At the Free Library of Philadelphia, I visited an excellent women’s suffrage exhibit, which included recent scholarship on African American involvement in the suffrage movement. I spotted this exhibit case on the African American writer Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s suffrage work –known through her scrapbook.
There’s a larger online exhibit on Alice Dunbar-Nelson which picks up on some of her other scrapbooks, too, but omits the suffrage work. It’s hosted by the Rosenbach Library: The Authorship and Activism of Alice Dunbar-Nelson. It was organized by Jesse Erickson and his University of Delaware students, using the Alice Dunbar-Nelson materials in the UDel archives. Impressive work!
Membership card, Women’s Social and Political Union
Scrapbooks for the vote across the Atlantic! I’ve been delighted to learn more about how British suffragists, too, used scrapbooks to record their work and save their history. One remarkable collection in the British Library of 37 bulging hardback scrapbooks offers a personal history of suffrage activism created by Alice Maud Mary Arncliffe Sennett (1862-1936). This actor turned confectioner/businesswoman and activist public speaker saved plenty of newspaper clippings, but preserved significant memorabilia, too, like the key to the hotel room where her husband stayed when he picked her up from Holloway Prison, either from when she was detained for smashing the Daily Mail’s office windows or an earlier imprisonment.
Cherish Watton’s blog article highlights letters Arncliffe Sennett received about her speeches that she pasted down. Not surprising that she saved letters from movement leaders, but there’s one from her servant Bessie Punchard, who wrote, “Do you know you made a simply splendid speech, I was so proud of you,” and told her she would happily go to prison herself if it would help the cause. Arncliffe Sennett reciprocated Bessie Punchard’s regard, dedicating one of her scrapbook volumes to Bessie, “the only one true and trusted friend I have found…the star to which I have hitched by wagon of loneliness.”
Arncliffe Sennett’s scrapbooks reminds us that while historians may focus on the rifts between different suffrage factions, people inside a movement may not be so concerned with these divisions. Arncliffe Sennett saved membership cards and other materials that show she belonged – sometimes simultaneously – to two different wings of the suffrage movement, the British Library’s page about these scrapbooks explains.
This entry rounds out the Scrapbook History blog series on scrapbooks and voting. When I started the series in the fall, before the US election, I wanted to highlight how important the vote was to African Americans and women’s rights advocates who kept scrapbooks. African American men and women saved evidence of white supremacists trying to keep Black people from voting, and Black people worked hard and brought lawsuits to vote, saved items about their work and honored exemplary voters in their scrapbooks. Since when I post in this blog the items go to my Writing with Scissors Facebook page, I thought I could publicize the articles to present-day scrapbooking enthusiasts who might not realize that there is a real, long history of people being blocked from voting.
I tried to pay to use Facebook’s “boost post” feature to reach groups I wouldn’t know people in otherwise. But Facebook’s algorithms decided that the history of voter suppression and the history of women’s suffrage were politically partisan, and blocked me from publicizing the items, despite my attempts to reason with them. (One objection they or their bots raised was that Facebook users in other parts of the world might be offended by women’s suffrage.) Facebook also blocked me from tagging more than half a dozen teacher and professor friends who might have been interested in using the pieces in class. It was frustrating, but I will try to work out some way to re-engage the blog for the next election.
Please enjoy and share the posts here on how people used scrapbooks to save the history of the struggle for the vote.
I first saw a Beecher family-related scrapbook when Minton Brooks asked me to look at one now in the Brooklyn Historical Society, made by his ancestor Henry F. Minton. Henry Minton was Henry Ward Beecher’s parishioner, and had been riveted enough by
Harriet’s daughter Hattie Stowe made a cat scrapbook! (Schlesinger Library)
his minister’s doings in the unfolding Beecher Tilton sex scandal to compile clippings about them in his scrapbook, along with his own interests as a homeopathic doctor. It was the kind of unfolding news story that often inspired newspaper clipping scrapbook making. A scrapbook allowed you to collect all the sidepaths and follow them all across different newspapers.
But the Beechers and
Henry Minton scrapbook
Stowes and their friends themselves had different ideas of what to collect. And old newspapers could be turned into data, abolitionists realized in creating American Slavery as It Is – the book that Harriet Beecher Stowe kept under her pillow when writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Alice Dunbar-Nelson, in the photo taken around 1900, which appeared in the many newspaper articles about her suffrage work in 1915.
My article in today’s Washington Post “Made by History” section, “How a new exhibit corrects our skewed understanding of women’s suffrage: Addressing racism in the suffrage movement” tells about the fabulous exhibit, “Votes for Women,” opening today at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. This exhibit avoids the narrow “Seneca Falls to 1920” framing of women’s struggles for the vote to include the activism of African American churchwomen, clubwomen, and educators, and later civil rights activists, and Native Americans and Puerto Ricans, whose timeline for getting the vote was very different.
My article focused on Alice Dunbar-Nelson, an African American writer, speaker, teacher, and all around activist, whose portrait is in the exhibit. Her story, not in the exhibit, is fascinating. I learned about her 1915 campaign tour for suffrage through her scrapbook – really the only record there is of this work. The news articles she collected about her speeches were in local papers, not digitized or even microfilmed. She was bold enough to think that evidence of her work should be saved, and savvy enough to realize that if she didn’t do it, no one else would. Her scrapbook is thus almost the only trace we have of the very particular arguments for suffrage she addressed to the black community.
