Hey guys, happy Thursday!
I have been doing some hard reflection since the last class, and my reflection hovers around what we don’t learn in school. I remember vividly the paragraph on Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycotts and how the movement initiated from her actions. I never knew the surrounding history – the year and a half of discontent surrounding the actions of the city and the buses and the threats of boycott. I was left wondering what else I did not learn from major events that surrounded major events.
I have been conducting my own research now, and one topic that has recently come to my mind is voting; I have seen signs go up around my community recently for the state senate vote. I think back on my education and I have to thank Susan B. Anthony for my ability to vote in these elections and all others, but I was curious to see if I was maybe missing some information.
Apparently, there were two suffragist groups fighting for voting rights for women – one was the National Women Suffrage Association (NWSA), formed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and the other was the American Women Suffrage Association (AWSA), formed by Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (teachinghistory.org). I never learned the names of Lucy Stone or Julia Ward Howe, or Thomas Wentworth Higginson! These two groups also supplied different tactics to earn the right to vote for women. NWSA went straight for petitioning the US House and US Senate to earn the right to vote, whereas the AWSA aimed to get local and city governments to approve the right to vote for women to eventually get support for the nation to earn the right.
Additionally, I learned that the suffrage movement started and ended with Susan B. Anthony – because of her work, white women across the United States had earned the right to vote. While it is true that she was a major figurehead of the suffrage movement, she passed away almost 15 years before the country had added the 19th amendment to the Constitution!
Tennessee’s ratification of the 19th Amendment, 1920.
We missed so many other men and women suffragists who worked hard to ensure white women had the right to vote, so why do we only learn about Susan B. Anthony? Why don’t we learn that suffragists held the first picket recorded on White House grounds in 1917, and they conduct this picket for THREE YEARS, six days a week, to earn the right to vote? They were called the ‘Silent Sentinels’ because they would never speak at their picket, they would let their banners speak for them – I mean, how cool is that?
It is so amazing to continue to learn as we move on in our class, our programs, and just in general, but I think should be taken as an important reminder that we may not learn all of the information that we need to get an idea of the whole event. As we become teachers, this will remain important as we try to help our students become historians. Also, I think everyone should take a moment (when (and if!) you have free time) to explore the teachinghistory.org website; it does give great lesson plans, as Drs. Stohr and Bland had said and it has awesome background information and primary sources to look at and learn more information from. All of the images and facts I used tonight originated from teachinghistory.org, and lead me to this website: https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/woman-suffrage#background
Lexie