These are letters that were written by Sarah Bagley Durnough. Sarah Bagley was a famous labor leader in Lowell during the 1840s. And she—as a labor leader, she at one point published the Voice of Industry, which was an important newspaper in that labor movement. She corresponded with a lot of important political figures and reformers. And this is part of her correspondence. This is one of the people she corresponded with—Angelique Martin. Angelique Martin was a Fourierist, that's a social utopian reform movement. And Angelique Martin had taken an interest in the Lowell factory women who were struggling to get a 10-hour workday in the factories.

So what I have here are three letters between Sarah and Mrs. Martin, thanking Mrs. Martin for her support at one point, and also discussing some pretty important ideas with her. I find the letters particularly important because Mrs. Martin had really encouraged these young women to start thinking about issues of women's rights. And in this letter it becomes clear, that it's from this correspondence and that encouragement that there is a definite interests in women's rights that starts to develop among these factory workers. And eventually, in Sarah's case, is leading to a critique of both the labor movement and eventually the labor newspaper that she's involved in because some of her colleagues and co-workers are not so sensitive to the issue of women's rights.

Well, first of all these letters became fascinating because they helped us to find Sarah. Like most women, once she got married she had disappeared from the historic record. And it's in this set of letters that we find out what her married name is—Dornough—and that opened up a whole new area of research for us, because once we had a married name we could start tracing her again, and we were able to do that.

But secondly the other thing I found so fascinating about these letters is that they're really extremely powerful. And it is one thing to write a book or an article where you talk about the way in which people in the labor movement may or may not have been sensitive or interested in other reform movements going on around them, whether it be anti-slavery or women's rights or whatever. It's quite another thing to actually look at the document and—particularly when the letters are very powerful—get a sense of just how important those ideas were to the person.

So I find these letters in particular to be very powerful expressions of Sarah's ideas. Although I think when I look at her life, and I think about the way in which she goes off to these factories. She uses the money to buy her parents' home. She gets involved in these labor struggles. She goes to work with reform prostitutes. She becomes a doctor. She becomes a successful snuff manufacturer. You know this is a very powerful woman, so it doesn't surprise me that her letters are so moving.

Make sure first of all, that you pretty much understand what the person is saying. And if there are things that don't quite makes sense I think, the important thing to realize is that it's probably a good thing, not a bad thing. It's an interesting—it probably means the person is saying something a little surprising and unusual, and that's usually a good thing to write about. So one of the things I always tell my students is if something doesn't make sense, they should not panic, it's not them. It may actually be that they've got a good historical problem to write about.

So, if there are things that make you uncomfortable, or surprise you, or don't make sense, those are the things to go back and focus in on. Look at them more carefully. See if there are contradictions. Maybe the person who's writing is living with contradictions that we don't necessarily live with today. Maybe they're living with contradictions that we do live with today. But to go back and look at that closely, make sure you really understand that—whether it's a critique of the anti-slavery movement or a discussion of women's rights—whatever you find.

So, in addition to just looking very closely at the textual material, when you look at these letters you want to think, what is the nature of this exchange? Are you writing home to your mom? Do you want your mom maybe not to be worried about you, cause you're off at the factory? Are you writing home because you need help? I mean that kind of personal letter is going to set up one set of conventions of the kinds of things you say. And all you have to think about is the things you say or don't say to your mom and dad today, to realize that was probably true back in the 19th century, too. So you want to ask that. Certainly, if you're writing a formal letter to someone you don't know to say, ask them to come address your organization, that letter might not contain much interesting information one way or the other. It's certainly going to be a very formal letter, and you shouldn't be surprised if some kinds of emotional expressions don't show up.

This kind of letter here is somewhere in between because Angelique Martin has clearly befriended Sarah and some of her friends. On the other hand, it's a professional relationship. Mrs. Martin is an important social reformer. She clearly is a woman of some means. She's offered to help them pay for their printing press for the Voice of Industry. They're hoping she will do that. They have an important intellectual relationship because she's been introducing them to ideas about women's rights. And they've talked pretty passionately about some of these issues.

