Meredith Research on Women Suffragists Published

As the nation prepares to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment, which gave women the right to vote, Assistant Professor of History Angela Robbins and students in the Department of History, Political Science, and International Studies have published their research with the “Biographical Database of Militant Woman Suffragists” in the Women and Social Movements in the United States database, available through Carlyle Campbell Library.

Their work is part of a crowdsourcing effort to produce biographical sketches of those activists who picketed the White House during World War I. Because their subjects are women about whom little or no information has previously been published, the students had the challenge of poring through sources like the census, records of birth, death, and marriage, photographs, and newspaper accounts of suffrage protests and arrests to find as much information as possible.

To date,  alumnae Ashley Owens, ’17, and Miranda Pikaart, ’18, and senior Dominique Bateman have published nine biographical sketches. Sophomore Maariya Sayed recently started research on two additional suffragists.

“These students have made a valuable contribution to the fields of U.S. and women’s history by enhancing what we know about the struggle for the right to vote, and their research is available to a broad audience including other researchers, students, educators, and the general public through institutions and libraries,” Robbins said.