toured with white antislavery lecturers who also spoke on women's rights, including Abby Kelley, Lucretia Mott, and Lucy Stone. Cary's commitment sustained itself through the 1880s, when she joined the National Woman's Suffrage Association. Sarah J. S. Garnet was the woman behind Brooklyn's Equal Suffrage Club and Superintendent of the NACW's suffrage department. Eliza Ann Gardner helped found Boston's Woman's Era Club and championed women's rights in the AME Zion Church. Amanda Berry Smith preached in pulpits across the globe and "wherever she went there always sprang up an eager discussion on the subject of women's right to preach." Laura A. Brown was, during the administration of President Warren Harding, appointed a member of the executive board of the Republican Women's Committee of Allegheny County in Pennsylvania, and in 1922 she ran for the state legislature, perhaps, Brown suggested, the first black woman in the United States to do so.

Hallie Quinn Brown was a suffragist. She was simultaneously an educator, church worker, temperance advocate, and club movement leader. She was a Republican party activist and she was a writer. Homespun Heroines may not have rivaled in page count the six-volume History of Woman Suffrage, begun by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage in the 1880s. But it was no less an effort to chronicle the history of women's activism and then mobilize that history for political ends. As the celebration in 1920 of the Nineteenth Amendment faded, Brown and the women of the NACW were left with serious work in front of them. Jim Crow still kept too many of their sisters away from the polls, and untruths wrought of racism and sexism sustained their disenfranchisement. The way forward was fraught-with competition in black politics from an increasingly influential NAACP, and with indifference on the part of women's suffrage organizations like the National Women's Party. The NACW would be hampered internally by an elite politics of respectability that kept it distant from black women of the working class. Other black women activists would take an internationalist view of politics, rejecting the vote and parties as too tainted by racism to take them forward. Still, Brown's book endured, aiding those activists who followed her, and historians like me, to better understand and build upon that "great nation of women" of which she was a part.

* This article was updated on July 19, 2019, to say that it was not Frances Dana Gage but rather Matilda Joslyn Gage who began work, with coauthors Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, on History of Woman Suffrage.

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How Black Suffragists Fought for the Right to Vote and a Modicum of Respect

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Read her remarks from 1889 and you might believe she saw the future or at least had the capacity to call it into being: "I believe there are as great possibilities in women as there are in men. . . . We are marching onward grandly. . . .

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Picturing America: Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother" | NEH-Edsitement

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Dorothea Lange was a photographer working for the Resettlement Administration (later the Farm Security Administration), documenting the hardships faced by farmers during the Great Depression, when she took what has become one of the most iconic images of the period-indeed, of American history. Less well-known than Lange's name, or the photograph of her, is the name of the woman in it: Florence Owens Thompson, a Cherokee woman active in labor struggles in the 1930s.

Watch the video (5 minutes) from Picturing America.
Access the Picturing America lesson plan.

Classroom Connections
Comprehension Questions

What was the role of photographers for the Farm Security Administration?

How do the different perspectives affect the emotional power of the photographs? What do you find most compelling about each image? (You can view the series of images from the Library of Congress.)

How did people respond to the publication of the images?

How has the image been reused over the years?

Discussion Questions
It is likely that students have seen this photograph and can associate it with the Great Depression. It is less likely that they know the history of the image itself, thus opening space for a discussion of the circumstances in which the image was produced, the role of images in both supporting and limiting historical memory, and the politics of representation.

What events, emotions, and ideas does this image evoke for you?

Read more about the image and Florence Owens Thompson's response from the Library of Congress.
Why was Thompson upset by the publication of the image?

While the publication of the image did result in an influx of aid to the migrant workers where the image was taken, Thompson's family had moved on by then and did not benefit from the response to her photograph.

How do you think the anonymity of the woman in the photo-which lasted for many years-affected its reception?

What ethical issues are at stake in the taking, publishing, and viewing of photographs?

Think of another photograph that has become an iconic representation of an event or period. What do you immediately associate with this image? Conduct some research to see who created the image, in what context, and for what purpose. How does what you have learned affect how you now see the image.

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Picturing America: Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother"

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Dorothea Lange was a photographer working for the Resettlement Administration (later the Farm Security Administration), documenting the hardships faced by farmers during the Great Depression, when she took what has become one of the most iconic images of the period-indeed, of American history.

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BackStory: Making the Team: Sports and Equality in American History | NEH-Edsitement

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This episode of BackStory entitled " Making the Team: Sports and Equality in American History" recounts important moments in the history of sports and they ways they have intersected with fights for equality both on and off the playing field. While the struggles for equality for women athletes and athletes of color have been more visible, less familiar may be the history of sports and decolonization, captured by the idea of "sports sovereignty."

A full transcript of this episode can be found on the BackStory website.

Comprehension Questions

Why was the American Physical Education Association opposed to women's participation in track and field events?