So Sarah regards her as a friend, in a way that she probably doesn't regard her sister as a friend. But she also regards her as a kind of mentor, and as someone who has—in some ways—some power over her. She wants to impress her, but she's also going to talk about the issues that they care about together; such as women's rights. But when she talks about women's rights she's going to talk passionately about it. So I think there is a sort of a way in which you need to think about what the relationship is between these two people. And we can certainly see from the letters that there are a lot of complications in this relationship. That are going to—I don't want to say necessarily shape what gets said, but they're going to put constraints or they're going to dictate a little bit how things get said. And I think that's always an important thing to keep in mind.

I would want a student to look at these letters and try to understand all of the different concerns that Sarah—and someone like Sarah—was trying to piece together. That is, to see her as more than a one-dimensional person. We know her mostly as a labor leader, but she's clearly got a much more complicated life and a lot of other demands that were being made upon her. She's being drawn in other directions with her interest in women's rights. She has demands that are being placed upon her by her family.

And I think trying to understand those issues are important, not only for understanding an individual who is involved in the movement, but also for understanding the way in which so many of these issues do overlap and intersect. We tend to treat them separately; we tend to talk about the labor movement or the women's rights movement. Or actually in one of these other letters she brings up anti-slavery. And she brings it up in a way that I think is quite important. Some historians have alluded to this, but we don't have as many sort of direct comments on it as I would like. This is in the first letter from Jan 1, 1846. And while she mentions that she's opposed to slavery, she is completely disgusted with the abolitionists—because many of the factory owners are abolitionists, but they are not at all sympathetic to their own operatives.

I think the first question I would ask them to think about is: Well, what is she really angry about here? Is she angry at slaves? Is she really secretly a racist? Is she angry at the abolitionists? If so, why? What sort of complications are being expressed here? Particularly because she starts off the letter by mentioning that when they started their labor reform association she said, they originally met in Anti-Slavery Hall. So, these are people who could have been in some ways comfortable with the anti-slavery movement. Now maybe Anti-Slavery Hall was just a sort of general public building that people used for all sorts of things. But on the other hand, I think what I would encourage the student to think about is, what precisely is her criticism here and why is she leveling that criticism.

A very famous essay by Jane Addams, "Why Women Should Vote," and it's recreated in many places. Jane Addams—you would probably want to introduce Jane Addams to the students first. She's a key progressive reformer and a key voice of women at the moment. She's probably the most well recognized and generally admired woman of her time. She writes an article where she says not only why should women get the vote—why women should have the vote—but she talks about why women should vote, why it is the responsibility of women to vote. She's in large part talking to a readership that is anti-suffrage and is female. So what she is trying to do is to appeal to women who are anti-suffrage. Men who were anti-suffrage were powerful voices, but when women seemed ununited on this issue it made it harder to make the claim that women should have the vote. In fact, a lot of public discussion after about 1905 was based on polls whether women wanted the vote, and if you could show that most women either didn't consider it relevant to them or felt uncomfortable with it or openly opposed it the idea was why should suffrage be granted, women don't even want it for themselves.

So she's speaking directly to women; she's trying to organize women and change women's minds, not just men's minds. I think that's probably something that the students might be surprised about as well. So when she says "Why Women Should Vote," she uses all of the social housekeeping or maternalist kinds of arguments we've talked about and we've seen in the visuals. It's three or four pages long, students can take it home, they can read it for themselves, and they can pull out, I think, easily recognized moments in the essay where she relies on those particular kinds of arguments.

One of the things I would do with that piece, which Victoria B. Brown, another historian, does so well herself, is to recognize that there is a subtle difference in Jane Addams's argument between saying that women are naturally and essentially and biologically more moral or more pure or more concerned about the health of others or more civic minded. She kind of avoids saying whether she thinks that or not, and talks about women's experiences that build those skills and build those characteristics. That's a subtlety that would be interesting to talk to students about, because a lot of students even in 2010 and beyond, I'm sure, struggle with how much they think women's nature or stereotypes about women or any other group are natural and are rooted in biology, and it is something that feminist historians have long addressed.

