Mary E. Britton

The National Collaborative for Women's History Sites (NCWHS) is leading the effort to develop a National Votes for Women Trail (NVWT), originally as a part of the celebrations commemorating the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment. (For more information about this national project, visit the About page at their website: https://ncwhs.org/votes-for-women-trail/about-the-trail/.) The William G. Pomeroy Foundation sponsors the NVWT with donations of the distinctive NVWT national markers.

With the support of the Kentucky Woman Suffrage Project (KWSP), Kentucky has approximately 200 sites on the

Soon after Kansas granted women the right to vote in municipal elections, Kentuckian Mary E. Britton put aside the racial differences that had torn apart the women's suffrage groups during the 1860s and spoke of her new-found commitment to the cause. She bravely spoke before her teacher colleagues - men and women - at a statewide conference at a church in Danville on July 7, 1887. In this speech, she explains her change from her activism in fighting for "human rights" to fighting for women's rights was a recent one. She argues for the full empowerment of women as co-equal with men and in

This post was co-written by Dr. Randolph Hollingsworth (coordinator for the Kentucky Woman Suffrage Project) and Dr. Margaret Spratt (coordinator for the Tennessee entries for the Women and Social Movements in the U.S. project on woman suffrage) as they consider a proposal to the National Endowment for the Humanities for a community outreach project to include both Kentucky and Tennessee:

In Kentucky, the suffragists Laura Clay and Madeline McDowell Breckinridge held a debate in 1919 focusing on the differences in political ideology that impact state and municipal powers as a check on federal