If the Washington Post article whets your appetite, you can read more about Alice
Photo of a gathering of black suffrage activist, 1917. Anyone know who is who?
The exhibit catalog has an eye-opening essay by Martha S. Jones – essential reading on African American suffrage involvement: “The Politics of Black Womanhood, 1848-2008.”
Auburn is not far from Syracuse and Ithaca — come on over.
This will be my last talk for Humanities New York’s Public Scholars Program, which is coming to an end. Audiences have been enthusiastic, and I hope to keep giving talks.
Last minute announcement – Humanities NY and the Desmond-Fish Library in Garrison, NY have asked me to fill in tonight, June 29, 6:30 in the library’s suffrage series. Come hear my talk Scrapbooks and the Hidden Life of Suffrage:
Anti-suffragists’ scrapbooks reveal some of their tricks.
How did suffragists manage all the different arguments and strands of information to create a powerful and effective movement that spanned decades? They used scrapbooks: a form of distributed, decentralized information storage and history writing. In their scrapbooks, suffragists collected the history of their movement, strategized about public speaking, and explained their work to their families. Scrapbooks played a key role in transmitting tactics and stories. Susan B. Anthony fought to place her 13 volume scrapbook in the Library of Congress. Alice Dunbar Nelson clipping collection reveal her shaping her specifically African American vision of what women’s suffrage would do for the black community. Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s scrapbook became a multi-generation collaboration. Lillie Devereux Blake used her clippings in her speeches against domestic violence, and taught her readers how to use scrapbooks.
In the 1910s, as the suffrage movement sped toward ratification, it became increasingly professionalized and ran its own clipping services. Scrapbooks supported its growing public relations campaigns. Anti-suffragists used the same materials, though the scrapbook of a dedicated anti-suffragist PR woman shows her busy inventing facts to get her stories noticed.
These scrapbooks open a window into the lives of the thousands of ordinary women who became suffragists. They let us see how these earlier generations of campaigners and supporters used the press, while they reveal an intimate side of well known suffragists.
We met back in August at Butler Library at Columbia University and talked about the hundred or so scrapbooks of L.S. Alexander Gumby, the great gay scrapbooker of the Harlem Renaissance, which are there, though I didn’t get to explicate them on camera. We also talked about others, not at Columbia — William Dorsey’s over 400; the scrapbook Mark Twain invented, suffrage scrapbooks like Elizabeth Boynton Harbert’s, and one pasted into a book of sermons. Jennifer asked great questions, and I’m very eager to see what made it into the show!
And why did it take so long to air? Oddly enough, they’ve been covering more about politics this year.
So excited to be giving my first talk on scrapbooks for the Public Scholars in the Humanities program of the New York State Council for the Humanities, which has 31 scholars giving talks around the state. I have been completely wowed by those I met at our workshops last summer — Richard Heyl de Ortiz, who speaks about the foster care system, Sally Roesch Wagner, who speaks on the 19c women’s rights movement, and the cartoonist Robert Sikoryak who graciously shlepped to my university in Jersey City to give a brilliant presentation on the history of cartoons/graphic novels, and two dozen more. Just looking at the list of speakers again is inspiring. If you’re in NY State, your organization can invite one! Or more!
Tomorrow I head upstate to speak about scrapbooks at the History Center of Niagara, hard by the Erie Canal, with stops in Glen Falls along the way. I hope people respond to the invitation to bring their scrapbooks (50 years old or more — the scrapbooks, not the people). I’ll bring some of mine, too. And yes, I’ll talk about how people without much power — African Americans, women’s rights advocates — used scrapbooks to speak back to the media.
Thursday, May 19, 7 pm. Niagara County Historical Society, 215 Niagara Street, Lockport, NY14094. Looking forward to seeing you!
Scrapbooks in the collection of the Maine Historical Society
Society’s collection, from a backlog stretching back 50 years. What riches! Who would have thought the post office kept a scrapbook? I’m particularly curious about Scrapbook #7, on scrap and salvage during World War II. Often the only copies of rare newspapers disappeared into such efforts — and even scrapbooks disappeared into the salvage maw. The Maine Historical Society has many organizational and club scrapbooks — a type I didn’t do much with in Writing with Scissors. Is anyone working with that category? The descriptions of these scrapbooks show they are a rich trove for anyone working on Maine history, surely much else. If I ever get up to Portland…
Page from Scrapbook of Ruth Emerson Fletcher, Class of 1893, Bryn Mawr College Special Collections
Launched! Great new project digitizing documents of women’s education includes scrapbooks as well as letters, diaries, and photos reaching to the 19th century. College Women: Documenting the History of Women in Higher Education. College Women now covers women who attended the seven partner institutions Formerly Known As the 7 Sisters: Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Smith, Vassar, Wellesley, and Radcliffe. The plan is to bring in the experiences of women beyond these elite institutions, and then its value as a resource for both research and teaching will expand exponentially. It’s still very much a work in progress, both technically, in tagging for search terms, and in what has been scanned. Do pitch in with your comments. As someone on the advisory board, it has been fascinating to watch the push and pull between technical questions and ways of maximizing its use for researchers.
s rare, riveting photograph of Harriet Tubman, probably taken around 1911 at her home in Auburn, NY, was in one of the scrapbooks kept by Elizabeth Smith Miller and Anne Fitzhugh Miller. They were ardent suffragists, and the daughter and granddaughter of abolitionist Gerrit Smith. You can see 
Scrapbook History 