Women and Social Movements in the United States (Web)

To celebrate the centennial of the White House picketing for woman suffrage that began in January of 1917, the editors of Women and Social Movements in the United States invite women’s history faculty and students and independent scholars to join a crowdsourcing experiment.

Historian Jill Zahniser compiled extensive information about women suffrage picketers and their supporters, which we published as a database in the March 2015 issue of WASM. Women from 35 states and the District of Columbia are represented in the database. Jill Zahniser has launched this project by constructing the database and writing 500-word biographical sketches of six women activists. Another 28 already have biographical sketches in Notable American Women. We seek to assemble biographical sketches of the remaining 190 picketers and their supporters for whom there are no authoritative biographical sketches. Will 20 faculty in U.S. women’s history volunteer to mentor students in their classes between now and June 2017 in the methods of researching and writing these remaining biographical sketches of militant woman suffragists? Are there graduate students or independent scholars who would volunteer to write one or two of these sketches?

This collaborative project offers a rare opportunity to engage in the research, interpretation, and writing of women’s history for a broad public. Contributors will receive authorship credit for their work and can view the online publication of these sketches as a contribution to the approaching centennial celebration of the passage of Woman Suffrage in the United States.

In the summer of 2017, Jill Zahniser will edit these new suffragist sketches and they will be published in the fall 2017 issue of Women and Social Movements in the United States. We will also add to the NWP Suffragists Database new information discovered about any of these activists.

If you do not have access to Women and Social Movements in the United States we will provide you access to the excel spreadsheet which contains this database and related files from the project. We have prepared guidelines to researching these woman suffrage activists that we can send you. And we will supply you with names and biographical information about activists to research. To join this project, please contact WASM co-editor, Tom Dublin at tdublin@binghamton.edu, who will be coordinating the crowdsourcing activity.

Source: H-Net Notifications