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Southern Women and Lynching
Jessie Daniel Ames began her career in the suffrage and women’s rights movements in Texas. She was the treasurer of the Texas Equal Suffrage Association when Texas became the first southern state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment. She became disillusioned by the suffrage movement’s exclusion of black women. In 1922 Ames became director of women’s work for the Commission on Interracial Cooperation in Atlanta. In 1930 Ames founded the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, organizing against lynching in Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma and thoroughly repudiating the idea that lynching was a defense of southern white girls. -
Announcement: Three Important Lectures will be Given in London by Emma Goldman
A charismatic speaker, Emma Goldman was a powerful advocate for controversial causes including free speech, gender equality, defense of sexual minorities, union organization, and birth control. The Lisa Unger Baskin collection includes a significant number of letters, documents, and printed material related to Goldman’s life, publishing, and activism. -
[Ticket for a lecture by Emma Goldman at Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, Holborn, 1933]
A charismatic speaker, Emma Goldman was a powerful advocate for controversial causes including free speech, gender equality, defense of sexual minorities, union organization, and birth control. The Lisa Unger Baskin collection includes a significant number of letters, documents, and printed material related to Goldman’s life, publishing, and activism. -
[Tea cup and saucer, and bowl]
In 1889, reformer Jane Addams and bookbinder Ellen Gates Starr founded the Hull-House social settlement in an immigrant neighborhood in Chicago. Hull-House members provided English classes, art clubs, kindergarten, libraries, and activities for the neighborhood and worked for social reform. Hull-House Kilns was a commercial pottery associated with their art school. Many of the staff and potters were recent Mexican immigrants. The collection holds four tea cups with matching saucers and a small serving bowl. All are stamped “Hull House Kilns, Chicago.” The items are in the style of Myrtle Merritt French, one of the founders of the pottery. -
Inez Milholland Boissevain: Who Died for the Freedom of Women
Lawyer, journalist, socialist, reformer and activist Inez Milholland Boissevain became an icon and martyr for the suffrage movement. She had an electrifying public presence that could move crowds. In 1913, on the day before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, she mounted a white horse and led 8,000 marchers in a suffrage parade. By 1916, she had become one of the highest-profile leaders of the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage. While on a grueling speaking tour to twelve western states, she fell ill but refused to cancel her engagements. She collapsed at the podium in Los Angeles and died days later. -
Contraception (Birth Control) Its Theory, History and Practice
In 1905, at age twenty-five, Marie Stopes became the youngest Doctor of Science in Britain while pursuing her first career as a paleobotanist. She was also a life-long women’s rights activist. Her unhappy and unconsummated first marriage led her to write about sexuality and birth control. She met Margaret Sanger in 1915 during Sanger’s self-exile in London and the two discussed birth control extensively. It became her passion. She opened the Mothers Clinic in London with her second husband in 1921 and over time opened clinics in major cities across Great Britain. -
Annual Report for the Year 1923
Jane Edna Hunter founded the Working Girls Association in 1911, changing the name to the Phillis Wheatley Association in 1912. Her motivations were similar to Victoria Matthews’, as she sought to provide support and vocational training for single African American women migrating to Cleveland from the South. Her own negative experience as a black woman moving from South Carolina and attempting to find a safe place to set up residence and work as a nurse inspired her to open the Association. Hunter graduated from Cleveland Law School in 1925 and continued to serve as the Association’s Executive Director until 1947. -
Deportation, Its Meaning and Menace: Last Message to the People of America
Emma Goldman’s opposition to the draft during World War I led to her deportation in 1919, and she continued her fight in exile. She and her partner Alexander Berkman wrote Deportation while detained at the Ellis Island Deportation Station. In it, they decry the United States’ treatment of Russian Americans and immigrants now facing deportation, drawing parallels between these American policies and European despotism. -
Anarchism and Other Essays
First published in 1910 under anarchist Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth imprint, this collection of essays reveals the range of issues in which Goldman was active. It includes essays on suffrage, free love, the Modern School movement, political violence, and patriotism. -
Letter to Comrade [Thomas H. Keell]
Anarchist Emma Goldman worked as a nurse and midwife on the Lower East Side of New York in the 1890s. She became a mentor to Margaret Sanger and brought her into the fight against the Comstock Law of 1873. When Goldman was arrested in 1916, she managed to turn the trial into a national forum on birth control. In this letter, she criticizes Sanger for focusing on birth control as a single issue, rather than working on the larger political, social, and economic forces that led to its suppression. -
Vote Yes on the Woman Suffrage Amendment November 2
This large poster was printed to get out the vote for the suffrage referenda held in Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania on 2 November 1915. The posters were printed by the Empire State Campaign Committee and hung in New York City’s theaters. -
Family Limitation: [For Private Circulation]
