The Library is rich in collections documenting the woman suffrage movement in America. In addition to the National Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) working library, the Rare Book and Special Collections Division (RBSCD) holds Susan B. Anthony's personal library of nearly 300 volumes, some with her handwritten notes, along with more than 30 scrapbooks Anthony began keeping in 1855, according to Rosemary Fry Plakas, American history specialist.
In addition to the Anthony memorabilia, RBSCD holds a significant number of scrapbooks compiled by Ida Hulsted Harper, Elizabeth Smith Miller and other reformers, which offer intimate and often unique insights about suffrage leaders. The Broadside Collection is another rich source for posters, programs, playbills and other emphemeral materials that reflect grass-roots activities as well as national initiatives.
The Library's Manuscript Division holds the organizational records of NAWSA, separately from RBSCD's NAWSA holdings. The Manuscript Division also holds the personal papers of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Julia Ward Howe, Carrie Chapman Catt and the Blackwell family, as well as the organizational records of the National Woman's Party, the Leslie Woman Suffrage Commission and the League of Women Voters. according to Janice Ruth, editor and acquisitions archivist in women's history.
Together, the Manuscript Division's NAWSA collection, its Carrie Chapman Catt personal papers and its Blackwell family papers form a nucleus of source material on the women's suffrage movement in America. This collection was given to the Library in 1961 by Edna L. Stantial, NAWSA's archivist. The acquisition brought to fruition the work of John C. Fitzpatrick, former acting chief of the Manuscript Division, who had written to Alice Stone Blackwell (daughter of suffragists Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell) in 1915, and to Carrie Chapman Catt in 1918, in hopes of acquiring the papers that would explain "the woman (sic) movement in America for the use of historians."
One of the more unusual artifacts among the Library's suffrage collections are twigs from a bonfire set by suffragists in front of the White House in January 1919. The twigs, which were found in the National Woman's Party collection, were recently on loan to the Woodrow Wilson House for an exhibit entitled An Act of Right and Justice: Woodrow Wilson and Women's Suffrage.
According to Lou Ann Broad of the Woodrow Wilson House, the suffragists had grown impatient with President Wilson's lack of progress in securing the vote for women and began setting symbolic "watchfires for freedom." Twigs from various Revolutionary War battlefields (such as the Brandywine Battlefield at Chadd's Ford, Pennsylvania) were contributed to serve as a reminder of the country's earlier struggle for freedom. Marvin Kranz, an American history specialist in the Manuscript Division, noted that the suffragists presumably meant to link symbolically "one revolution to another."
Researchers may also consult the Prints and Photographs Division for visual documentation of the suffrage movement.
