This broadside was one of many produced by the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia (ESL) to advocate voting rights for women during the 1910s. About twenty women met in Richmond in 1909 to establish the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia to advocate…
The National League of Women Voters was established in 1920, the year that the Nineteenth Amendment granting women the right to vote was ratified. The League's purpose was "to unite all existing organizations of women who believe in its principles.…
For a significant portion of American history, women were not allowed to vote. Although they were considered citizens, voting was considered a privilege and not a right and thus not extended to women. In the the 19th century, a small number of women…
American society underwent changes during both WWI and WWII. The roles of women shifted from domestic roles as caretakers and home makers to working in male- dominated fields like agriculture and manufacturing in factories. Many factories shifted…
"Agitate – Educate – Legislate” was the slogan of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, which advocated the prohibition of alcohol. Established in 1874 in Ohio, the union became a national movement and Virginia women established a state chapter in…
“The Age of Iron” was published by the New York printing firm of Currier and Ives in 1869. It satirized the woman suffrage movement that was gaining widespread support in America during that time.The woman suffrage movement took root in 1848 at the…
After the United States entered WW I in 1917, young men who worked in agriculture left to join the military or find better jobs working for the government and the burgeoning defense industry. The departure of them men left farms without enough people…
Touted as the largest and most magnificent exposition of all time, the New York World’s Fair opened at Flushing Meadows in April 1939. In the Court of States, one exhibition was strikingly different from the rest: the Virginia Room, “an island of…
Commonwealth causes are criminal cases filed by a county's prosecuting attorney (commonwealth's attorney) against individuals who violate Virginia law. Prior to the abolition of slavery in Virginia in 1865, criminal offenders and victims included…
Pocahontas was the daughter of Powhatan, the powerful paramount chief of the Algonquin Indians in eastern Virginia, which the Indigenous Virginians called Tsenacomoco. She was about eleven years old when the English colonists arrived in 1607.…