What was the role of international cooperation in creating a place for women athletes to compete at a higher level?

What was the APEA's response to the successes of Lucile Godbold and the other U.S. women in Paris?

EDSITEment Resources

Independence through Sport?

Comprehension Questions

What is "sports sovereignty"? In what historical moment did it emerge as a practice?

What tensions emerged surrounding sports sovereignty at the 1966 Central American and Caribbean Games?

According to Antonio Sotomayor, how has sports sovereignty been successful in reproducing the colonial relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico?

EDSITEment Resources

Comprehension Questions

Tommy Smith and John Carlos's Black Power salute is one of the better-known and most visible protest symbols at the 1968 Olympics. What other symbols did these men incorporate into this moment?

How did U.S. spectators and the U.S. Olympic Committee respond to the protest?

What are some of the other political aspects of the Olympics? Why are some forms of politics more accepted than others in the context of the Olympic Games?

EDSITEment Resources

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BackStory: Making the Team: Sports and Equality in American History

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In this episode of BackStory, learn about the history of sports in the United States, and how a fight to win on the field, court, or track is often embedded in a fight for equality.

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BackStory: Hidden Figures - The People Behind the Story You Know | NEH-Edsitement

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This episode of NEH-funded BackStory-" Hidden Figures: The People Behind the Story You Know"-features an interview with Margot Lee Shetterly, the author of the book on which the movie Hidden Figures is based. Shetterly's book, and the movie, recount the lives and work of the African American women who worked for NASA and played critical roles in the U.S. space program despite facing constant racism.

A full transcript of this episode can be found at the BackStory website.
Comprehension Questions

What is the familiar story of the space program? Who are the familiar characters?

What did the work of human computers look like? Why was it so important for the space program?

Who was A. Phillip Randolph?

What kinds of segregation and discrimination existed at Langley? How did the African American women fight segregation in the workplace?

How did growing up in Hampton, Virginia, and living as neighbors with these exceptional women affect Shetterley's own life?

About BackStory
Founded in 2008, BackStory is a weekly podcast that explores the historical roots of current events. Hosted by a team of historians of the United States, the show features interviews with other scholars and public historians, seeking to bring U.S. history to life. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in the show do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Learn more at the BackStory website.

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BackStory: Hidden Figures - The People Behind the Story You Know

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This episode of NEH-funded BackStory-" Hidden Figures: The People Behind the Story You Know"-features an interview with Margot Lee Shetterly, the author of the book on which the movie Hidden Figures is based. Shetterly's book, and the movie, recount the lives and work of the African American women who worked for NASA and played critical roles in the U.S.

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BackStory: Women at Work | NEH-Edsitement

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This episode of NEH-funded BackStory-" Women at Work: A History"-includes several segments. Explore the lives of nineteenth century domestic workers, myths related to "Rosie the Riveter" during WWII, and changes and challenges in the twenty-first century. Each segment below includes analysis questions and prompts to draw connections to contemporary and historical issues.

A full transcript of this episode can be found at the BackStory website.

Comprehension Questions

Why does Betty Soskin refuse to be called a "Rosie"?

Who was hired to work on the homefront during WWII?

What does Betty mean when she says "...what gets remembered is determined by who's in the room doing the remembering"?

What changed for women of color as a result of WWII?

Comprehension Questions

What was work "inside" the home like at various points in history?

How did women come to work outside of the home?

What are some of the myths that have been constructed regarding women in the workplace across U.S. history?

Comprehension Questions

What is sexual harassment?

What were the causes and outcomes of the Dane v. Wyckoff case of 1858?

To what extent are the issues raised in this segment relevant to issues in the workplace today?

Comprehension Questions

Why were protective legislation protections deemed necessary?

What did the courts think about the movement to establish protective legislation for women?

How are labor rights and civil rights connected?

How do the issues raised at the start of the twentieth century compare to rights and protections for women in the workplace today?

Comprehension Questions

How did the movement of women to work outside of the home impact families and social norms?

To what extent did changes in employment for women impact the power and authority of men?

How do issues raised about the changing nature of the family then compare to now?

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This episode of NEH-funded BackStory-" Women at Work: A History"-includes several segments. Explore the lives of nineteenth century domestic workers, myths related to "Rosie the Riveter" during WWII, and changes and challenges in the twenty-first century. Each segment below includes analysis questions and prompts to draw connections to contemporary and historical issues.

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BackStory: Shattering the Glass Ceiling | NEH-Edsitement

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This episode of the NEH-funded BackStory-" Shattering the Glass Ceiling"-features a compilation of stories about women in U.S. history. Highlights include a feature on Senator Margaret Chase Smith (R-Maine) who ran for President in 1964, examination of the anti-lynching journalism and advocacy of Ida B. Wells, and an interview with Labor rights lawyer and former switchboard operator Gabrielle "Gay" Semel on the experiences of women in the workplace and their efforts to end discriminatory hiring practices.