So Jane Addams's essay allows you to do a lot of good work around not only the particular issue of suffrage, but also the underlying ideological issues about gender that should be raised when we talk about suffrage. Because it's not just there was a movement and here's what happened, but what are the issues at that time that continue to raise themselves in our own time?

And they are reinforcing some conventional ideas that feminist historians since the 1970s have not always felt comfortable with: wanting them to have been more radical, or wanting them to have been less compromised by race or class issues. But as historians what we are really interested in is the complexity, is the messiness of it. I think bringing students to an appreciation of that is not only important, but it's what makes it interesting for them, too. I find students think one of two things—history is so easy, it's not worth studying, it's not hard like math; or history is boring because it's a chronicle of events. And I'm also bored by a chronicle of events. So, allowing them to see that there's an analytical set of issues that have to be explored triggers their curiosity and allows them to really stretch intellectually.

So I think that it's important even at a young age to bring that complexity in; otherwise we are going to bore them and not convey why this is so important. And I have taught high school myself, and I taught it at a very high level and found that students were more interested than they were when I tried to keep it at a low level in order to make sure I wasn't moving too fast or using too many big words.

I have an interesting document, actually, about why black women need the vote. Black women are also using a kind of argument from expediency after 1900. By "expediency" I mean pragmatism, practical reasons. They’re not only arguing from justice—that this is what is right—although they retain that as well.

And I think that Nannie H. Burroughs's article, that is short and something that students could easily read, makes a profound point. Nannie Burroughs, whose mother was an emancipated slave, was one of the founders of the Women's Convention of the National Baptist Convention, which is a very important locale for the Southern black women's movement. She was a black women's club leader.

The clubs that women organized at the turn of the century are more than recreational and more than philanthropic even; and certainly for black women even when they're philanthropic, it's about uplifting the race. The National Association of Colored Women's motto becomes by the 1920s "Lifting as we Climb." And so there's an idea that anyone who achieves a certain level of middle-class respectability or economic stability in the black community has a responsibility to the entire black community. Women really took that message to heart and really saw their role change by 1900.

I would read this just to make sure that students take note of the particularities here. So this isn't a visual source, but it is a powerful textual source. It reads,

"When the ballot is put into the hands of the American woman the world is going to get a correct estimate of the Negro woman. It will find her a tower of strength of which poets have never sung, orators have never spoken, and scholars have never written. Because the black man does not know the value of the ballot, and has bartered and sold his most valuable possession, it is no evidence that the Negro woman will do the same."

And here what she's referring to is the common practice—or at least not uncommon practice—of black men who otherwise would have been beaten and possibly killed for voting, pragmatically taking money in order to vote for the Democratic party, the party of the South, the party of the Confederacy for a long time. She's critical of black men for that. I think as historians and as contemporary people we need to put that in some context, she's using this as a point of contention in order to draw a very different picture for black women. But I wouldn't want students to take away her criticism of black men, without understanding the context for it.

She goes on to say, "The Negro woman, therefore, needs the ballot to get back, by the wise use of it, what the Negro man has lost by the misuse of it. She needs to ransom her race. She carries the burdens of the Church, and of the school and bears a great deal more than her economic share in the home."

In a very short space of time she has identified key tensions between black men and black women and between blacks and whites. One is that black men are not allowed to have the kinds of industrial jobs that would provide a wage that can support a family. Black women, therefore, typically need to work outside the home for a wage. Which is something that is inimical, is opposite to the idea of the middle-class woman who does not engage in wage earning, or really deals with money in any way.

So she makes that point, but she also says that the black woman carries the burden of the church and the school. So at the same time she talks about black women have sort of double duties that are unique to black women but common to women in general, which is serving the church, serving the community, making sure that schooling and other services for children are there.

