LibGuides: Women's Rights & Suffrage Movements: Primary Sources

Primary Sources

COM Library has some great collections of primary sources. Primary sources are records created at the time of an event or experience, or as told by people who were present at the event. Must access on campus or login with your COM account for off campus access.

Want more on finding primary sources? Try Tips for Finding Primary Sources or Tips for Finding Primary Sources Open Access.

Defining Documents in World History: Women's History From the European calls for the rights of women to the modern feminist movement, these volumes provide thoughtful analysis of documents and speeches allowing readers to gain a better understanding of the roles, opinions, and changing attitudes of and toward women in world history. An important resource for the history collections of high schools, undergraduate libraries and public libraries.
Documents Decoded: Women's Rights Taking a broad view of the ongoing efforts to attain rights for women, this work provides unique insight into the context of the issues and reveals the range of factors that can influence a particular policy decision. * Carefully examines the major issues that helped frame women's rights in various key policy areas * Blends the practical explanations of the government's role in women's rights with the feminist theoretical foundations of the quest for these rights * Supplies crucial context for all women's rights policy statements, including information about the statements' authors as well as the political dynamics surrounding the issue * Presents coverage of policy statements that illustrate some of the key players in the attainment of women's rights and uniquely demonstrate the various ways women's rights have been framed across history * Clearly illustrates the relationship of women's rights issues to fields of study as disparate as business, history, healthcare, law enforcement, and political science, among others * Includes coverage of some of the major political challenges to women's reproductive rights witnessed in the previous decade * Considers some of the most difficult and controversial issues related to women's rights, such as the "war on women" and the country's pervasive rape culture
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Feminist as Thinker : A Reader in Documents and Essays More than one hundred years after her death, Elizabeth Cady Stanton still stands--along with her close friend Susan B. Anthony--as the major icon of the struggle for women's suffrage. In spite of this celebrity, Stanton's intellectual contributions have been largely overshadowed by the focus on her political activities, and she is yet to be recognized as one of the major thinkers of the nineteenth century. Here, at long last, is a single volume exploring and presenting Stanton's thoughtful, original, lifelong inquiries into the nature, origins, range, and solutions of women's subordination. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Feminist as Thinker reintroduces, contextualizes, and critiques Stanton's numerous contributions to modern thought. It juxtaposes a selection of Stanton's own writings, many of them previously unavailable, with eight original essays by prominent historians and social theorists interrogating Stanton's views on such pressing social issues as religion, marriage, race, the self and community, and her place among leading nineteenth century feminist thinkers. Taken together, these essays and documents reveal the different facets, enduring insights, and fascinating contradictions of the work of one of the great thinkers of the feminist tradition. Contributors: Barbara Caine, Richard C#65533;ndida Smith, Ellen Carol DuBois, Ann D. Gordon, Vivian Gornick, Kathi Kern, Michele Mitchell, and Christine Stansell.
Eve's Century : A Sourcebook of Writings on Women and Journalism 1895-1950 This unique collection of extracts is taken from women's journals and magazines - both British and American - on the eve of the twentieth century. Arranged by subject, the collection focuses on what this pivotal moment represented for women and includes an introduction to women's journalism of the period. The rapidly changing conditions then surrounding a woman's world are illustrated here by sections on: * monarchy * women and war * colonial women * the politics of emancipation * and girlhood.
Eyewitness History: Women's Suffrage in America At the start of the 19th century, women had severely limited rights. They had no control of their earnings, could not divorce a husband, had no claim of property, could not speak at public meetings, and could not vote. The women's suffrage movement, a political campaign that sought to address these problems, began around 1800 and culminated in 1920 with the passage of the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote. Led by women such as Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the members of this movement petitioned Congress, marched, and gave speeches in the face of public disapproval in an effort to achieve their goals. Women's Suffrage in America, Updated Edition provides hundreds of firsthand accounts of the women's movement - diary entries, letters, speeches, and newspaper accounts - that illustrate how historical events appeared to those who lived through them. Among the eyewitness testimonies included are those of Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, Lucretia Mott, Frederick Douglass, Helen Keller, and John Quincy Adams. In addition to firsthand accounts, each chapter provides an introductory essay and a chronology of events. Critical documents such as the Declaration of Sentiments at Seneca Falls, the Emancipation Address of the Women's National League, the Constitution of the National American Women's Suffrage Association, and the 19th Amendment are paired with capsule biographies of more than 100 key figures, making this reference extremely engaging and easy to use. This updated edition contains a great deal of new material, including additions to each chronology section, new primary source quotations, and an expanded appendix. Women's Suffrage in America, Updated Edition provides new information about individual topics, including court cases and legislation, and more than 20 additional black-and-white photographs.