A full transcript of this episode can be found at the BackStory website.

A Woman in the White House (00:00-09:30)

Comprehension Questions

Why did Senator Margaret Chase Smith think she could become the first woman to be nominated for the Presidency of the United States?

What do the questions asked by the reporters reveal about what people thought about her campaign?

Based on independent research, what did Senator Chase Smith support? What was she opposed to?

The story concludes with the question: "Will we see a woman elected President of the United States during our lifetime?" Do you think this will happen?

Comprehension Questions

What issues did women encounter when interviewing and working at New York Telephone in the 1970s?

How do issues described by Gabrielle Semel compare to those experienced by "Hello Girls" at the turn of the twentieth century?

To what extent do the issues discussed by Semel compare to women and the workplace today?

To what extent have women shattered glass ceilings in sports, careers, politics, entertainment, and other aspects of life?

Reports of Strange Fruit (16:27-36:50)

Comprehension Questions

Who was Ida B. Wells and why was her experience on the train a turning point in her life?

What changes did journalism and the newspaper business experience at the start of the twentieth century?

How did the Black Press differ from mainstream press and newspapers at the time? (See "Diverse Perspectives and Chronicling America" at our Teacher's Guide)

To what extent did Ida B. Wells change politics and the public discourse around race and lynching in the United States?

What is the lasting legacy of Ida B. Wells?

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This episode of the NEH-funded BackStory-" Shattering the Glass Ceiling"-features a compilation of stories about women in U.S. history. Highlights include a feature on Senator Margaret Chase Smith (R-Maine) who ran for President in 1964, examination of the anti-lynching journalism and advocacy of Ida B.

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It's Way Too Hard to Find Statues of Notable Women in the U.S. | Smart News| Smithsonian Magazine

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Only a handful of the country's sculptures honor women

smithsonianmag.com

When you walk the streets of cities like New York and Washington, D.C., it's hard to miss the sculptures that mark the parks and neighborhoods. Historic figures often can be seen standing erect or sitting astride on their horses, stoically striking a poise. More often than not, these statues have another thing in common: their gender. The majority of public statues in the United States are of men.

Of the estimated 5,193 public statues depicting historic figures on display on street corners and parks throughout the United States, only 394 of these monuments are of women, the Washington Post's Cari Shane wrote in 2011. Compounding this number, none of the 44 memorials maintained by the National Parks Service, like the Lincoln Memorial or the Thomas Jefferson Memorial, specifically focus on women.

A group called Where Are The Women? is looking to change this ratio. Recently, it successfully campaigned to have statues of women's rights pioneers Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton installed in Central Park (which, notoriously, had no statues of non-fictional women on its grounds) and is now raising funds to build the suffragettes.

The lack of women's representation is problematic because leaving their narratives out from public art takes away from the significant roles that women have played in history. As Shane writes:

U.S. history is not just the record of the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, as told through the stories of their ranking officers. But that's largely what it looks like in Washington, D.C., where military equestrian statues occupy virtually every circle and square in the L'Enfant Plan. They're inoffensive, but these public spaces are wasted on statues that over-tell one story to a people who have long grown oblivious to hearing it.

Currently, few of the statues that do show women on city streets around the country are modeled on historic figues, Kriston Capps writes for CityLab. Instead, women often appear as archetypes, symbols of abstract concepts or as nameless figures in a memorial.

While one campaign isn't enough to solve persistent issues of gender discrimination and inequality in the U.S., by pressing to honor real women from history, cities around the country can restore them to a story that has ignored them for so long. After all, as it stands now, there remains only five public statues of historic women in New York City: Joan of Arc, Golda Meir, Gertrude Stein, Eleanor Roosevelt and Harriet Tubman.

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It's Way Too Hard to Find Statues of Notable Women in the U.S.

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smithsonianmag.com When you walk the streets of cities like New York and Washington, D.C., it's hard to miss the sculptures that mark the parks and neighborhoods. Historic figures often can be seen standing erect or sitting astride on their horses, stoically striking a poise.

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Kate Chopin’s The Awakening | NEH-Edsitement

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In this curriculum unit, students will explore how Chopin stages the possible roles for women in Edna's time and culture through the examples of other characters in the novella.

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-paper” & the “New Woman” | NEH-Edsitement

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-paper" & the "New Woman"

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story "The Yellow Wall-paper" was written during a time of change. This lesson plan, the first part of a two-part lesson, helps to set the historical, social, cultural, and economic context of Gilman's story.

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Esperanza Rising: Learning Not to Be Afraid to Start Over | NEH-Edsitement

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Esperanza Rising: Learning Not to Be Afraid to Start Over

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In this lesson, students will look behind the story at the historical, social, and cultural circumstances that shape the narrative throughout Esperanza Rising. The lesson also invites students to contemplate some of the changes Esperanza undergoes as she grows into a responsible young woman and the…

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Women and Revolution: In the Time of the Butterflies | NEH-Edsitement

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Women and Revolution: In the Time of the Butterflies

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Set in the Dominican Republic during the rule of Rafael Trujillo, In the Time of the Butterflies fictionalizes historical figures in order to dramatize the Dominican people's heroic efforts to overthrow this dictator's brutal regime. In the following activities, students will examine the actions of the characters in the novel and discuss an all encompassing definition for courage.

