This is a brief lesson designed to introduce students to the lives and contributions of Sarah and Angelina Grimke, two remarkable sisters, who played a pivotal role in the Abolitionist and Suffrage Movements in South Carolina and the United States.
This unit explores perspectives on the central issues of the Progressive Era. Students examine the middle class reformers' attitudes towards immigrants; draw inferences about historical context by analyzing documents that relate to segregation of San Francisco schools in 1906; and question the reliability of Jacob Riis's photographs as accounts of the past. The unit includes cognitive modeling lessons - one that compares the perspectives of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B Dubois, and one that juxtaposes muckracking journalist Lincoln Steffens with political boss George Plunkitt. The Background on Woman Suffrage prepares students for the Anti-Suffragists lesson plan on why Americans opposed woman suffrage.
Women have been agents of change throughout American History. Students will work primarily with two Library of Congress collections, Votes for Women - The Struggle for Women's Suffrage and Votes for Women: 1848-1921, to understand how the suffragists of the early 20th century changed the requirements for voting in America.
We hear a lot about the “women’s vote” these days, although most young people take universal suffrage for granted and the fight for women’s right to vote is usually given scant attention in the classroom. Since the late 20th century, women have constituted the majority of the voting public. The number of female voters has exceeded the number of male voters in every presidential election since 1964. In this module we offer resources, information and ideas for examining the role of women in politics as voters and the history of their increased participation in the political sphere.
The goal of this module is to provide resources and information about the history of the women’s vote in the U.S. Looking at the women’s suffrage movement provides a framework for exploring the changing role of women in politics and society in the 19th and 20th centuries. The history of suffrage offers an opportunity to examine women’s roles at critical points in the nation’s history, and to think about the impact of women’s voting behavior on politics in our time.