The March 3, 1913 suffrage march in Washington, DC

 Up to date February, 2024

As Girls’s Historical past Month returns in March, 2024, college students can have fun the ratification of the nineteenth Modification in 1920. They will additionally look again to the previous wrestle, together with the march by 1000’s of suffragists down Pennsylvania Avenue on March 3, 1913 (24 pictures). Lots of the 500,000 spectators weren’t supportive of the nonviolent protest, injuring 200 marchers and sending 100 of them to the hospital.

Throughout March 2013 1000’s gathered in Washington, DC to commemorate these marchers who took the wrestle for girls’s proper to vote from the states to the federal authorities, rallying for a constitutional modification.

Profitable the Proper to Vote

Click on to enlarge.

For a succinct therapy of the suffrage wrestle with choices for scholar analysis in addition to an infographic (at left) displaying the states which voted to permit ladies to vote earlier than the nineteenth Modification, see iCivics right here. Join free iCivics instructor entry right here.

The Historical past Channel outlines the pre-1920 efforts of girls’s organizations together with Alice Paul and the opposite suffragists who picketed the White Home and have been imprisoned (and at instances force-fed throughout starvation strikes) within the years following the 1913 march.

Lucy Burns throughout one in all her incarcerations

The Library of Congress offers a photograph of the imprisonment of suffrage chief Lucy Burns and notes that “Burns served extra jail time throughout her six sentences than every other suffrage prisoner, and she or he helped instigate starvation strikes to protest the suffragists’ therapy.” The Library of Congress additionally quotes one other suffragist on pressured feeding:  “The drums of the ears appear to be bursting and there’s a horrible ache within the throat and breast. The tube is pushed down twenty inches; [it] should go beneath the breastbone.”

Information of the ladies’s therapy in addition to altering ways in following years helped result in ratification of the nineteenth Modification in 1920. For instance,

The yr 1915 marked an entire new stage of activism for the suffrage motion within the U.S. Suffragist used new methods like casting the Girls’s Liberty Bell, creating the torch of Freedom, and launching a flotilla of girl suffrage boats in New York Harbor. Nonetheless, male voters in all 4 distinguished japanese states (Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania) rejected the thought of girls having the appropriate to vote. It’s inspiring to notice nevertheless, that simply two years later, in 1917, New Yorkers launched one more battle that succeeded. It was a victory that gave momentum to the nationwide modification simply three years later.” …from The Nationwide Girls’s Historical past Alliance’s 2015 Gazette p. 19

The Nationwide Girls’s Historical past Alliance presents themes every year because the group acknowledges ladies leaders. In 2024 the theme is “Girls Who Advocate for Fairness, Variety and Inclusion.” The annual journal (previously gazette) affords biographical sketches of girls leaders, an essay on settlement homes and far more. Among the many NWHA’s different useful sources are a really detailed month-to-month calendar of girls’s historical past and an essay outlining the efforts to determine Nationwide  Girls’s Historical past month in the course of the Seventies and Nineteen Eighties.

On August 18, 1920 Tennessee grew to become the thirty-sixth state to vote for the nineteenth Modification, reaching the required variety of states for ratification. U.S. Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby proclaimed the passage of the Modification on August 26, now celebrated as Girls’s Equality Day. To see when different states ratified (as late as 1984), go to Wikipedia’s publish on the the nineteenth Modification.

Understanding the Battle for Girls’s Suffrage   

The Nationwide Girls’s Historical past Museum, which outlines the 1970’s origin and yearly Presidential proclamation of Girls’s Historical past Month right here, affords Campaign for the Vote, a take a look at Seneca Falls, classes (principally concentrating on grades 9-12) and on-line displays.

College students can uncover Key details about ladies’s suffrage all over the world, a century after U.S. ratified nineteenth Modification from the Pew Analysis Heart.

A 2019 NYT article, Early Feminists Issued a Declaration of Independence. The place Is It Now? by Liz Robbins and Sam Roberts, not solely critiques the historical past across the writing of the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments, but in addition reveals how present historians work together.

Extra Historical past Centered Assets

The Equal Rights Modification did not obtain ratification by 38 states by its 1982 deadline. Click on the map for particulars. See ERA leaders right here and the present standing of the ERA On this 2022 article from the Washington Submit. 

College students who wish to perceive the place of girls in army endeavors can begin with Girls Warriors from 3500 BC to the twentieth Century, an internet site by Nicky Saunders. The transient descriptions Saunders has gathered by century not solely give a really broad overview of girls fighters but in addition can function a leaping off level for additional research.

