In this activity, describe your initial idea for a final project. What is your main topic? What kinds of primary sources might you use? Who is your intended audience and how will they engage with the project?
My initial idea was to further evaluate women physicians from the eclectic medical college in Cincinnati (from last semester’s project) who also became activists for women’s right to vote, like Alice Stockham. This led me to early female physicians who also were suffragists, like Harriot Keza Hunt and Dr. Anna Shaw. I may not keep this focus, but this is my starting point. So far, my early primary sources will be the women’s magazine archive, the library of Congress, and the Library of Virginia. Initially, I was also fascinated by the National Women’s Party and the fires they had in front of the White House on New Year’s Day, 1919, so I may incorporate that and how the movie, Iron Jawed Angels, depicted this compared to the primary sources about the events. The anti-suffragist paper “The Woman Patriot” described this event as a riot. However, since there is a movie and a teaching exhibit website done by the Library of Congress about these events already, I may need to change my focus to local or state archives and have been looking at the Ida Mae Thompson archive at the Library of Virginia. I may make a trip there to look at some of the materials on the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia and see if I am allowed to take photos and digitize them as primary sources for a focused website. Virginia did not ratify the amendment for women to vote until 1952. The suffrage movements and anti-suffragist primary sources are plentiful and digitized at the Library of Congress website. Still, the state of Virginia has a lot of boxes of suffrage material in Richmond and could see what that is there has not been digitized and do a website on a few materials there. The audience will be students interested in USA history and women’s history. I hope to get some guidance on narrowing the topic to maybe one person or event within the women’s suffrage movement.
