Jezebel: suffrage

Annie Get Your Gun

Sadie — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 12:45:00 EDT

As PBS' documentary Annie Oakley showed last night, the famed "Little Sure Shot" sharpshooter was a walking, heat-packing contradiction: an advocate of women's self-defense and equal pay, she also didn't believe in female suffrage. [PBS]

Be Counted

Sadie — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 17:40:00 EST

It's come to light that scores of Englishwomen risked prosecution by refusing to participate in a 1911 census, to protest their inability to vote. Wrote one suffragette, “No votes for women, no census.” [Times UK]

In 1920, the first year that all American...

Margaret — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 14:30:00 EDT

In 1920, the first year that all American women could vote for president, Irma Schmidt walked to her hometown fire station with her grandmother, mother, and aunt to vote for Warren G. Harding. Now 110 years old, Schmidt has voted in every presidential election since, and is believed to be the oldest registered voter in Connecticut. Schmidt is an unaffiliated voter, and has cast her ballot for Truman, Kennedy, Reagan, and Kerry in the past. "Voting was always something you looked forward to," she says. Staff members at the nursing home where she lives says she reads newspapers and talks about the news every day, but she wouldn't say if she's voting this year, or which candidate she prefers. [The Hartford Courant]

The Female Vote: It Was 89 Years Ago Today

Jessica — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 13:30:00 EDT

Whatever the outcome of the 2008 election, we can all still honor the fact that we are allowed to vote in the first place! On June 4th, 1919, Congress approved the women's suffrage amendment, and sent it to the states for ratification. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony had been working explicitly since 1869 to get the amendment passed, when they formed their National Woman Suffrage Association. The kernel of what would become the suffrage movement arguably started back in 1848, when Stanton and others held forth at the famed Seneca Falls convention. Stanton drafted eleven resolutions at Seneca Falls, the ninth of which, "held forth the radical assertion that it was the duty of women to secure for themselves the right to vote." In honor of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and all the other females (and feminist males!) who fought for the Nineteenth Amendment, I have posted the Distillers' song "Seneca Falls" after the jump. Nothing gets you quite in the proto-feminist honoring spirit like listening to an awesomely growly Brody Dalle sing, "Elizabeth Cady/ Forever reminding me/I don't steal the air I breathe."

[Image via TeachNet UK]

Congress Approves Nineteenth Amendment [Library of Congress]
Seneca Falls Convention [National Portrait Gallery]