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“Remember” by Joy Harjo | NEH-Edsitement

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Activity 1. Listening to a Native American Song from the Western Shoshone Tribe

Objective: Students will learn to listen closely and notice aspects of a song when they cannot understand the words.

To introduce your students to the rhythm and sound of a Native American song, ask them to listen to the PBS audio recording of Corbin Harney of the Western Shoshone tribe singing "Water Song." This song is in Harney's native language.

As they listen, ask them to write down what they hear, e.g., a drum, repeating sounds, or rhythms. Have them listen to the song a second time and again write down what they hear. [Note to teacher: In the audio, Harney explains the song before he sings it. Please, do not play the explanation before your students hear the song, itself. You will play it for them later. On the recording the drumming and singing start at 1:30 and continue through 4:20 (when the narration resumes.)]

Activity 2: Sharing What You Hear in "Water Song"

Objectives: Students will synthesize information to come to a conclusion.

Ask your students to get in small groups where they will share what they heard in "Water Song." Each group should come up with an agreed upon list of what they heard in the song, including how it was structured, as well as the sounds and rhythms. Ask them to assign one person to represent the group's findings in a larger discussion.

Ask each appointed group representative to contribute her group's findings to the whole class. Write these findings on the board in the front of the room. What items appear most often on the board? Circle those items, and create a separate list of the ones mentioned most often. What might this list tell us about some of the characteristics of a Western Shoshone song?

Conduct a whole-class discussion of what your students can learn about this Western Shoshone song, even though they don't understand the words.

After this discussion, play Corbin Harney's introduction to the song. [Note to teacher: Harney's narration opens the recording and continues through 1:30 (where the drumming and singing comes in through 4:20.) The narration picks up again at 4:21. ]

Ask your students: What more can you learn about the song from Corbin Harney's explanation?

Activity 3. Reading the Poem "Remember"

Objective: Students will complete a close reading of "Remember" by Joy Harjo, paying attention to its poetic structure.

Project in the front of the classroom the poem "Remember." Ask your students to read the poem silently. As they read, they should write down phrases, images, and words that jump out at them. This includes words and phrases they might not know. Prompt your students to notice how Joy Harjo structures her lines.

Ask two students to read the poem, one after the other, out loud to the class. Tell them that the way the words are placed on the page and which words are repeated should influence the emphasis they place on words and phrases when they are reading the poem out loud. The listening students should add what they hear from the oral readings to their list of what they noticed when they silently read the poem.

Vocabulary: Have your students keep a running list on the front board of the words they have read and heard that they do not understand (not counting the Western Shoshone words to "Water Song" unless you, one of your students, or someone in your community understands the language). You can either conduct a separate vocabulary lesson on these words where students try to figure out their meaning from context and connections or review the vocabulary as you progress through the other activities.

Activity 4. Watching Joy Harjo Read "Remember"

Objective: Students will notice the difference between experiencing a poem on a page and experiencing a poet reading her poem.

Tell your students that while they are viewing the video of Joy Harjo reading her poem, they are to record on paper what they notice in the poem that is new and different for them. What do they notice about the way Joy Harjo reads the poem? How do her voice and her facial expression reflect the poem and add to it?

Show the video of Joy Harjo reading her poem.

Activity 5. Small-Group Work with "Remember"

Objective: Students will work collaboratively to synthesize findings to compare and contrast the poems.

Ask your students to get back in their small groups to share what they have noticed. They should synthesize their findings into one list and choose another person from the group to share this list with the whole class.

In addition, while they are in their groups, ask them to think about how the class synthesis of characteristics from "Water Song" might relate to what they noticed in the poem "Remember." How does the position of the words on the page influence the rhythm of the way the poem is read?

Activity 6. Gleaning Meaning from Poetic Structure and Content with "Remember"

Objective: Students will create a shared meaning of the poem by synthesizing what they have noticed.

Hold a whole-class discussion. Start by having the representatives from each small group (Activity 2) share their group lists, recording the lists on the front board.

In the discussion, move from talking about the details that were noticed to what those details might mean in the poem. Make sure your students address the structure of the poem, as well as its content. They should look for how the words are placed on the page, as well as metaphoric language.

As with the Western Shoshone song, ask your students about which details are mentioned most often and circle them on the board. Create a list of the most commonly mentioned details. Students can use examples from the list of details on the board as evidence to support their thoughts about the poem's meaning.

