Suffrage

Dear Colleague,

Dear Colleague,

Dear Colleague,

*** We apologise for any cross-posting***

Hello, my name is Perri Meldon, and I work with the National Park Service on disability history initiatives.

Our summer intern is conducting research on American Deaf suffragists. She is especially interested in learning more about the Gallaudet alumnus Georgia Elliott Hasenstab.

She started her search by reviewing Dr. Joan Naturale's excellent Deaf Suffragists guide at RIT Libraries (https://infoguides.rit.edu/prf.php?account_id=43304). But our intern has struggled to track down more digitized information.

On the eve of ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, American women’s voting rights were literally a patchwork of half-measures. Suffrage maps used cross-hatching to indicate states where women could vote for president but not local offices, stripes for states where women could vote for local officials but not federal, stars for voting in primaries but not general elections, and on and on. The most common partial suffrage measure was “school suffrage”—women’s right to vote on local school matters. The National Woman Suffrage Publishing Co.

Ayala Foundation, Inc. - Filipinas Heritage Library, and 
Ayala Museum
present   

TARA, VOTE!
A Short History of Philippine Suffrage

On March 31, 1870, Thomas Mundy Peterson became the first African American in the United States to vote under the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution when he cast his ballot in a Perth Amboy, NJ, city charter referendum. Though he was encouraged to do so by his white employer and others, he went home for lunch first to think it over. One can imagine him mulling things over, perhaps dicussing it with Daphne, his wife, before making a choice that would make history.