A century after women won the right to vote, researchers are still trying to piece together their stories.
Through the Suffragist Stories Project in collaboration with the National Park Service, two dozen Towson University faculty members and undergraduate students from several disciplines pored for years through thousands of historical, mostly digitized, records of letters and biographical information to geographically map the international correspondence among roughly 900 activists, from prominent figures of the suffrage movement, like Frederick Douglass, to lesser-known local activists like Emily Howland.
The geographic information system, or GIS map — the same software used to build Johns Hopkins University and Medicine’s coronavirus dashboard and many other maps used for tracking — goes live Tuesday morning during a free virtual unveiling hosted by The Peale Center at 11 a.m.
The hourlong event will feature a presentation on the Suffragist Stories Project and a question-and-answer session with its creators at Towson and its Center for GIS and the National Park Service and the director of The Peale Center.
The interactive map links documented activists to more than 200 sites with historical significance to the women’s suffrage movement throughout the U.S., many of which function under the auspices of the National Park Service and can be visited today.
The Suffragist Stories Project is going live on the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that gave women the right to vote.
The amendment was passed by Congress on June 4, 1919, and ratified by the 36th and deciding state, Tennessee, on Aug. 18, 1920.
In Maryland, the amendment wasn’t ratified until 1941, likely given Maryland’s alignment with the Southern states, said Diana Bailey, executive director of the Maryland Women’s Heritage Center in Annapolis.
The Suffragist Stories Project gives its users the ability to learn about the hard-fought, and in many ways deeply segregated, suffrage movement by allowing them to select a historic figure from a list under the “Explore Suffragist Connections” tab or by zooming in to a geolocation on the map itself to learn more about the activists connected to that area.
In Maryland, for instance, one might learn about Nellie V. Mark, a Baltimore physician and graduate of the defunct Maryland College for Women in Lutherville who was heavily involved in promoting the suffrage movement in the late 1800s and early 1900s, including as vice president of the Association for the Advancement of Women, and in educating the public about health and women in the medical field.
By clicking Mark’s map marker — or the marker of any other suffragist — yellow lines spring out across the country and world, showing the subject’s communication with national figures and various historic sites.
In Maryland, those sites may include the Lyric, once known as The Lyric Theater, where the 38th National American Woman Suffrage Association was held in 1906, or in Baltimore County, Goucher College, where the activism of students and faculty alike earned the school a commemorative marker in February among the 250 sites across the country in the National Votes for Women Trail, which the Maryland Women’s Heritage Center helped fund.
“Those correspondence networks are really vital to understanding what kinds of support people relied on for the suffrage movement,” said Sam Collins, a cultural anthropologist and one of the leads on Towson’s role in the Suffragist Stories Project.
The database links to information from online sources, like historical societies, biographies, libraries and archives.
“When we look at the suffrage movement, in a lot of ways it looks a lot like movements do today; that’ s not what I expected,” Collins said. “There’s really no part of the country that wasn’t connected.”
Those connections span the bounds of time, too.
“People organizing today, like the Black Lives Matter [movement], that’s just not a stand-alone issue: They’re also working on other issues related to social justice,” Collins said. “It was the same as these people; [they were] using social media tools to do what people today do on Facebook.”
Research showed that the suffrage movement did not exist in a vacuum. Its leaders played roles in several aspects of social reform, including abolition (in its early days), labor reform and workers’ rights, and the socialist and temperance movements, Collins said.
The research also shows the racial divide that grew in the suffrage movement as it evolved, and as white women forced out Black women and other women of color, who have far fewer connections to national suffrage leaders, Collins said.
The divide was akin to Jim Crow segregation, he added, and so much of the activism of Black women was done locally and independently in their homes and churches.
Researchers have only just begun digging into the stories of Black suffragists over the past four years or so, Bailey said.
That’s in part due to shoddy historical documentation of the suffrage movement, and partly because “there’s been so little investment” in that research today, a problem that Bailey expects to persist given the economic impact of a global pandemic.
“The thinking at the time in historical societies, the kind of material they collected was men in wars and horses and things like that,” she said. “Right now, a lot of the stuff we’re finding was in somebody’s basement.”
The lack of documentation was a challenge for Collins’ team, too. Letters written by Susan B. Anthony are publicized and easy to find online, of course, but what about local suffragists like Emilie Doetsch, a Goucher College graduate who reported on the women’s march from New York to Washington? What about Edith Houghton Hooker, a powerhouse of Maryland’s movement?
“We know that every town, every city had its own [suffrage] group, but we don’t have their correspondence network,” Collins said.
That’s where the crowdsourcing comes in.
As an ever-evolving project, the Suffrage Stories Project includes a feature that allows the user to submit the name and upload information about a suffragist not already included in the database.
“We’re hoping just to get all kinds of people involved,” Collins said.