All Stories: 38
Stories
After Suffrage: Becoming Citizens
On September 8, 1919, the Minnesota state legislature ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, becoming the 15th state to do so. Eleven months later, Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the amendment. Once it became law in August 1920, the…
Women's Suffrage and World War I
A turning point for the suffrage movement came in April 1917, when the United States entered the First World War. Historians have argued that suffrage volunteerism during the war helped persuade opponents of women's civic capacities. …
Racial and Ethnic Tensions in Minnesota's Suffrage Movement
When Jamar Clark died after being shot by Minneapolis police in November 2015, hundreds of people gathered in the square outside Minneapolis's City Hall to demand justice. #BlackLivesMatter, then only two years in existence, led the march. The fight…
The Press and Women's Suffrage
The main sources of news in 1914 were either neighborhood gossip or the local newspaper. Radio only became widely available in the late 1920s. Local papers could easily sway public opinion, so suffragists were keen to attract positive news coverage.…
Arts and the Suffrage Movement
The arts can be powerful tools for social and political change. Local suffrage organizations used a variety of creative strategies to engage the public. They organized historical pageants and skating carnivals. On special “suffrage days” they…
Women Who Opposed Suffrage
Not all women believed in equal suffrage. Minnesota was among twenty states that had an organized anti-suffrage movement.
There were two anti-suffrage organizations based in Hennepin County -- the Minnesota Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage…
Suffrage Militancy and Public Demonstrations
When Aretha Franklin and Tony Bennett came to town in 1968, they performed at the Minneapolis Auditorium. So, too, did the famed British suffragette, Emmeline Pankhurst, when she visited in 1913. For more than fifty years, the Auditorium was…
Religion and the Suffrage Movement
The 1848 Seneca Falls convention is typically seen as the start of the U.S. women’s suffrage movement. But the roots of feminism can be found in church-based movements, like evangelicalism, abolitionism, missions, and philanthropic societies. …
Suffrage Organizing in Hennepin County
Clara Ueland, a tireless advocate for women's right to vote, once remarked that there couldn't be "too many clubs." The more grass-roots organization, the better.
Suffragists organized themselves into a vast network of suffrage…
The 19th century Suffrage Movement in Minnesota
Minnesota was a vast prairie, the homeland of more 10,000 Dakota, Ojibwe and Anishinaabe peoples in July 1848, when the first woman's rights convention was held in Seneca Falls, NY.
Early efforts to champion women's suffrage started in…