Margaret Sanger’s socialism and feminism were born of her own experience. She noted in My Fight for Birth Control that, “Very early in my childhood I associated poverty, toil, unemployment, drunkenness, cruelty, quarreling, fighting, debts, jails with large families.” Sanger worked as a nurse in the New York City slums and began to challenge the federal laws that prohibited the distribution of birth control information. This copy of Family Limitation is one of one hundred thousand in the first edition. Sanger opened the first family-planning clinic in 1916. In 1952, she joined with other advocates for family planning and founded the International Planned Parenthood Federation. -
Letter to Lady Constance [Georgina Bulwer-Lytton]
Emmeline Pankhurst was arrested several times for her militant actions. She wrote this letter about the notorious Holloway Gaol, where she had been on hunger strike and was force-fed. The letter’s recipient, fellow suffragette Lady Constance Lytton, came from one of Britain’s leading families. She had sent Pankhurst a book. Pankhurst writes, “I was allowed to have a wardress with me all night for I was very weak & ill & I gave it to her to read. It was strange to watch her absorbed in reading as I lay on the floor wondering what would happen on the morrow.” -
The Suffragette
Christabel Pankhurst was the oldest daughter of Emmeline Pankhurst, the founder of the Women's Social and Political Union. In 1905, she and Annie Kenney carried out the WSPU’s first militant act when they were arrested for disrupting an election meeting. Under the direction of the Pankhursts, WSPU’s tactics became increasingly militant and violent. The Pethick-Lawrences opposed this escalation, and the Pankhursts forced them out. Christabel took over as editor of Votes for Women and changed the newspaper’s name to The Suffragette. -
Manuscript narrative of the Great Pilgrimage of 1913
National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies member Alice Margery New joined fifty thousand women and men from across England in the Great Pilgrimage of 1913. It was the largest public demonstration in British history. The NUWSS organized the pilgrimage and march to demonstrate the depth and breadth of support for women’s suffrage. It was the organizers’ intention that their orderly and dignified pilgrimage would serve as a counterpoint to the militant activities of the Women's Social and Political Union. As they traveled and campaigned for the vote, they were frequently met with hostility and violence. Alice New traveled from Birkenhead to London, nearly two hundred miles. -
Robinson & Cleaver, Swan & Edgar, Swears & Wells, White House Linen Specialists, and T. J. Harries & Co. v. Frederick Pethick Lawrence, Emmeline Pethick Lawrence, Emmeline Pankhurst, Christabel Pankhurst, and Mabel Tuke, [1912] EWHC K.B. 1317, 2595, 2148, 1121 (Deposition)
Wealthy aristocrats Frederick and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence were leaders in the Women's Social and Political Union and the editors of its journal Votes for Women. Their home became WSPU’s London headquarters. In 1912, they were arrested along with other WSPU leaders on charges of conspiracy to commit damage after a window smashing campaign in West London. They were sentenced to nine months in jail, during which they went on hunger strike and were force-fed. The deposition is part of the Pethick-Lawrence papers and is annotated. -
[Certificate honoring Rosa May Billinghurst]
Militant suffragette Rosa May Billinghurst was a member of the Women's Social and Political Union. A childhood illness had paralyzed her from the waist down. Known as the “cripple suffragette,” she campaigned riding on a hand-powered tricycle and in a wheelchair. Billinghurst founded and led the Greenwich Branch of the WSPU and participated in window-smashing, hunger strikes, and other types of direct action. She was arrested several times and force-fed on at least one occasion. This printed certificate from the WSPU, signed by Emmeline Pankhurst and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, thanks her for contributions to the fight for women’s suffrage. The certificate was designed by Sylvia Pankhurst, with the Angel of Freedom, jail portcullis, broad arrow, and other suffrage symbolism. The WSPU gave these certificates to suffragettes after their release from jail. -
Sanitary Health Sponge
Sponges have been in use for contraceptive purposes for centuries. Modern forms of the contraceptive sponge were popularized in the west during the birth control movement of the early twentieth century. Both Sanger and Stopes recommended their use for effective birth control. The Sanitary Health Sponge sits inside a pouch of pink netting with a cord for easier removal. -
[“Justice” march banner]
This parade banner was made by sisters Dorothy, Maud, and Monica Harvey for “The Great Procession of Women” of 18 June 1910. The reverse reads “No Taxation Without Representation.” This march was sponsored by the Women's Social and Political Union and the Women’s Freedom League. Over fifteen thousand women and men marched peacefully through London. Banners served as rallying points and commentary, while also providing natural dividers to organize the mass of protesters. In making the banners, the activists used a traditionally female art form to challenge the limits placed on women in the political sphere. -
[WSPU tea service]
Commissioned by the Women’s Social and Political Union and designed by Sylvia Pankhurst, this tea service was originally made for use in the Tea Room of the first WSPU fundraising bazaar at the 1909 Women’s Exhibition in London. At the close of the exhibition, the remaining pieces were assembled into tea sets and sold. Pankhurst designed devices and symbols for the WSPU, as well as their membership card. Her “Angel of Freedom” design incorporates prison bars, thistles, shamrocks, roses, and chains. The collection includes eighteen pieces from this set, more than any other collection holds.
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