Online Biographical Dictionary of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States

Abstract

The 2020 centennial of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment inspired an impressive array of books, articles, museum exhibits, and public humanities projects encouraging us to revisit, revise, and, in some cases, revolutionize our understanding of women's long (and ongoing) fight for the vote. At the forefront of the new digital projects stands the Online Biographical Dictionary of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States (Obd), edited by Thomas Dublin and Kathryn Kish Sklar. The Obd is connected with the Women and Social Movements Database (Wasmd), launched by Sklar in 1997 and published by Alexander Street Press. What makes the Obd so useful, however, is that Dublin and Sklar negotiated with the publisher to offer the resource both as part of the subscription-only Wasmd and as a stand-alone Web site available for free to anyone with an Internet connection. The result is a monumental biographical database comprising what will soon be more than 3,700 women suffragists. Most of these women were engaged in suffrage and other reform efforts at the local and state levels, so their names will be new to historians and laypeople. For user convenience, more well-known national leaders are also included in the database via links to their biographical entries in Notable American Women (1971), in partnership with the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard University. The entries are organized into three parts, mirroring the suffrage movement's divisions: Militant Women Suffragists—The National Woman's Party (Nwp); Black Women Suffragists; and Mainstream Suffragists—The National American Woman Suffrage Association (Nawsa).