Artifacts of the Women's Suffrage Movement

2019 marks the centennial of the passage of the 19th Amendment (ratified by the Congress in 1919 - by the states in 1920) which made it a woman's constitutional right to vote.  This is a virtual look at materials that are currently on display in the atrium of the Haas Library until 2020.

WestConn was founded (1903) as the debate over whether women should have the right to vote was reaching its zenith.  In fact, WestConn was established to train teachers, at first all women, in order to fulfill the State's mandates for public education.  Partly, it was women like the students at WestConn who were employed outside the home that exposed the hypocrisy of excluding half of the voting-age-population from full citizenship, while relying on that unrepresented half's labor to fuel the economy. 

The following exhibit is a sampling of some of the items in the WCSU Archives that illuminate this pivotal period from the 1890s until the early 1920s.

Though women's struggle for the right to vote began much earlier, we begin this exhibit with artifacts from the 1890s.

The artifacts utilized for this exhibit are all items held by or available for use at the WCSU Archives.  Items include original voter lists, photographs, periodicals, books, pamphlets, postcards, and newspaper clippings.

See a video presentation of objects in this exhibit.

Note: items from the clippings section have been digitized from microfilm and the scans have been enhanced for aesthetic purposes.  All newspaper items viewable here are available on microfilm at the Haas Library.