When A Single Item Tells a Story...
This is a small gallery of individual items that can help us interepret and understand the past through many lenses. Every item tells a story, or many stories - one that may be clear, and one that may be up for interpretation and expansion.
The Woman Suffrage Cook Book: Containing Throroughly Tested and Reliable Recipes for Cooking, Directions for the Care of the Sick, and Practical Suggestions, Contibuted Especially for This Work. Edited by Hattie A. Burr, printed by C. H. Simonds & Co., 1886.
The first overtly named suffrage cook book, this title contains recipes and household tips, from an impressive list of suffragists, including Lucy Stone, Frances Willard, and Matilda Joslyn Gage. With a mission to “advocate for the elevation and enfranchisement of woman”, it was created to be a fundraising tool and to appeal to women who were both in favor of suffrage and who ran their own households.
The Legal and Political Status of Women in the United States, Jennie L. Wilson, 1912.
This book is a reference guide to legal issues related to women across the United States, including marriage, the custody of children, age of consent, and property rights. Written eight years before its author could vote, the book served to education women about their existing rights. Jennie L. Wilson was a lawyer, and a member of the Iowa Bar Association. To read this book freely online via Harvard University Library, visit here.
Some Strange History, James Etheridge Callaway and Ida Husted Harper, 1918.
In some ways, this piece stands as a testament to the intersectionality of the women's movement. It contains anti-racist comments from Susan B. Anthony and others and a photograph of African American activist Hester Jeffrey, a friend of Anthony’s in Rochester. However, it is actually anti-suffrage propaganda, meant to convince white women and men in Georgia that the suffrage movement would threaten white supremacy and enfranchise black women.
A Winning Team: Pat and Dick Nixon's political button, 1968.
Sometimes it what isn't in a collection that can tell a story. RBSCP holds a large collection of mid-20th c. political buttons given by a single donor. In looking through the boxes of political pins, the only image or reference to a woman is in this button, which features Richard Nixon, Republican candidate for President of the United States, along with his wife, Pat.
Joint Discussion on Woman Suffrage invitation, 1913.
Florance Harmon Dock portrait, undated.
This printed invitation to the public debate between two women on opposing sides of the woman suffrage question opens a window into a complicated moment when women were gauging their levels of disenfranchisement, engagement, and political responsibility. Florence Harmon (see accompanying photograph) was a feminist leader, orator, lawyer, and Secretary of the Political Equality Association. Another copy of the card pasted into the scrapbook she assembled on the Suffrage Movement is accompanied by a letter of thanks praising her speech. Research and archival processing is being done on the scrapbook to find out more about her and her role in the Movement, and it will soon be available for use.
Kemp Hosiery advertisement, Rochester, NY.