Votes for Women:
A 75th Anniversary Album
by Ellen DuBois and Karen Kearns
with an introduction by Anne Firor Scott

Of all the reforms that came out of the nineteenth century, woman suffrage has the longest history. It took women seventy-five years, and several generations of activists, to convince men of the efficacy of allowing women the right to vote. The long struggle for suffrage, and the generations of women and men who fought for and against it, are admirably represented in the collections at the Huntington Library.

From the introduction:

The items described in this publication are drawn from the remarkable collections of the Huntington Library. Behind each item, any student of woman suffrage will see whole stories. For people new to the subject, the same objects will provide views of this extraordinary social movement which after years and years of work led in 1920 to the enfranchisement of American women, or at least of white women.

It would be possible to look back even further, to Margaret Brent in the seventeenth century demanding a vote in the Maryland Assembly, to Hannah Corbin Lee in eighteenth-century Virginia asking why she, a taxpayer, was not permitted to vote, to other individuals here and there through the years before 1848. But in 1848 came the first formal demand for woman suffrage from a substantial number of women and men.

...Indeed, open to almost any page, trace out the meaning of the artifact you are seeing, and there you are in the midst of one of the most significant social-political movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

This 1888 magazine cover illustration portrays Wyoming women exercising their right of franchise—a right they alone held after Utah women were disenfranchised the previous year.

Advertisement for Shredded Wheat used the issue of woman suffrage to sell its products.

Poster of Inez Milholland Boissevain, who became a martyr in the cause following her death on the woman suffrage campaign trail in 1916.

The Woman's Party journal, The Suffragist, celebrates the Senate's passage of the woman suffrage amendment to the U.S. Constitution.