What she is doing is similar to white suffragists, is taking a popular convention of the moment and twisting it to serve her purposes. To say that regardless of what you feel about putting the vote in the hands of black people, here's how it will serve your interests. She's speaking a racist language. She concludes by saying, "The ballot, wisely used, will bring to her," the Negro woman, "the respect and protection that she needs. It is her weapon of moral defense." She has made her point loud and clear and gotten the attention of both white and black readers who then might debate, at least, the argument that she has brought to the fore. And, thereby, she has accomplished her aim—by putting suffrage smack in the middle of race relations and not just gender relations.

What we have here are many photos of women publicly demonstrating. There are probably 200 articles about women demonstrating in public between 1900, 1910 and 1915. That's a good chunk, and a lot for historians to draw on. What you can do is you can juxtapose these photographs, one next to the other. Some of the photographs of women publicly protesting, marching in the streets holding signs, are going to be about women who are protesting work conditions for women—striking workers, for instance—others are specific to suffrage. What I would do with students is to talk to them about the differences in the photos and the continuities, so that you can see that the suffrage movement is taking lessons from the movement to protect women workers. Which is not always the same as the socialist movement, or the general workers campaigns, partly because major organizations are run by men and do not embrace women workers and do not attempt to protect them, nor do they see them as anything really but flies in the ointment. A spare population of workers who will work for less and will dilute the ability of men to demand better conditions and wages.

If we look at the striking women workers, and you can see where the techniques that the leaders of the suffrage movement, votes for women, took their cues. And one of the things they did—which is similar to the political cartoon that we just looked at—is they made sure that all the women looked fabulous. So they are wearing big hats and they were wearing as expensive clothes as they can afford, even when they are striking women workers. This did cause comment in the newspaper because it seemed in some ways to be a contradiction of terms. You're talking about how you can't really live on the salary that you make while at the same time you're trying to look like a leisured individual.

But for the most part it worked in this important way: it got their picture taken. And it made people attracted to and amenable to their message because they looked young and fresh and fashionable and they just seemed more appealing. This is at a moment when the public sphere was becoming inundated with images and the images in large part are of women. This is the emergence of cinema; it’s the emergence of advertising. So being able to look like those images that are held up as ideals for young women gave them an edge in the public consciousness; even if it created a kind of logical conundrum. It also made them sort of stand up straighter, feel proud, feel unified by their sex. It seemed to have a real centrifugal impact on their organizing.

I would point out that about the striking workers, and if you move from looking at the striking workers to looking at suffrage parades—which became a powerful way to get the public attention by about 1910 and certainly we're at the height of this in 1913—this becomes the talk of the nation.

What you see are dramatic displays where women are coordinated in their dress. White became a symbol of the suffrage movement, so they're borrowing from the traditional iconography of womanhood, they're borrowing the notion of purity, they're also borrowing from notions of white supremacy. It sort of works on a lot of different levels.

So in, for instance, 1913 you see at the head of that suffrage parade a very well-known, young, beautiful lawyer—female lawyer—who is dressed in white in a long, white, dramatic cape and is sitting astride a pure white horse. That suffrage parade is heading past the Capitol. The first public protest to ever petition the White House, to stand outside and demand attention in front of the White House—which is a familiar image now for early 21st-century Americans [because] this is what you do when you want attention and you want to call the powers that be on the carpet and you want to demand something from them—but the first one was a suffrage parade. And it was talked about as very controversial. Women were being bold. This was lead by two leaders—young leaders; a new generation of what's often referred to as militant suffrage women, because instead of working behind the scenes and working through contacts with powerful men, they went directly to the public. They also got arrested for what they were doing and also staged hunger strikes in prison, which also got them an enormous amount of attention.

They—Lucy Burns and Alice Paul—organized this particular one on the eve of the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson, the day before the inauguration. So they were very savvy. They knew the press was in town, they knew people were gathered there for the next day. And there was almost no one to greet the newly elected president when he stepped off the train because everyone was downtown watching the women marchers.

