Suffrage

Author & Activist

b. July 19, 1875
d. September 18, 1935

“Unwittingly, you’ve made me dream
Of violets, and my soul’s forgotten gleam”

Alice Dunbar-Nelson was a racially-mixed bisexual poet and author whose career spanned multiple literary genres and culminated during the Harlem Renaissance. She was also a lifelong educator and activist who fought for women’s suffrage and equality for Black Americans.

Dunbar-Nelson (née Alice Ruth Moore) was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, 10 years after her enslaved mother gained freedom. Her father, who was rumored to have been a white merchant, left when she was young.

An exceptional student, Dunbar-Nelson graduated from high school at age 14. She attended Straight College (now Dillard University) and received her teaching certificate in 1892. She later attended Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania.

Initially, Dunbar-Nelson taught in the Louisiana public school system and worked on her writing. In 1895 she published her first book, a collection of stories and poems titled “Violets and Other Tales.” Soon after, she moved to Boston to pursue a literary career. Her work for the Boston Monthly Review captured the heart of a fellow writer, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and they began a two-year correspondence.

During this period, Dunbar-Nelson relocated to Harlem where she cofounded and taught at the White Rose Mission, a “home for Black girls and women.” In 1898 she married Paul Dunbar in New York, and they settled in Washington, D.C.

In 1899 her second book, “The Goodness of St. Rocque and Others,” about Creole life, launched Dunbar-Nelson’s career-long exploration and critique of American culture and racial oppression. She wrote novels, stories, essays, poems, and reviews and kept a diary.

Dunbar-Nelson’s husband physically and emotional abused her. She divorced him in 1902 and moved to Wilmington, Delaware, where she taught at various high schools and colleges. She created the Wilmington Advocate, a newspaper promoting racial uplift. She quietly married and divorced a second time and explored relationships with women, including Edwina Kruse, a high school principal, and Fay Jackson Robinson, a journalist and activist.

In 1916 Dunbar-Nelson married the journalist Robert J. Nelson. His activism further ignited her own. Among other pursuits, she served on the Delaware Republican Committee and championed civil rights and women’s suffrage.

During the Harlem Renaissance — the golden age of African-American art and expression in 1920s and ’30s — Dunbar-Nelson lectured and wrote prolifically. Her work inspired influential writers of the era.

Dunbar-Nelson died from a heart condition. Fifty years later, W.W. Norton & Co. published her journal, “Give Us Each Day.” It is one of only two African-American women’s journals published in the 20th century.

American Suffragist

b. February 15, 1820
d. March 13, 1906

“Men their rights and nothing more; women their rights and nothing less.”

Susan Brownell Anthony was an American activist central to the women’s suffrage movement. She rallied for women’s voting and labor rights and for the abolition of slavery. Her efforts were foundational to securing women’s voting rights in America.

Anthony was born in Adams, Massachusetts. She grew up in a Quaker household, raised with the belief that all people are equal in God’s eyes. Quaker values underpinned Anthony’s lifelong battle for equality. Her seven siblings also became women’s rights activists and abolitionists.

In 1846 Anthony began teaching at Canajoharie Academy in New York. Five years later, she traveled to Seneca Falls for the seminal abolitionist convention. There, she forged friendships with Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who inspired her to include the abolition of slavery in her activism. Anthony eventually became the chief New York agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society, which Garrison founded.

In 1851 Anthony and Stanton began working and traveling the country together in the fight for women’s rights. Anthony gathered signatures for petitions and spoke publicly about women’s suffrage, despite the taboo against women making speeches. She faced angry hecklers who claimed her campaign was an attempt to destroy the institution of marriage. She was nearly arrested many times for speaking out.

Anthony and Stanton became lovers and lifelong companions. In 1866 they created the American Equal Rights Association, which distributed a newspaper called The Revolution. They used the publication to address all aspects of women’s equality, but especially suffrage, eliciting both love and hate from the citizenry. Detractors labeled Anthony “manly” — one of the worst insults a woman of the era could receive. Anthony countered with a published essay titled “The New Century’s Manly Woman.”

After the 15th Amendment was proposed, ensuring the right of Black men to vote, Anthony and Stanton were outraged that women were excluded. They formed the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869 to pressure Congress to include women’s voting rights. In 1870 the U.S. ratified the 15th Amendment, leaving women out. Anthony managed to vote in the next election anyway. The police arrested her, and she received a $100 fine, which she refused to pay.

Though rarely acknowledged, Anthony is one of the most famous lesbians in American history. In addition to Elizabeth Stanton, she is known to have had relationships with a least tw oother women.