Ask your students how the structure of the poem is similar to, or different from, the structure of "Water Song." What have they learned about the rhythm of the two pieces? Although Joy Harjo and Corbin Harney come from different tribes, what seems to be similar about their worldview? As always, ask your students to provide details from the poem and the song to support their answers.

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This lesson plan is the ninth in the "Incredible Bridges: Poets Creating Community" series. It provides a video recording of the poet, Joy Harjo, reading the poem "Remember." The companion lesson contains a sequence of activities for use with secondary students before, during, and after reading to help them enter and experience the poem.

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Toni Morrison's Beloved: For Sixty Million and More | NEH-Edsitement

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Toni Morrison’s Beloved: For Sixty Million and More

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One of the most compelling novels of the twentieth century, Beloved by Toni Morrison has been read in classrooms across the country since its publication in 1987. The novel follows Sethe’s escape to freedom, the murder of her child, and her difficult psychological journey as she copes with her past…

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Introducing Jane Eyre: An Unlikely Victorian Heroine | NEH-Edsitement

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Introducing Jane Eyre: An Unlikely Victorian Heroine

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Through their interpretation of primary documents that reflect Victorian ideals, students can learn the cultural expectations for and limitations placed on Victorian women and then contemplate the writer Charlotte Brontë’s position in that context. Then, through an examination of the opening chapter…

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Sor Juana the Nun and Writer: Las Redondillas and The Reply | NEH-Edsitement

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The Reply was written in response to attacks against her by a supposed friend, the Bishop of Puebla, Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz, using "Sor Filotea de la Cruz" as a pseudonym. In it, Sor Juana defends her right to intellectual freedom as a woman and as a nun while affirming her dedication to her literary duties. This lesson plan will help students study both Las redondillas, an arraignment of men for what Sor Juana believed was hypocritical behavior,as well as her autobiographical Reply to the Very Illustrious Sor Philotea de la Cruz. These two documents will help them to understand why Sor Juana has been called the first feminist of the New World.

For the first portion of this lesson plan, read thoroughly and study the Redondillas and the selected segments of La Respuesta included in this lesson. The Redondillas, or the Philosophical Satire, can be accessed through the EDSITEment-reviewed site, LitGloss.

La Respuesta or The Reply is available through the Proyecto Ensayo Hispánico website. For general vocabulary for this lesson plan, you can access general glossaries, available in both Spanish and English, through EDSITEment.

(Click here for the Spanish version of this lesson plan.)

Ensure that students know that a redondilla is a word derived from the word "redondo," or round in Spanish. In poetry, it is a series of stanzas (estrofas) that consist of cuartetas octosílabas (versos de arte menor, eight syllables) with the rhyme scheme abba, also called rima abrazada. (Worksheets for Activity 1 and 2 will guide students to analyze first the form of Sor Juana's redondillas to then analyze the content and meaning, including the gender questions the poet raises in this work.). For basic poetic terminology, you and the students can access the Glossary of Poetic Terms available through EDSITEment.

Ensure that students are able to identify literary resources within the redondillas. Some of the most memorable quatrains in Sor Juana's redondillas use the repetition of a grammatical structure in reverse order known as a chiasmus (el quiasmo). The definition and examples are available in the Glossary of Poetic Terms available through EDSITEment, or through the EDSITEment-reviewed site, Silva Rhetoricae, from Brigham Young University. (The worksheet for Activity 1 will provide students with the opportunity to point out any chiasmus and other literary devices they find in the redondillas on their worksheets.)

The following part of this lesson plan (Activity 3) will study a groundbreaking document, La Respuesta a la muy ilustre Sor Filotea de la Cruz (La Respuesta or The Reply), available through EDSITEment, which students can also use. The complete Respuesta can be accessed through the website of the Proyecto Ensayo Hispánico. Discuss with the students the passages you select for study.

La Respuesta a la muy ilustre Sor Filotea de la Cruz (La Respuesta or The Reply)is the autobiographical letter in which Sor Juana defends her rights as a woman and as a nun to intellectual freedom and literary pursuits. Give a solid historical background for this part of the lesson so that students understand the significance and the tone of the letter. Biographical information on Sor Juana can be found through the EDSITEment-created timeline of the life of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. More information can also be found through the EDSITEment-reviewed site LANIC (Latin American Network Information Center) featured site, the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Portal, from the Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes. Students will work with a worksheet for this portion of the lesson to analyze one or two fragments of this letter.

Activity 1. Las Redondillas: Let's Analyze!

In this activity, you will analyze the internal structure of of Las Redondillas, available through EDSITEment, using the EDSITEment-created worksheet. You can also access Las Redondillas, here titled Sátira Filosófica, on LitGloss. As you complete the worksheet, you will count and record the syllables in each verse, as well as look for literary devices such as similes, metaphors, and chiasmus. The Glosario poético básico will be helpful here. You should also note any unfamiliar words so that you can look them up. This activity will prepare you for Activity 2, where you will analyze Las Redondillas in greater detail.

