Women's History - Read Their Stories

Martha Washington was going to give Ona Judge to her granddaughter. Judge decided to seize her freedom while the Washington family was eating dinner.

Look carefully at the bottom half of this printed Declaration of Independence. Do you see the name Mary Katharine Goddard? Read more about a woman who played an important role in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and American history.

Mary Newport established a successful pastry business in Philadelphia in the 1700s. Two of her nieces claimed the title of "Successor."

Philadelphia’s July Fourth, 1876 celebration kicked off the nation’s one-hundredth birthday celebration to large, enthusiastic crowds. Among those in the city for the festivities was the National Woman’s Suffrage Association (NWSA), an organization founded in 1869 to advocate for a constitutional amendment insuring women’s right to vote.

Alice Paul championed strategies fairly new to the suffrage movement, like open-air meetings and rallies. The rallies on Independence Square in 1911 and 1912 drew large crowds and spread the message of "Votes for Women."

The bell is called the Justice Bell, but has also been known as the Women’s Liberty Bell and the Suffrage Bell. It was commissioned by Katharine Wentworth Ruschenberger in 1915. She was one of the 70,000 members of the Pennsylvania Woman Suffrage Association, and a leader of the organization in Chester County. A close replica of the Liberty Bell, the bronze Justice Bell was cast without a crack.

The Justice Bell pealed in celebration of women's voting rights on Independence Square on September 25, 1920. Speeches, pageantry, and the bell ringing linked women's rights to the nation's founding on this historic landscape.

Most suffrage histories begin in 1848, the year Elizabeth Cady Stanton convened a women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. There, she unfurled a Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, seeking religious, educational and property rights for women – and the right to vote. While Seneca Falls remains an important marker in women’s suffrage history, in fact women had been agitating for this basic right of citizenship even before the first stirrings of the Revolution.

The Declaration of Sentiments was a clarion call in celebration of women’s worthiness—naming their right not be subjugated. Most prominent among the critiques Stanton advanced were: women’s inferior legal status, including lack of suffrage rights; economic as well as physical subordination; and limited opportunities for divorce. These offences were particularly ironic considering the expansive civic wartime roles women performed.

On June 24, 1919, Pennsylvania voted in favor of the Nineteenth Amendment. By August of 1920, 36 states (including Pennsylvania) approved the proposal and it became law. The proposal, now the 19th Amendment, made women’s suffrage legal all across the country.