Within the NYT article, The Many Roles of Girls in Warfare: Sniper, Pilot, Dying Camp Guard by Navy veteran Andrea N. Goldstein, college students can uncover how ladies out and in of service, within the US and past, responded to WW II.

… Elsewhere, the Library of Congress hosts Girls’s Historical past Month for Lecturers, with hyperlinks to a number of federal businesses in addition to an American Reminiscence assortment of major sources. Within the Census Bureau’s 2023 Girls’s Historical past Month Details for Options college students will discover general stats on employment, schooling, companies, and extra, together with hyperlinks to extra detailed data. For college students who need a sense of place to amplify their picture of historic ladies in America, the Nationwide Park Service offers a web site on ladies’s historical past in America in addition to an in depth park-related webpage.

Dr. Jill Biden

The White Home hosts First Girls’ biographies. The US Home of Representatives affords detailed essays on the 4 waves of girls elected to the physique and on people members. The US Senate features a assortment of transient biographies of the 51 ladies who’ve served within the Senate together with a timeline of girls who influenced the Senate earlier than the primary ladies Senator entered the Senate in 1922.

A Take a look at Girls within the Arts

To combine the humanities into literacy, go to the Nationwide Museum of Girls within the Arts which opened in Washington, DC, in 1987. Among the many museum’s many sources for lecturers are the See for Your self playing cards that includes photos and common questions (together with a set of Madonnas). Additionally check out ABC – arts, books, creativity. That curriculum for fourth and fifth graders affords a sequence of detailed classes, every that includes a medium, which collectively may end up in college students creating their very own artwork books. The curriculum could possibly be a undertaking to plan throughout a break or over the summer time.

To have fun Girls’s Historical past Month, center grades ELA instructor Kasey Brief affords a listing of nonfiction and fiction books representing a variety of woman’s and girls’s voices and experiences in a MiddleWeb publish. She notes all college students profit from studying about good, courageous ladies who make constructive impacts.

Girls Scientists by means of Historical past

Sally Experience, the primary US girl in area

Science Buddies mixes bios with experiments in Girls in STEM! Greater than 50 Scientists and Engineers for Girls’s Historical past Month, a weblog publish by Amy Cowen. The article additionally recommends books by age. The Smithsonian Institute affords a colourful pdf for center grades college students which options ladies leaders in STEM.

Need extra bios? AWIS hyperlinks to bios of previous and current racially numerous ladies in a variety of science fields. For lengthier bios of choose ladies in science, go to the Science Historical past Institute’s Girls in Science web page. NASA additionally offers hyperlinks to its ladies leaders in addition to a quick video.

Time Journal Acknowledges 100 Girls of the Yr

In March 2020 Time created a century of annual covers recognizing excellent ladies in politics, the humanities, protest, science, and far more, writing:

“In 1999, Man of the Yr gave strategy to Individual of the Yr. Whereas the identify rightly modified, too typically the selection was the identical. With this 100 Girls of the Yr undertaking, we’re spotlighting influential ladies who have been typically overshadowed….”

The undertaking provides 89 ladies to the 11 who have been named Individuals of the Yr lately. The covers seize the altering journal designs since 1920. On-line every cowl is linked to a biographical essay. Readers might want to create a free Time account to entry the essays. Time additionally describes the month’s lengthy undertaking’s background. Lilly Ledbetter, pictured beneath, is featured on the 2007 cowl.

President Obama indicators the Lily Ledbetter Truthful Pay Restoration Act, Jan. 2009.

Girls’s historical past on social media

To search out Girls’s Historical past Month on X/Twitter, comply with #wmnhist (final entry 2023), #STEMfem, and @Feministory. College students could also be gleaning some historical past and present occasions concepts @teenvogue shared by the journal which, along with leisure articles, consists of posts like Girls in Labor Historical past, From the Triangle Shirtwaist Fireplace to In the present day by Kim Kelly. Amongst Pinterest collections is one from the Smithsonian.

Photograph Credit

Entrance web page: A suffragist carrying costume of “Columbia” in entrance of the Treasury Constructing, March 3, 1913, Washington, D.C, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-70382

Inez Milholland Boissevain driving a horse in the course of the March 3, 1913 Washington, DC, protest, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-77359. 2016 was the centennial of her dying.

24 pictures: 100 Years In the past, The 1913 Girls’s Suffrage Parade by Alan Taylor, The Atlantic, March 1, 2013.

Sally Experience, Photograph from NASA

President Obama Signing the Lily Ledbetter Truthful Pay Restoration Act in 2009. White Home video.