So they were very coordinated, they were all about using the press, and that's new. The press is relatively new, so it's not a surprise that 19th-century suffragists were not as able to take advantage of them—it simply didn't exist really until the end of the 1890s. It is the first time you really see the suffrage movement using that to its full advantage.

So this is probably the most famous photograph of women protesting outside of the White House. The text of their banners reads: "Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty?" and "Mr. President, what will you do for women suffrage?" This is 1918, so it's at the end of Wilson's term as president and they had been waiting for Wilson to make a commitment in one direction or the other. And this is on the eve, of course, of the passage at the end of the year in 1920. You can see that they are boldly demanding, rather than politely asking. That too is a change in, not only the tactics of the suffrage movement itself, but kind of the tenor of public debate in the country. That there was an opportunity with urbanization and with increasing mass media—which became more and more, I'm sure some contemporaries thought vulgar, and other contemporaries thought frank and direct. There also is a frankness and a directness that's new to the suffrage campaign.

The parade that I was talking about was with women all dressed in white. Not all the women were dressed in white; some were dressed in academic regalia or their professional insignia to signify that these are a wide range of women from different backgrounds. That same parade allowed black women to march—at the back. And that was a, I'm sure, a very difficult moment for many of the people in the parade—for black women and for white women who had been committed to the principle of racial equality, which included many of the leaders of the suffrage movement who had made, I'm sure, some very painful compromises with that philosophy, hoping to bring Southern states, where the principle of Jim Crow and segregation was front and center throughout this time period. This is often talked about as the nadir of race relations in the United States and lynching is an issue that has been brought to the fore by black women such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett, who is at that parade—and refuses, in fact, to walk at the back and at the last minute just emerges out of the crowd and joins somewhere towards the middle to the front. That was also an exciting moment for Ida B. Wells-Barnett and for the history of the women's suffrage movement. Her defiance of the racism within the movement signaled an unwillingness of black women to take that backseat.

One of the things that I would emphasize with students are the abundance of political cartoons that are produced in the first two decades of the 20th century. Mainly because this is a moment when the mass circulation of daily newspapers has reached its full potential and is reaching hundreds of thousands of customers in each city locale and also across cities.

This cartoon, which is called "The Dirty Pool of Politics," and what it shows is a fashionably dressed woman with an elaborate hat and very up-to-date and trendy clothes with a shovel, and she's shoveling dirt in front of her as she goes and the dirt is characterized as "White Slavery," Graft, Food Adulteration—and these are problems of the city, of the moment. And the point of the cartoon—which says, "Can we clean it? Give us a chance"—is to talk about how women are imagined as having a greater instinct for cleaning, a greater commitment to it, and investment of it, a set of skills and experiences that allows them to be, not only the cleaners of their own homes, but municipal housecleaners. This is a very prominent theme by the 1890s and by 1900, when suffrage becomes once again on the public consciousness and you see the merging of the two kind of rival suffrage associations—the NWSA [National Woman Suffrage Association] and the American Women's Suffrage Association—the national and the American. This is what they're going to, in a large part, base their rationale on.

So instead of what we had seen for most of the second half of the 19th century, which was an emphasis on the human right to political participation that should be shared equally by men and women, so a principle, you see a change in tactics. Not that many of the suffragists actually gave up thinking along those lines, but they certainly switched rhetoric to something they felt would be more practical, more pragmatic, and some historians have used the term expedient. The one closest to hand was the idea that women are responsible for the home and in an industrialized context the home is no longer a private domicile that a woman has control over the quality of. So if you want to be able to clean up your home, if you want—one of the things in this cartoon was food adulteration, you want to make sure that the meat that your serving your children is healthy and not rotten, that the fruit is clean and hasn't been soiled by being sitting out in an open market, if you want to make sure that the water coming into the home does not have disease in it, does not have airborne or waterborne diseases. All of those things [are] going to require the woman to actually step out of the private sphere and into the public sphere and have some political participation and some influence and control.