The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony : An Awful Hush, 1895 To 1906 The "hush" of the title comes suddenly, when first Elizabeth Cady Stanton dies on October 26, 1902, and three years later Susan B. Anthony dies on March 13, 1906. It is sudden because Stanton, despite near blindness and immobility, wrote so intently right to the end that editors had supplies of her articles on hand to publish several months after her death. It is sudden because Anthony, at the age of eighty-five, set off for one more transcontinental trip, telling a friend on the Pacific Coast, "it will be just as well if I come to the end on the cars, or anywhere, as to be at home." Volume VI of this extraordinary series of selected papers is inescapably about endings, death, and silence. But death happens here to women still in the fight. An Awful Hush is about reformers trained "in the school of anti-slavery" trying to practice their craft in the age of Jim Crow and a new American Empire. It recounts new challenges to "an aristocracy of sex," whether among the bishops of the Episcopal church, the voters of California, or the trustees of the University of Rochester. And it sends last messages about woman suffrage. As Stanton wrote to Theodore Roosevelt on the day before she died, "Surely there is no greater monopoly than that of all men, in denying to all women a voice in the laws they are compelled to obey." With the publication of Volume VI, this series is now complete.
The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony : Their Place Inside the Body-Politic, 1887 To 1895 Their Place Inside the Body-Politic is a phrase Susan B. Anthony used to express her aspiration for something women had not achieved, but it also describes the woman suffrage movement's transformation into a political body between 1887 and 1895. This fifth volume opens in February 1887, just after the U.S. Senate had rejected woman suffrage, and closes in November 1895 with Stanton's grand birthday party at the Metropolitan Opera House.  At the beginning, Stanton and Anthony focus their attention on organizing the  International Council of Women in 1888.  Late in 1887, Lucy Stone's American Woman Suffrage Association announced its desire to merge with the national association led by Stanton and Anthony.  Two years of fractious negotiations preceded the 1890 merger, and years of sharp disagreements followed.  Stanton made her last trip to Washington in 1892 to deliver her famous speech "Solitude of Self."  Two states enfranchised women--Wyoming in 1890 and Colorado in 1893--but failures were numerous. Anthony returned to grueling fieldwork in South Dakota in 1890 and Kansas and New York in 1894.  From the campaigns of 1894, Stanton emerged as an advocate of educated suffrage and staunchly defended her new position.  
Treacherous Texts : An Anthology of U. S. Suffrage Literature, 1846-1946 Treacherous Texts collects more than sixty literary texts written by smart, savvy writers who experimented with genre, aesthetics, humor, and sex appeal in an effort to persuade American readers to support woman suffrage. Although the suffrage campaign is often associated in popular memory with oratory, this anthology affirms that suffragists recognized early on that literature could also exert a power to move readers to imagine new roles for women in the public sphere. Uncovering startling affinities between popular literature and propaganda, Treacherous Texts samples a rich, decades-long tradition of suffrage literature created by writers from diverse racial, class, and regional backgrounds. Beginning with sentimental fiction and polemic, progressing through modernist and middlebrow experiments, and concluding with post-ratification memoirs and tributes, this anthology showcases lost and neglected fiction, poetry, drama, literary journalism, and autobiography; it also samples innovative print cultural forms devised for the campaign, such as valentines, banners, and cartoons. Featured writers include canonical figures such as Stowe, Fern, Alcott, Gilman, Djuna Barnes, Marianne Moore, Millay, Sui Sin Far, and Gertrude Stein, as well as writers popular in their day but, until now, lost to ours.
A Voice of Their Own: The Woman Suffrage Press, 1840-1910 A Voice of Their Own explores the consciousness-raising role of the American suffrage press of the latter half of the 19th century. From the first women's rights convention - a modest gathering of 300 sympathizers led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton - grew the ever-expanding movement for equal rights, greater protection, and improved opportunities. Although the leaders of that and subsequent conventions realized that such public rallies, with their exhortative speeches, were crucial in gaining support for the movement, they also recognized the potential impact of another medium - the women's suffrage periodicals, written and published by and expressly for women. The 11 essays of this volume demonstrate how the suffrage press - in such works as Woman's Journal, Woman's Tribune, Woman's Exponent, and Farmer's Wife - was able to educate an audience of women readers, create a sense of community among them, and help alter their self-image.
Why We March : Signs of Protest and Hope : Voices From the Women's March On January 21, 2017, over 5 million people in 673 cities around the globe gathered in solidarity for the Women's March, carrying signs that shone with unwavering hope and determination and demanded the protection of women's rights, opposed the newly inaugurated U.S. president, and championed equality and justice for all. Why We March presents 300 of the most powerful, uplifting, clever, and creative signs from these marches. 'Nasty Women Unite.' 'Make America Think Again.' 'Build Bridges, Not Walls.' 'Girls Just Wanna Have Fundamental Rights.' 'Love Trumps Hate.' 'A Woman's Place Is in the Resistance.' These images--featuring messages about reproductive rights and cabinet picks, immigration and police violence, climate change and feminism--together paint a striking portrait of resistance, despair, humour, and most of all, hope. This book will serve as a rallying cry for this burgeoning movement, and a valuable and timely encapsulation of an unprecedented moment in political history.  
Women's Suffrage in America : An Eyewitness History Part of a series of historical references, this volume addresses the Women's Suffrage Movement in America between 1820 and 1920, during which time leaders like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan Anthony spearheaded reform movements seeking equality for women. Eyewitness accounts are supplied by referring to contemporary records of observers and participants.