Activities

In this activity, students will analyze documents pertaining to the woman suffrage movement as it intensified following passage of the 15th Amendment that guaranteed the right to vote for African American males. Documents were chosen to call attention to the struggle’s length, the movement’s techniques, and the variety of arguments for and against giving women the vote. 

In this activity, students will focus on a letter written to Congress about Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama. Students will determine that, due to television coverage, the author, Mrs. Jackson, was very aware of the events that day even though she was in a different part of the country: Brooklyn, New York. Students will also look at the author’s tone and word choice to discern the kinds of images shown on television.

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This short comparative analysis activity involves comparing and contrasting two images of marches for freedom—a 1917 march of suffragists and the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom by Civil Rights leaders. Students will consider the similarities and differences between these two images and hypothesize what major differences these photos might imply about the two social reform movements.

For this activity click here.

In this activity students will analyze and respond to one nineteenth-century woman’s argument for her right to vote.

In 1878, Mrs. Amelia Bloomer wrote a letter to the U.S. Congress stating that she should be allowed the right to vote because she was a tax-paying citizen. Students will use her letter and a letter written by the National Association Opposed to Woman’s Suffrage to analyze late nineteenth-century arguments for and against woman’s suffrage and construct their own response.