On This Day: Ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment

On August 18, 1920 the Tennessee General Assembly approved the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution by a one vote margin, making Tennessee the thirty-sixth and last state necessary to ratify the enactment. The amendment which stated “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,” finally granted full suffrage to women across the United States.

For more information on the women’s suffragist movement and the nineteenth amendment, visit the Charters of Freedom website from the National Archives and Records Administration. NARA also created a lesson plan based on primary documents from the American suffragist movement, that can be viewed at Teaching with Documents: Woman Suffrage and the 19th Amendment. To see documents related to the women's suffrage movement in Tennessee, including the passing of the 19th amendment, visit the Calvin M. McClung Digital Collection at the Knox County Public Library.

Image Caption: Suffragist with "Kaiser Wilson" poster (Record Group 165, Records of the War Department General and Special Staff, National Archives and Records Administration)

Preserving Historic Films

The National Film Preservation Foundation site offers online access to examples of its preservation work. Three of these films document the history of women:

Wohelo Camp (ca. 1919) (Northeast Historic Film), a promotional film about the pioneering all-girls summer camp in Maine, includes footage of the girls involved in a variety of activities: jewelry making, pottery, canoeing, cooking, gardening, and horseback riding.

Manhattan Trade School for Girls (1911) (George Eastman House) This  promotional documentary film (16 min., 10 sec) includes footage of students playing basketball, dancing, cooking, sewing, and making hats. Jennifer M. Bean's commentary provides historical context throughout the film.

A Trip through Japan with the YWCA (ca. 1919) includes footage of women in traditional occupations,  fleeting images of workers outside a textile factory, and scenes with Ainu women (pictured at left). For background on the Ainu, see Ainu: Spirit of a Northern People (Smithsonian Institution in Association with University of Washington Press, 1999).

Changing the Face of Medicine: Celebrating America's Women Physicians is an online exhibition developed by the National Library of Medicine. The website accompanies a traveling exhibition currently touring public libraries and universities around the United States. The site spans 150 years of history and includes biographies of more than 350 women, and features photographs, video interviews, and short films.

The exhibition explores major themes in the history of women in medicine, from the nineteenth-century campaign to gain access to medical schools to ongoing efforts to reform education and diversify the profession at all levels.

There are resources for educators, activities for schoolchildren, and bibliographies and career resources for scholars and students. Visitors are also invited to share their own stories of women physicians they admire.

New Digital Collection: Gottlieb Jazz Photos

Gottlieb Jazz Photos 
This Library of Congress collection of 200 photographs (now in the public domain) on Flickr documents the jazz scene in New York City and Washington, D.C. from 1938 to 1948. More photos will be added each month until all 1,600 in the collection are in Flickr. Browse the collection for photos of Mildred Bailey, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, Sarah Vaughan, and Mary Lou Williams.  

William P. Gottlieb's photos of Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and Mary Lou Williams.

For additional context, listen to Gottlieb's comments on the Billie Holiday photograph and on the Ella Fitzgerald photograph. Also, the National Public Radio's segment on Women in Jazz  includes an audio clip of a 1973 interview with Mary Lou Williams.

Book: Contesting Archives

Contesting Archives: Finding Women in the Sources is a set of essays on innovative methodologies for the study of women's history from the sixteenth-century to the present. The contributors have developed and shared ways of approaching archives and documents "against the grain." The Table of Contents gives proof of the book's broad geographic and thematic reach. Edited by Nupur Chaudhri, Sherry J. Katz, and Mary Elizabeth Perry, the book was published by the University of Illinois Press.

"Contesting Archives makes vivid and concrete the way historians must proceed when faced with partial or contradictory sources. Historians and anyone interested in how historians work will appreciate the authors' strategies for, and cautions about, unearthing information about women from documents inside and outside the archive."--Margaret Strobel, coeditor of Expanding the Borders of Women's History