Exploring the Legacy
of Leadership Through
Primary Sources: The
Women’s Suffrage
Movement
L
Cheryl Lederle, Rebecca Newland, and Stephen Wesson
Library of Congress
eadership and legacy are a bit like the chicken and the
do so in part because of the organizing and activism of these
works? In either case, there is no better way to explore the
newly popular medium of newspaper photographs to spread
egg: No one can be sure which comes first. Is someone
seen as a leader because of the legacy he or she has left,
or does a leader rise and incidentally leave a legacy of good
legacy of a leader than by analyzing the primary sources that
leader left behind, or ones left by others that bear witness to
the leader’s impact.
The fight for women’s suffrage in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries called forth several generations of leaders, including
many women who had traditionally been discouraged from
taking leadership roles outside of the home. These activists
fought and organized for decades to secure women’s right to
vote, gaining victory after gradual victory until 1920, when
the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution asserted that
“The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be
denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on
account of sex.”
However, the legacy of the suffrage campaign in America is
not limited to the ballot box. While their primary objective
was the right to vote, the suffragists also began to focus
attention on the expansion of rights for women as human
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beings, taxpayers, and full members of society. Women today
who attend colleges and universities and embark on careers
NATIONAL HISTORY DAY 2015
generations of suffrage leaders. The legacy of the suffragists
can also be seen in their protest methods. They used public
forms of peaceful protest such as picketing, parades, and the
their message. More than 40 years later, civil rights activists
of the 1960s similarly used new forms of peaceful protest and
took advantage of emerging media to raise awareness of their
A
cause. The innovative spirit of the suffragists, who broke new
ground for women’s rights, set the example for others who
seek redress of their own grievances even to this day.
The Power of Primary Sources
nalyzing
a
primary
source—a
photograph,
manuscript, newspaper, political cartoon, personal
narrative, or other artifact—is a powerful way not
only to build student understanding of a historical period
or event, but also to develop questions for further research.
It’s a perfect tool for finding a National History Day topic or
completing an NHD project.
When students analyze a primary source, they can respond
to it in a number of ways. They can observe the primary
source, reflect or speculate about it, and come up with a