Activity 2. Las Redondillas: Misguided Men, Let's write!

In this activity, you will analyze the content and message of Las Redondillas. The worksheet for this activity is divided into two parts. In the first part, you will describe the characteristics of Las Redondillas, while in the second part you will analyze the content and message of this work through two essays. For the final question on the worksheet, use the Gender Worksheet to analyze the use of gender in this work before returning to the main worksheet to discuss the treatment of gender and gender stereotypes in Las Redondillas.

Activity 3. The Reply to the Very Illustrious Sor Philotea de la Cruz: Answer to a Traitor

In this activity, you will study one or two fragments from La Respuesta a la muy Ilustre Sor Filotea de la Cruz, an autobiographical letter in which Sor Juana defends her rights as a woman and nun to intellectual freedom and literary pursuits. It is important to understand the historical background of this letter, so begin by reviewing the timeline of Sor Juana's life, as well as the biographical information found on the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Portal from the Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes. Then, select one or two fragments from the EDSITEment-created worksheet. Think about the circumstances surrounding Sor Juana's life when she wrote this letter, and what the fragment or fragments are communicating. Write an essay analyzing your selected fragment(s), being sure to address the following questions:

To whom is the letter really being directed?

How would you characterize Sor Juana's tone and attitude?

Is the letter effective in communicating the author's attitude and feelings?

How might this text support the title some have given to Sor Juana as the New World's first feminist writer?

Now that you have learned more about the historical context in which Sor Juana lived, create your own timeline of her life. Use the EDSITEment-created timeline as reference, but be sure to conduct your own research an include additional events in her life or in New Spain that involved or affected her. Create a parallel timeline to illustrate the global context, including events from around the world.

By reading and analyzing Las Redondillas and Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz, you have become familiar with the last years of Sor Juana's life, as well as her writing from this period. Imagine that you face the modern-day equivalent of Sor Juana's final years: life without books, television, internet, computers, or cellphones. Using the EDSITEment-created worksheet for this activity, write a one-page essay, in the form of a journal entry or letter to those with authority over you, expressing the injustices you face. Be sure to use correct verb moods and tenses throughout the essay, including the subjunctive.

You may find it useful to consult the timeline of Sor Juana's life and LANIC (Latin American Network Information Center) with its featured site, the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Portal from the Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes.
(Click here for the Spanish version of this lesson plan.)

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Sor Juana the Nun and Writer: Las Redondillas and The Reply

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Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the first great Latin American poet, is still considered one of the most important literary figures of the American Hemisphere, and one of the first feminist writers. In the 1600s, she defended her right to be an intellectual, suggesting that women should be educated and educators and accusing men of being the cause of the very ills they blamed on women.

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Maya Angelou: A Phenomenal Woman | NEH-Edsitement

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"There is no greater agony
than bearing an untold story inside you."

-Maya Angelou

Poet. Orator. Actress. Activist. Professor. Writer. Singer. Phenomenal Woman. These and many more superlatives were used to describe the incomparable Maya Angelou. Gone too soon in 2014 at the age of 86, Dr. Angelou's legacy lives on through the words she used to eloquently, powerfully, and honestly express emotions, capture experiences, and spread hope. Some of Dr. Angelou's works, along with commentary and other classroom ready materials, are provided below.

"You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise."

"Phenomenal Woman" (1978)

"I know what the caged bird feels, alas!
When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;
When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,
And the river flows like a stream of glass;
When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,
And the faint perfume from its chalice steals -
I know what the caged bird feels!"

"His Day is Done" (2013)"Abundant Hope" (2011)"A Plagued Journey" (1983)"Woman Work" (1978)"Harlem Hopscotch" (1971)"The Mothering Blackness" (1971)

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Poet. Orator. Actress. Activist. Writer. Singer. Phenomenal Woman. These and many more superlatives are used to describe the incomparable Maya Angelou. Gone too soon in 2014 at the age of 86, Dr. Angelou's legacy will live on through the words she used to eloquently, powerfully, and honestly express emotions, capture experiences, and spread hope.

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Folklore in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God | NEH-Edsitement

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Folklore in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God

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Learn how writer Zora Neale Hurston incorporated and transformed black folklife in her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. By exploring Hurston's own life history and collection methods, listening to her WPA recordings of folksongs and folktales, and comparing transcribed folk narrative texts with the plot and themes of the novel, students will learn about the crucial role of oral folklore in Hurston's written work.

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The Letters and Poems of Emily Dickinson | NEH-Edsitement

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The Letters and Poems of Emily Dickinson

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Long perceived as a recluse who wrote purely in isolation, Emily Dickinson in reality maintained many dynamic correspondences throughout her lifetime and specifically sought out dialogues on her poetry. These correspondences-both professional and private-reveal a poet keenly aware of the interdependent relationship between poet and reader.

