Features suffrage wagon at the Long Island Museum
by Marguerite Kearns The first week in July of 1913 represented a high point in bringing the issue of Votes for Women to the public. This is when the campaign suffrage wagon, the “Spirit of 1776,” left the Manhattan office of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association at 108 Madison Avenue in the care of…
Continue ReadingThis appeal sent to Edna Buckman Kearns sparked the desire to get in line in the procession. It’s the first time in her writings that Edna mentions speaking to Alice Paul on the parade route where they shared concerns about the crowd that was out of control. Edna and Serena Kearns marched in the Quaker…
Continue ReadingNew York City and Long Island suffragist Edna Kearns wrote Votes for Women columns for the newspaper and she responded to letters to the editor! Here, she answers a man who writes to the paper about how women have it good and they should stop complaining. In another piece (below), Edna refers to the big…
Continue ReadingNinety-nine years ago in the first week of January, a hardy band of marchers under the direction of suffragist Rosalie Jones started out from from New York City on a march headed to Albany, NY to ask NYS Governor Martin Glynn to appoint poll watchers in the 1915 suffrage referendum. My grandparents Edna and Wilmer…
Continue ReadingIt’s one thing to read about the split between Alice Paul and the main suffrage organization at the time, NAWSA. It’s quite another to realize that Grandmother Edna Kearns witnessed it. An article in the New York Tribune in November following the big 1913 suffrage parade laid out how the New Yorkers headed to Washington,…
Continue ReadingI’ve been working through grandmother Edna’s archive of letters, news clippings, photos, and memorabilia of the New York State suffrage movement and have barely scratched the surface. The next step is to weave these snippets into an overall story that highlights what it took to win the vote on the local level. There’s a digital…
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