Written by Kasey Caminiti

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“Creates Sensation with Suffrage Plea Painted On Her Pretty Back”

The Topeka State Journal, November 6, 1915
Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, Library of Congress

Suffragists deployed many creative strategies to draw attention to their cause, including breaking convention to use their own bodies as signs. These stunts were designed to be widely seen, photographed, and discussed—to “go viral,” 1910s-style.

Written by Kasey Caminiti

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Patchin Place

Jessie Tarbox Beals (1870–1942)
Patchin Place, ca. 1917
New-York Historical Society Library, Jessie Tarbox Beals Collection

The allure of Greenwich Village lay in its cluster of tea rooms, restaurants, bookstores, art studios, and galleries, many of which were run by women. Jessie Tarbox Beals, the country’s first female photojournalist, moved to the area in 1917 and became a tireless promoter of its picturesque streets, businesses, and local characters.

Written by Kasey Caminiti

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Charlotte Powell

Jessie Tarbox Beals (1870–1942)
Charlotte Powell, ca. 1917
Gelatin silver print
New-York Historical Society Library, Jessie Tarbox Beals Collection

Jessie Tarbox Beals was highly conscious of being a woman in a male-dominated profession. In her portraits of women artists and business owners in the Village, she presented her subjects as independent, capable, and androgynous. Here Charlotte Powell, labeled “the Village painter” by Beals, poses confidently with the tools of her trade.

Written by Kasey Caminiti

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Family Limitation

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966)
Family Limitation, ca. 1914-15
New-York Historical Society Library

Nurse Margaret Sanger disobeyed obscenity laws to share birth control information with poorer women. In her 1914 pamphlet Family Limitation, Sanger wrote that “in my estimation a well fitted pessary is one of the surest methods of preventing conception.” It was illegal to send birth control information through the mail, but women distributed the pamphlet at meetings and through their own networks. In 1916, Sanger opened a clinic in Brownsville, Brooklyn, to teach women to use these devices. It was shut down after nine days but marked the birth of the concept of “family planning.”

Written by Kasey Caminiti

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Written by Kasey Caminiti

Read the Full Story ≫

Suffrage and The Man poster

Suffrage and The Man poster, 1912
New York: The Metropolitan Printing Company
New-York Historical Society, Bella C. Landauer Collection

Advertised as “a comedy of votes and love,” this 1912 film (now lost) was produced by the Women’s Political Union, founded by Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s daughter Harriot Stanton Blatch. The film’s heroine, serving on a jury, manages to save her ex-fiancé from a lawsuit and win him back. Similar scenarios, with less happy endings, were often used by anti-suffragists to claim that women could not separate romance from politics.

Written by Kasey Caminiti

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Written by Kasey Caminiti

Read the Full Story ≫

Wake Up America!

Wake Up America!, 1917 Poster
New-York Historical Society Library

After the United States entered World War I in April 1917, the fight for the vote took on new urgency. War propaganda drew on the visual iconography of suffrage, with idealized female figures representing patriotic ideals. Many suffragists who supported the war saw it as an opportunity to prove their patriotism and insist on their right to full citizenship. Others, however, were dismayed by the capitulation to militarism and continued to demonstrate for peace.

Written by Kasey Caminiti

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Women’s Strike for Equality

Women’s Strike for Equality (detail), 1970
New-York Historical Society Library, Eugene Gordon Photograph Collection

Women’s activism for political rights is ongoing, and many of the galvanizing issues of today—racial justice, labor rights, immigration, reproductive rights, and women’s political participation—were also at the forefront a century ago. Then, as now, it was not individual leaders that had the power to drive real change, but the collective action they inspired.