The Privilege of History
One of my favorite TV shows is Henry Louis Gates’ “Finding Your Roots” where a couple of celebrities get the benefit of genealogical tools and DNA tracking to discover who their ancestors are and where they came from. Needless to say, it’s transformative for his guests, particularly black and brown people, whose histories were quite […]
Suffrage Jewelry
Following up on the Wishbone Ring, my cousin asks if there was other “suffrage jewelry.” I’m sure there were lots of cloisonne pins and of course buttons, which might count as jewelry in my wardrobe. But the most prized piece was that presented to English suffragettes who had done prison time for their beliefs. It’s […]
The Wishbone Ring
A side line of Elisabeth’s–and every freelance activist needs a second gig–was selling antiques. When she was on the road, she carried some watches to sell. One specialty was seriously old pocket watches (the size of a baseball), and also creating rings out of the ornate watch cocks from fancy watches. Elisabeth had a store* […]
Freeman on Strategic Use of Wagons
I participated in a zoom presentation sponsored by the Historical Society of Woodstock. on Sat. Oct. 1oth called “Standing on Their Shoulders: 100 Years of Voting and Still Marching for Women’s Rights.” Elisabeth and Edna Kearns were the shoulders in this case and they both traveled about in horse drawn wagons to draw attention to […]
The Vote
Hopefully you have seen the PBS American Experience two part series called The Vote. If not: Watch it! Stream it! Elisabeth was well represented in the series and I recall talking with the researchers a year ago or so. What a thrill it must be to put together a narrative like this! It’s a great […]
Anti-Lynching in 1916
When Elisabeth Freeman showed her niece Ruthie (my mother) the scrapbook detailing her activism, she instructed her not to look at one section. “It was,” she said, “too terrible for a young girl.” * My mother ignored her warning but she was not wrong—there were gruesome images of the torture and lynching of a young […]
No Rest for the Weary
Due to an undiagnosed malady–a bellyache–I have been prescribed “rest” among other odious measures. Perhaps you can imagine what anathema this is for me: a sunny three day weekend and I’m not supposed to work in the garden? Really?! I am compromising by resting between small tasks, a tomato plant here, a weed or two […]
You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby!
When I was just a young pup, having been unceremoniously chucked out of grad school before it even started, I happened upon the scrapbook of Elisabeth Freeman’s activist career that my mother had lovingly kept. Well, you can imagine! I was obsessed, and unemployed. Poring over the scrapbook night after night, I found an article […]
Sisterly Support
This blog topic comes to me by way of Tom Dublin, Binghamton University Professor Emeritus of Women’s History and sharer extraordinaire. I may have mentioned that researchers in this field are incredibly generous when they find mention of Elisabeth Freeman, and none more so than Tom, who also co-authored an article with me in an […]
Colonel Ida Craft
I’ve become expert at spotting an image of Elisabeth Freeman from even the grainiest of old photos, but there is another figure that always pops out at me: Ida Craft, better known as Colonel Ida Craft. She is the square faced serious one that you might mistake for an earlier crusader against the evils of […]
The Elisabeth Freeman Blog
March 28, 2020 OK, so it’s the tail end of Women’s History Month, in the 100th Anniversary of Women’s Suffrage in the U.S., and Corona distractions be damned, I’m going to start this blog! I am fortunate to be the heir and keeper of Elisabeth Freeman’s papers, which consist primarily of a giant scrapbook of […]