Anthony died at the age of 86. Fourteen years later, the United States ratified the 19th Amendment, granting women the right to vote. In 1979 she became the first woman depicted on a circulating U.S. coin.

Community Nursing Founder

b. March 10, 1867
d. September 1, 1940

“Nursing is love in action ...”

Lillian Wald was a social reformer and the founder of the American community nursing movement. Her visionary leadership in public health; women and children’s welfare; and labor, immigrants’ and civil rights led to the formation of countless institutions worldwide.

Wald was born to a German Jewish middle-class family in Cincinnati, Ohio. After graduating in 1891 from the nursing program at the New York Hospital Training School, she took a job at the New York Juvenile Asylum, an orphanage, where she quickly grew disillusioned with institutional methods of child care. As her biographer and friend, R. L. Duffus, commented, “She had too much individuality to be willing to lose herself as a cog in an established institution. Instinctively, she wanted to change things—to do better.”

Wald attended medical school briefly. During this time, she witnessed firsthand the poverty and hardship endured by immigrants on New York’s Lower East Side. She resolved to bring affordable health care to those in need.

In 1893 Wald quit medical school and organized the Henry Street Settlement, otherwise known as the Visiting Nurse Society (VNS) of New York. The VNS operated on a sliding fee scale to provide all city residents with an opportunity to access medical care. Wald pioneered, and coined the term, “public health nursing” with the belief that the nurse’s “organic relationship with the neighborhood should constitute the starting point for a universal service to the region.” By 1913, through her tireless efforts, the VNS grew from 10 to 92 nurses, making 200,000 visits annually. It became a model for similar entities across the nation and around the globe.

Wald became a highly influential advocate at the city, state and national levels. She persuaded the New York Board of Education to initiate the first American public school nursing program in Manhattan. She successfully lobbied President Theodore Roosevelt to create a Federal Children’s Bureau to protect children from abusive child labor, and she helped form the Women’s Trade Union to protect women working in sweatshops. She campaigned for women’s suffrage and supported racial integration, helping to found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Upon her recommendation, The New York Commission on Immigration was formed to investigate the living and working conditions of immigrants.

Wald did not marry and maintained her closest relationships with women. Although she did not self-identify as a lesbian, her letters reveal the intimate affection she felt for at least two of her companions, Mabel Hyde Kittredge and Helen Arthur.

Wald died of a stroke at the age of 73.

Composer & Suffragette

b. April 22, 1858
d. May 8, 1944

“I feel I must fight for [my music], because I want women to turn their minds to big and difficult jobs; not just to go on hugging the shore, afraid to put out to sea.”

Ethel Mary Smyth was a pioneering British composer who helped popularize opera in the United Kingdom. She became a fervent champion of women’s rights and the first woman composer to be awarded damehood.

Smyth was born the fourth of eight children in Sidcup, Kent, outside of London. Her father, a major general in the Royal Artillery, opposed her musical aspirations. Smyth defiantly persevered, learning from esteemed tutors. She studied composition at Leipzig Conservatory in Germany and received encouragement from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Antonín Dvořák and Johannes Brahms. 

Along with operas, Smyth wrote choral arrangements, symphonies and chamber music. She first captured attention for her “Mass in D” (1892). Her 1902 opera, “Der Wald,” broke attendance records in London. It became the only opera composed by a woman ever produced by the New York Metropolitan Opera. This held true for well over a century, until 2016.

Smyth composed her most famous work, “The Wreckers,” in 1906. Critics extoled it as one of the most important English operas. 

By 1910 Smyth had established herself as a leading member of the women’s suffrage movement in the United Kingdom. She took time off from composing to join the Women’s Social and Political Union. She participated in marches and protests for women’s rights and full equality. During this period, she was incarcerated for two months after the authorities arrested her and more than 100 other suffragettes for breaking the windows of their political opponents. In 1911 Smyth composed “The March of Women,” which became the anthem for England’s women’s movement.

Smyth was public about her nonconformist sexual identity. Many of her romantic partners were famous women, including the French Empress Eugénie and the English modernist writer Virginia Woolf. 

Smyth wrote 10 books and many have been written about her. She openly discussed her experiences in several autobiographies. She once wrote, “I wonder why it is so much easier for me to love my own sex more passionately than yours.”  

In 1922 Smyth was named a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for her accomplishments as a composer. In 1926 Oxford University presented her with an honorary doctorate. Despite the fanfare, as a woman she struggled to get her music performed. 

For her 75th birthday, Smyth was honored with a festival in Royal Albert Hall celebrating her lifetime achievements. She began to lose her hearing at age 54 and went completely deaf before the end of her life. She died at age 86.