Biographical Database of Militant Woman Suffragists, 1913-1920
A Crowdsourcing Experiment

To celebrate the centennial of the White House picketing for woman suffrage that began in January of 1917, the editors of Women and Social Movements in the United States invite women's history faculty and students to join a crowdsourcing experiment. Historian Jill Zahniser compiled extensive information about women suffrage activists, which we published as a database in the March 2015 issue of WASM. Women from 35 states and the District of Columbia are represented in the database. Jill Zahniser launched this project by constructing the database and writing biographical sketches of six women activists.  We then began to crowdsource biographical sketches for a group of militant suffrage supporters of the National Woman's Party. Eventually we will add about 400 additional biographical sketches to this part of the collection. We are looking for individual volunteers to write sketches and faculty in U.S. women's history to mentor students in their classes in researching and writing sketches for these suffragists.

This collaborative project offers a rare opportunity to engage women's history students in the research, interpretation, and writing of women's history for a broad public. Students will receive authorship credit for their work and can view the online publication of their work as a contribution to the approaching centennial celebration of the passage of Woman Suffrage in the United States.

As of January 2020 we have published some 349 crowdsourced biographical sketches. Another 70 NWP militants are still out on assignment or need to be assigned, and we expect to be adding these sketches to the site over the next year and a half. We still need additional volunteers, so please get in touch if you’d like to research and write a biographical sketch.

You can access sketches already published for this project at  https://documents.alexanderstreet.com/VOTESforWOMEN.  If you would like to volunteer to work on the projecgt, we will provide you the information you will need to work on a bio sketch of an activist.. If you teach a class in which you would like students to work on bio sketches, we can supply you with names of  suffragists ato work on. To join in, please contact  Tom Dublin at tdublin@binghamton.edu, who will be coordinating the crowdsourcing activity.

Progress Reports

Below we offer hypertext links to documents that will be useful to volunteers.

Resources for volunteers writing biographical sketches