On March 25, 1911, a fire swept through the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City, claiming the lives of 146 workers. Most of the victims were young immigrant women from Eastern and Southern Europe. In the wake of the fire, a group of women labor activists fought to ensure that the tragedy led to concrete change.  In this episode, host Laura Free speaks with Dr. Annelise Orleck, author of Common Sense and a Little Fire, to learn about the women who agitated for better working conditions before and after the Triangle Fire. Rose Schneiderman, Pauline Newman, and Clara Lemlich […]

Suffragists fought hard for the vote. They also knew that gaining access to the ballot was not the end of the struggle for political representation. This week Amended host Laura Free introduces a special episode from Civics 101, a podcast about how democracy works, to help us understand what a vote really means. The United States is a representative democracy. The idea is that we’re a government by the people (we vote officials into office) and for the people (the officials in office are supposed to represent our interests). But Civics 101 hosts Hannah McCarthy and Nick Capodice learn that […]

The scope of women’s political history is so vast that it can’t be covered by one podcast. This week Amended host Laura Free introduces a special episode from And Nothing Less, a seven-part series from the Women’s Suffrage Centennial Commission and PRX. This episode is more than a story about women’s rights. It’s a story about civil rights. And women like Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell understood that the suffrage fight was as much about race as it was gender. Hosts Rosario Dawson and Retta speak with some great guests you’ll recognize from Amended—like Martha Jones and Lisa […]

By Alison K. Lange. For as long as women have battled for equitable political representation in America, those battles have been defined by images—whether illustrations, engravings, photographs, or colorful chromolithograph posters. Some of these pictures have been flattering, many have been condescending, and others downright incendiary. They have drawn upon prevailing cultural ideas of women’s perceived roles and abilities and often have been circulated with pointedly political objectives. An excerpt from Picturing Political Power: Images in the Women’s Suffrage Movement In the mid-19th century, female reformers faced an impossible task as they advocated for rights and aimed to maintain a […]

Episode Show Notes & Transcript After the Civil War, many abolitionists and women’s rights activists saw an opportunity to team up and advance equality for all.  African American author and orator Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was hopeful, too. But she also knew that politics and prejudice could shatter this tentative alliance, with devastating consequences. She wasn’t about to let that happen without a fight. To help tell Frances’s story, host Laura Free meets up with Sharia Benn, a writer, researcher and theater artist who has spent a decade portraying Frances for public audiences. Laura also spends time with historian Bettye […]

Episode Show Notes & Transcript The right to vote was only one of many demands that women made prior to the Civil War. Zooming in on another priority, the right to bodily autonomy, changes our understanding of who was at the forefront of the struggle for women’s rights. Host Laura Free, a historian of women and politics, travels to Baltimore, Maryland, to spend a day with legal historian Martha S. Jones. They visit the Homewood Museum, a 19th century mansion once owned by a family of enslavers, to grapple with its legacy of slavery and sexual violence through the story […]

Episode Show Notes & Transcript How do we tell the story of the (unfinished) struggle for women’s voting rights? Who gave us the dominant suffrage narrative? And who gets left out?  Our host is Laura Free, a historian of women and politics. She reflects on the suffrage story she learned as a child, one that centers a few white women. She speaks with historians Bettye Collier-Thomas and Lisa Tetrault about the work they’ve done to show there is much more to the story. Next, Laura travels to Seneca Falls, New York, site of the 1848 women’s rights convention, with historian […]

On August 26th, HNY launched Amended, its first podcast. Amended travels from the 1800’s through to the present day to show us a quest for women’s full equality that has always been as diverse, complex and unfinished as the nation itself. For our ongoing Online Community Conversations series we will be using brief excerpts from Amended to open a conversation about the past, present, and future of the struggle for gender equality.  To complement this online conversations, we have curated a brief selection of readings that examine the complex legacy of the suffrage movement. You do not have to read […]