Manuscripts
The collection consists primarily of letters gathered by Ida Husted Harper relating to the women's suffrage movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many of these letters are to suffragists Susan B. Anthony or Elizabeth Cady Stanton; senders include Frederick Douglass, Lucy Stone, Samuel May, Sallie Holley, Francis Jackson, William Lloyd Garrison, Theodore Tilton, Wendell Phillips, George F. Train, Mary Livermore, Victoria Woodhull, Clara Barton, Mary Booth, Wendell Phillips Garrison, Fanny Villard, Felix Adler, Julia Ward Howe, Annie Besant, Angelina Grimke Weld, Frances E. Willard, Kate Field, Jane Stanford, and Robert Dale Owen, among others. Other correspondents in the collection include Theodore Parker, Gerrit Smith, William T. Stead, Abigail Mott, and Lydia Mott. There is one letter from Susan B. Anthony to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1872 November 5. In addition, there are a number of letters in the collection to Ida Husted Harper, most of them regarding her biography of Susan B. Anthony and the suffrage movement. Harper's correspondents include Eugene V. Debs, Frances E. Willard, Carrie Chapman Catt, Julia Ward Howe, Mary Livermore, Amalia Condert, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Ida Tarbell, Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer (aka "Dorothy Dix"), Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Alva E. Belmont, and Anna Howard Shaw. The collection also contains letters from US presidents James A. Garfield, William McKinley, William H. Taft, and Theodore Roosevelt.
mssHM 10497-10731