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Maya Angelou Recites 'Heritage' -1968 | KQED

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Maya Angelou Recites 'Heritage' -1968 | KQED

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History of Women's History Month Video- NWHM

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History of Women's History Month Video- NWHM

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Women’s History in the United States | NEH-Edsitement

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How have debates over women's rights shaped U.S. politics and culture?

What role does media play in the ongoing debate over gender roles?

Who's missing from the popular stories included within women's history?

How have major events in U.S. history transformed the status and rights of women in society?

How have women contributed to U.S. cultural institutions and practices?

The above video from the National Women's History Museum provides an overview of how International Women's Day became a week and then an entire month in the United States.

The movement to expand the franchise to women built momentum during the 19th century, achieved part of its goal with the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, and continues to press on to ensure protection of voting rights for all. This section provides compelling questions for teaching about the long road to women's suffrage rights and activity ideas for teaching about this topic across U.S. history. A collection of lesson plans can be found at the bottom of the page.

Compelling Questions

To what extent did the strategies of the Suffrage Movement change between Seneca Falls (1848) and ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920?

Who did the Suffragettes represent?

Why was there resistance to granting women the right to vote?

To what extent was passage of the 19th Amendment a turning point in U.S. history?

Why were the Suffragettes finally successful in achieving the right to vote?

How have women participated in elections since 1920?

To what extent do issues raised by 19th and 20th century Suffragettes remain?

Student Activities

In the interest of fostering inquiry-based teaching and learning that utilizes primary source materials and offers students space for creative application, consider the following strategies when engaging students in research on the 19th Amendment and women's history across your curriculum:

Construct a digital timeline that centers on women's writings, speeches, publications, artistic creations, and performances to avoid limiting discussion to an era or topic of study. Combined with storyboard software, students can record voice overs and use images to construct a response to a compelling question while addressing change over time analysis.

Create a digital or hard copy commonplace book when reading biographies, literature, poetry, reviewing art, films, or other multimedia produced by women across U.S. history. From time to time students can be asked to synthesize what they record around themes, concepts, topics of study, and the inquiry questions they have designed.

Use digital mapping software in combination with EDSITEment's Chronicling America to plot stories and connections within and across time and place on topics chosen by students (i.e. Suffragette meetings, women's organizations, education, sports, fashion, entertainment, the travels of characters in a novel or short story, historic homes, etc.).

Create a short documentary film using storyboard software and primary sources, including audio-visual resources, on a theme or concept that spans beyond a single unit or era.

Women in Literature and the Arts

This section is dedicated to authors, poets, playwrights, and other literary icons. Lesson plans, resources, videos of readings and performances, and other materials are included.

Folklore in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God: In tribute to Hurston's fusion of social science and authorial craft, this lesson plan focuses on the way Hurston incorporates, adapts, transforms, and comments on black folklife in Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Maya Angelou: Phenomenal Woman: Our Teacher's Guide provides some of Dr. Angelou's works, along with commentary and other classroom ready materials o this great American poet, orator, actress, activist, professor, writer, and singer.

The Letters and Poems of Emily Dickinson: In this curriculum unit, students will explore Dickinson's poetry as well as her letters to Higginson and her sister-in-law Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson.

Sor Juana the Nun and Writer: Las Redondillas and The Reply: This lesson (also available in Spanish) looks at the life and literary contributions of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the first great Latin American poet, who is considered to be one of the most important literary figures of the American Hemisphere, and one of the first feminist writers.

Introducing Jane Eyre: An Unlikely Victorian Heroine: Contemplating Brontë's position and desire for literary achievement in that context, students will compare Jane Eyre to other literary heroines and discuss her social class in relation to other characters.

Toni Morrison's Beloved: For Sixty Million and More: The close reading and reflective activities included in this lesson are intended to guide thoughtful inquiry into the novel and its major themes, while also providing teachers and students with creative outlets for making connections with one of the great novels of the twentieth century.

"Remember" by Joy Harjo: In her poem "Remember," Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation, reminds us to pay attention to who we are and how we're connected to the world around us.

"A Raisin in the Sun": Whose American Dream?: This interdisciplinary lesson includes a critical reading and analysis of Lorraine Hansberry's play, along with close examination of biographical and historical documents produced at different times during the long civil rights movement.

Women and the Revolution: In the Time of the Butterflies: In this lesson, students undertake a careful analysis of the main characters to see how each individually demonstrates courage in the course of her family's turbulent life events.

Esperanza Rising: Learning Not to Be Afraid to Start Over: In this lesson (also available in Spanish), students will look behind the story at the historical, social, and cultural circumstances that shape the narrative throughout Esperanza Rising.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-paper" & the "New Woman": With this lesson plan, the first part of a two-part lesson, students will examine primary source documents to gain an understanding of the roles of American middle-class women in the mid- to late-1800s.

Kate Chopin's The Awakening: In this curriculum unit, students will explore how Chopin stages the possible roles for women in Edna's time and culture through the examples of other characters in the novella.

