Online Biographical Dictionary of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States:
WASM Edition
Introduction (December 2020)
By Thomas Dublin and Kathryn Kish Sklar
We have now posted five installments of the Online Biographical Dictionary of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States containing more than 2,950 biographical sketches of grassroots women suffragists. We will be adding to the database regularly over the next year and when complete it will include crowdsourced biographical sketches of more than 3,600 women suffrage activists, primarily concentrated in the period 1890-1920. We are aiming for an inclusive collection, including white and black suffragists, mainstream and militant suffragists. The sketches will place women's suffrage activism within the frame of women's broader social agenda, before and after the passage of the 19th Amendment in August 1920.
In March 2015 we published the first six biographical sketches of militant suffragists who were active in the picketing of the White House in response to the call of the National Woman’s Party. At that time we began the crowdsourcing effort that has made this project possible, reaching out to interest our readers in researching and writing biographical sketches of NWP activists. Since then we have expanded the project to include Black women suffragists and mainstream suffragists affiliated with the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
Thanks to Our Hundreds of Volunteers—Especially State Coordinators
The database has grown organically from its modest beginnings with many decisions along the way that have shaped the database that you are accessing today. Database editor Tom Dublin has prepared a brief essay describing the work process that has been involved.
Combined with the online technology of Alexander Street, your contributions have made it possible to offer this freestanding edition of the Online Biographical Dictionary of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States.
As of April 10, 2020 we have identified about 80 suffragists as "impossible to find." They are part of the original groups of activists identified for NAWSA and the NWP, but volunteers were unable to find enough information about them to write biographical sketches. Click here to view the two lists and contact Tom Dublin if you know something about any of these suffragists and would like to write a 500-word biographical sketch.
To cite a biographical sketch from the Online Biographical Dictionary follow this example:
Author, "Biography of [Name of activist]," Online Biographical Dictionary of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States, accessed online at [provide URL of the sketch].
The search window below accesses the full database. For full-text searching, place phrases in double quotes.
Black Women Suffragists (BWS) – Brief Overview
Our compilation of biographical sketches on black women suffragists began in 2008 with a list of seventy suffragists who appeared in Rosalyn Terborg-Penn’s pathbreaking 1998 book, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850-1920. Biographical sketches of many in this group appeared in the encyclopedias Notable American Women and Dictionary of American Negro Biography. We have obtained permission to include those sketches here. We then commissioned new sketches for activists not included in these encyclopedias.
During the past decade we pursued further research, much in black newspapers newly available online, which allowed us to identify more than 300 additional black women suffragists. For some we had only their names and where they lived; for others we had more information, such as their participation in church or community organizations. Excited about how this new group could expand our historical knowledge of black women in the suffrage movement, we decided to commission volunteers to research and write biographical sketches of them. Our crowd-sourcing call for volunteers has been enormously successful. Generous researchers and writers have created biographical sketches that shed new light on black women suffragists and their communities.
We began our research on black women suffragists by assembling their published writings. As part of The Writings of Black Women Suffragists, we created an individual page for each suffragist with links to writings by and about her. In March 2014 we published the first online installment of these pages, which now are hyperlinked to about 2,100 writings by and about black women suffragists.
We are now creating individual pages for the newly-identified black women suffragists, adding them to the earlier collection derived from the work of Professor Terborg-Penn. We have renamed the expanded project The Black Women Suffragists Collection. Although many individual pages do not now include links to writings, we will add such links as we discover writings of these additional suffrage activists. Currently, this Black Women Suffragists section includes 290 biographical sketches. More will follow at regular intervals until the OBD is completed in late 2021.
Militant Woman Suffragists – Brief Overview
Our collection of biographical sketches of militant suffragists affiliated with the National Woman’s Party (NWP) began with a document project prepared for Women and Social Movements by historian Jill Zahniser. Published in March 2015, that project included a database of 224 women who picketed the White House in 1917-1919 in the final push for passage of the 19th Amendment. Many were arrested and imprisoned and force-fed when they engaged in a hunger strike. To this project Dr. Zahniser added six biographical sketches of women in this database. We have included the biographical sketches of militant activists treated in Notable American Women and other published sources for which we secured permissions. For those militant suffragists without published sketches, we reached out to our readers and other networks to crowdsource biographical sketches for the remaining activists. That outreach generated more research and the militant group has now grown from 224 to 420, as Jill Zahniser and others found new activists and additional NWP demonstrations beyond Washington, D.C.
Mainstream Woman Suffragists – Brief Overview
With these two suffragist projects launched, we decided to include mainstream suffragists in our work. We discovered the source that made that possible in volume 6 of the History of Woman Suffrage (1922), which consisted of about 700 pages of reports describing women suffrage activities between 1900 and 1920 in all 48 states and the District of Columbia. Published by the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), and compiled by leaders in each of the states, these reports contained the names of some 2,700 state-level suffrage activists in the campaigns of those decades. These grassroots activists were affiliated with the predominantly white state affiliates of NAWSA, thus complementing the black suffragists and militant white NWP activists of our two initial suffrage groups.
As with our earlier suffragists, we published calls for volunteers and have worked with teams in every state to research and write biographical sketches of thousands of women whose stories have not previously been gathered into public view. As with our two other groups, this research generated additional suffrage leaders overlooked by the contributors to volume 6 of the History of Woman Suffrage. As of this writing (June 2020), that group has grown to 2,930 suffrage activists.
The project has expanded significantly as we have worked on it. While it includes women active in the early decades from 1850 to 1900, it is especially strong in its coverage of activists who built the large and diverse woman suffrage movement during the final two decades before passage of the 19th Amendment.
There are duplicates across the three groups—NWP militants who also worked with NAWSA; black suffragists active in the NWP or in some of the NAWSA state affiliates; NAWSA activists whose names appear in two or more state reports—but we still anticipate the final database will include about 3,700 women suffrage activists, most of whom are new to historians and students of history.
Black Woman Suffragists | Militant Woman Suffragists | NAWSA Suffragists