So this cartoon shows you right at the beginning of that movement the opportunity that women are seizing upon. To say we require the vote in order to be the traditional mothers and homemakers that we agree we primarily are. It's a very powerful and very effective and strategic argument and a cartoon like this says it in a very short punchy way.

One of the things I might demonstrate for students is to how to read the document visually. So not only how to look at the caption and think about the context and talk about the politics of the moment, but also to really look at the visual. And I emphasized at the beginning of my description that this woman is very fashionably dressed. And what that should raise for students are questions of class and also questions of how women needed to portray themselves in public in order not to violate not only the traditional idea that they are the domestic managers, but also that they need to look attractive.

So one of the other things that suffragists by the early 20th century figure out and manage to get a hold on to is that they're going to be much more publicly effective if they come across as appealing, attractive, fashionable, rather than militant in a specific way, meaning hostile to the role that women play as ornament. So you see the combining of these two things—that you can be a political person who seems to be stepping out of her sphere and not unattractive to men, and not uncaring about one's appearance. And also that this is an issue that upper-class women can grasp hold of and find an investment in, in addition to their philanthropy, in addition to their charity work, they can see political participation as something that aids them in that. Because it's not—it is their home that is at issue, but it's also poor women, immigrant women, women who have recently migrated to cities who live in tenement slums whose water is choleric, whose garbage is right outside their door—homes where they don't have any control over the quality. So, I think that cartoon says a lot and you can talk to the students for a long time about all the different aspects of this.

One of the things I would also point out and that the students are usually struck by are the demon-like figures of Food Adulteration, Graft, White Slavery, Bribery—that these are the evils that plague our society at the moment. These are the things that threaten the nation, they threaten industrial production, that these are key important issues. But if you look closely at what they are, they're also a lot about two things. Political corruption, so the idea also is that women might be more moral because they come from a sphere that is imagined as uncompromised by capitalism. So they can come in with not only fresh eyes and a fresh perspective, but they are also treading on a kind of conventional idea that has grown in the minds of many for the past century that women bring a moral sensibility. So they wouldn't stand for corruption and bribery.

White Slavery is kind of thrown in there, and that might be something that you might also talk to students about—it might take you a little bit off topic, but this is how I would keep it on topic. White slavery is the notion that women—white women—rather than black people, the whiteness there is very key, are being taken across state lines, are being forced into prostitution, being forced into sex slavery. And again this is imagined as a woman's issue, because women are thought to care about the lives of other women and about the moral turpitude or the moral character in general of society at large. So there's a lot you can do with a very concise image if you really take a look at it and mine it for all the different dimensions that it presents.

One of the reasons that I think that this is a key issue is that of course there's also an anti-suffrage movement. And it's not made up only of men who can't see past the idea that women will be their helpmates and be there for them when they get home from work—it's also made up of a good number of women—a significant portion, especially of upper-class women, who feel—who agree that women might have to step out of the private sphere into the public sphere but they want to do so much more carefully. They're much more circumspect about official roles in the public sphere, particularly the vote. And here's the logic to that—and there is a logic to that, it's not simply a misogynist or diluted or consciousness problem, it’s a logic of the argument of being a social housekeeper and the moral force in society. If your moral character comes from being protected from the public sphere, it comes from being solely responsible for the care of children and loved ones in the family unit, then the fear is that if you step too far outside of that, you yourself will lose those qualities. So what anti-suffrage women argued is that women should take responsibility for households other than their own, for the community and maybe the city at large and that there were roles for them to do so. There were professional occupations such as social worker, there were reasons to do that, but that the ballot went too far. The ballot put them in the same position as men and might actually erode the special qualities that they brought to the question of something like public health. So the public health campaign is central to the Progressive era, it becomes central to the tug of war between women over whether or not to support suffrage or not.