Women, Landmarks, and History

The nation's commemorative landscape is ladened with over 5,000 public statues honoring historic figures and their accomplishments. However, recent estimates suggest that fewer than 400 of these public works of art recognize women from lived history. This disparity is evident in major cities such as Washington, D.C. and New York City. In Washington, D.C. there are only seven public statues, outside of the National Statuary Hall Collection, honoring specific women from history: Joan of Arc, Queen Isabella I of Castille, Olive Risley Seward, Mary McLeod Bethune, Jane A. Delano, Crown Princess Märtha of Sweden, and Eleanor Roosevelt. Until the addition of the Women's Rights Pioneers Monument on August 26, 2020, New York City had only five statues of female historical figures: Joan of Arc, Golda Meir, Gertrude Stein, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Harriet Tubman.

Many of the memorials and monuments erected during the 19th and 20th century that include women depict them as nameless fictional, mythical or emblematic figures and use them as a vehicle to honor a man, abstract idea, or historical theme. The representations of women solely in an artistic and often objectified nature removes them from contemporary conversations about the past. Commemorative sites continue to influence and shape our perception of history and the absence of public statues dedicated to female historic figures promulgates a narrow historical narrative that elevates the experiences and accomplishments of white men. Our Landmarks of American History and Culture Teacher's Guide includes more information on the power of commemorative spaces.

Compelling Questions

What emotions do statues of a historical figure evoke for you?

To what extent does representation in the form of public art matter?

What are the long-term consequences of the gender disparity in public statues?

Are there any public statues dedicated to female historical figures women in your community?

What historical or contemporary women should be honored with a public statue and why?

How can a public statue be used to address contemporary issues?

A few examples of memorials, monuments, or statues dedicated to historic women include:

Using EDSITEment's Investigating Local History Teacher's Guide and the links above, students can make connections between the accomplishments of women at the national level with local history. Additionally, using the above questions and those they design on their own, students can investigate who has been honored with monuments and memorials in their town, city, and state, while also considering who has not and why, perhaps, others should be similarly honored.

Media Resources for Women's History

This collection of NEH-funded media projects includes podcasts, films, and databases for researching and learning about Women's history in the United States.

This episode of Hidden Figures: The People Behind the Story You Know: BackStory features an interview with Margot Lee Shetterly, the author of the book on which the movie Hidden Figures is based. Shetterly's book, and the movie, recount the lives and work of the African American women who worked for NASA and played critical roles in the U.S. space program despite facing constant racism.

Picturing America: Cassatt and Sargent: This video from the Picturing America project includes discussion of Mary Cassatt, an artist noted for her paintings of mothers and children that echo traditional Madonna and child paintings but with a new, feminist edge.

Picturing America: Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother": This Picturing America video focuses on the famous picture taken by Dorothea Lange, as well as the less well-known woman in it: Florence Owens Thompson, a Cherokee woman active in labor struggles in the 1930s.

NEH Connections & Related Resources

Women in World History: This collection of primary sources created by the Center for History and New Media opens students to the roles women have played in the world across time.

"How Black Suffragists Fought for the Right to Vote and a Modicum of Respect: Hallie Quinn Brown and Other "Homespun Heroines"" by Martha S. Jones, HUMANITIES, Summer 2019, Volume 40, Number 3.

"Winning the Vote: A divided movement brought about the Nineteenth Amendment" by Lisa Tetrault, HUMANITIES, Summer 2019, Volume 40, Number 3.

"The Forgotten Suffragists: How the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment is being remembered and how, for decades, it was not" by Kimberly A. Hamlin, May 31, 2019.

" Old Friends Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony Made History Together: In their last days, the suffragist pioneers look back" by Katy June-Friesen, HUMANITIES, July/August 2014, Volume 35, Number 4.

Additional Resources

The Library of Congress provides access to a Women's History Month site that includes a collection of resources created by the LOC, NEH, National Archive and Records Administration, the National Gallery of Art, the National Park Service, the Smithsonian Institution, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The Library of Congress also provides access to Shall Not Be Denied, a digital exhibit on the suffrage movement.

Monumental Women provides a collection of biographies on suffragists and templates for students to create their own statues of historic women.

The National Park Service provides a variety of digital resources, articles, videos, and lesson plans about the suffrage movement.

The National Women's History Museum provides access to digital classroom resources, biographies, oral histories, and articles about women in American history.

The New York Historical Society offers a collection of ten units, organized thematically and chronologically, that explore the lives and experiences of women throughout American history.

Unladylike 2020: This collection of 26 short films and a one-hour documentary, created by PBS American Masters with support from the NEH, highlights the lives of little-known women in American history.

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How have debates over women's rights shaped U.S. politics and culture? What role does media play in the ongoing debate over gender roles? Who's missing from the popular stories included within women's history? How have major events in U.S. history transformed the status and rights of women in society?