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.