Village Preservation's 19th Amendment Centennial StoryMap
August 18 is the hundredth anniversary of the adoption of the 19th Amendment, which prohibited discrimination in voting in the United States based upon sex. While Native Americans and Chinese Americans nationwide and African Americans in many parts of the country still could not vote, sex was no longer a barrier to the franchise. It was the culmination of generations of effort by dedicated women and men, many of whom lived, worked, wrote, organized, protested, marched, and lobbied in Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo. Unsurprisingly, these neighborhoods played an outsized role in this movement towards equality, with many of women’s suffrage’s earliest and most important proponents and places found here.
Visit villagepreservation.org to explore the map!
To mark this milestone, we created a StoryMap showing more than two dozen significant sites, people, and events in our neighborhoods connected to this critical civil rights victory. You’ll find women who dedicated their lives to the cause, and the men who backed them up; labor leaders and socialites; 20th-century movers & shakers, and lonely 18th-century pioneers; traditionalists and revolutionaries. You’ll see names and places you know, and learn a few new ones. See how unions and civil rights groups worked alongside and sometimes struggled with suffragists. Explore the role of the alcohol industry and advocates of temperance. Take a look at the giant parades and rallies, and the small gatherings and salons. And learn about the suffragists’ ‘mole’ in the White House, as well as the women who went to jail repeatedly for the cause and the men who often faced scorn for their support.
Andrew Berman is Executive Director of Village Preservation, the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation.