Book Review: “Rosalie Gardiner Jones and the Long March for Women’s Rights” (McFarland) By Zachary Michael Jack Even with my hundreds of clippings of the “Pilgrim’s March” in March of 1913, there are always gaps in our understanding. In the Elisabeth Freeman collection there are precious few personal references that would help us understand how […]
I love fiction. Historical fiction is one of my favorites and I suspect that a lot of people get their history facts from these books. The good thing is that most historical fiction authors are pretty good about sticking with the facts although they make up dialogue and personalities, hence the fiction. But if you […]
Who doesn’t love playing dress up? Well, me for one, but not so our heroine Elisabeth Freeman. She loved fancy dresses and used her fashion sense to draw attention to her cause. Take the “Pilgrim’s Hike” from NY to DC in February 1911 to join the Women’s March the day before Woodrow Wilson’s Inaugural. (Talk […]
Talk about Elisabeth Freeman as a footnote in history!! Thomas Edison was perfecting the first “talkies”–film and sound recordings synced. Casting about for a popular topic he turned to Votes for Women, which was then most controversial. Freeman’s mission was to generate so much awareness of the cause that it became dinner time conversation in […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
