Teaching with Primary Sources: Women's Suffrage in the United States

Students should have a basic familiarity with the American women’s suffrage movement to give them the context they need to begin to analyze their primary sources. One or more of these can be assigned ahead of time:

Articles and book chapters:

• Jennifer Harlan. "Suffrage at 100: A Visual History," New York Times, August 20, 2020. Text by Jennifer Harlan; Introduction by Veronica Chambers, Jennifer Harlan, and Jennifer Schuessler.

• Martha S. Jones, “How Black Suffragists Fought for the Right to Vote and a Modicum of Respect,” Humanities: The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities, 40, no. 3 (Summer 2019)

• Allison K. Lange, “Portraits as Politics,” Picturing Political Power: Images in the Women’s Suffrage Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 53­–87.

• Manisha Sinha, “The Other Frances Ellen Watkins Harper,” Common Place, 16, no. 2 (Winter 2016).

Websites:

• Library of Congress. Marching for the Vote: Remembering the Woman Suffrage Parade of 1913 
• National Archives. The Nineteenth Amendment
• National Park Service. US Women's Suffrage Timeline 1648 to 2016
• National Women’s History Museum. History of the Women’s Suffrage Movement; National Association of Colored Women 

Event recordings: