Browse Items (215 total)

The woman suffrage movement coincided with major national reform movements seeking to improve public education, create public health programs, regulate business and industrial practices, and establish standards to ensure safety in food and public…

Like many “race leaders” in the early 20th century, Maggie L. Walker rose to prominence from modest beginnings as a result of her intellect, education, and business acumen. Her mother was a formerly enslaved woman and her father had served in the…

At the National American Woman Suffrage Association convention in 1919, President Carrie Chapman Catt proposed the creation of a “league of women voters to finish the fight and aid in the reconstruction of the nation.” Even before the ratification in…

As Americans prepared to send soldiers overseas during the First World War, the government reorganized the economy to better supply and equip its troops. Peacetime industries shifted towards producing necessary military goods like uniforms and…

At the turn of the twentieth century, the call for the  prohibition of alcohol had become a national issue, advocated by many politicians and pushed by several strong organizations. The American Temperance Society, started in 1826, acted as a support…

“At the Mercy of the Deluge” by artist George H, Ben Johnson was published in the Richmond Planet on July 19, 1919. A mail carrier and an artist, he began publishing editorial cartoons in the Richmond Planet in 1918. His cartoons appeared weekly in…

Early in the twentieth century, some Virginia women embraced the fight for equal voting rights and organized the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia in 1909. Many women, however, opposed such efforts and a group in Richmond established the Virginia…

World War I brought about great shifts in American society. As the war began, women were not allowed to vote or serve in military combat roles. As the nation was gripped by war, the entire population mobilized to produce weapons and supplies for the…

World War I brought about great shifts in American society. As the nation was gripped by war, the entire population mobilized to produce weapons and supplies for the troops. One way in which they supported the war effort was through the purchasing of…

The fight for woman suffrage was a decades-long struggle that included many participants who held different opinions on how to achieve the goal of voting rights for women. In 1915, suffragists in Virginia split over this issue. Since its founding in…