Charles Lenox Remond was the most prominent Black abolitionist in the US until he was overshadowed by Frederick Douglass.

Remond’s commitment to women’s rights was as deep as FD’s, maybe deeper. He should be remembered for his feminism.

Long thread. Charles Remond was the oldest son of eight children of Nancy Lenox and John Remond of Salem, Massachusetts. He had six sisters. Their grandfather fought in the Revolutionary War.

The photograph above was taken in the 1850s by Samuel S. Broadbent. via @BPLBoston

This poster competition last fall from @AIGAdesign generated images that reflect enduring and current themes of women's voting rights. I’ll showcase a few here. Browse the submissions at buff.ly/39Ar3vA

Left by Jenny El-Shamy; papercut (right) by @LynneYun I love that Mabel Ping-Hua Lee is becoming an icon. By Zonnel Jane Magante

I can’t stop thinking about this girl. Her gorgeous smile, her presence in front of the camera. The photo was taken sometime in the 1860s. @amhistorymuseum shared it on Instagram a few days ago, and I keep coming back to it.

Long thread. We don’t know her name, because she was invisible to the people who paid for the sitting on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, and distributed copies of the portrait to friends and family. We know the baby’s name, and her age - to the day.

Looking at her, wondering how her life

The story of Black abolitionist Hester Lane features blatant racism and sexism. But it’s also about a subtler version of both: when you’re expected to choose a side because of your identity, and pigeonholed into what someone like you is “supposed to” believe.

Long thread. Hester’s story is one of the most exciting discoveries in @marthasjones_' wonderful Vanguard - which is saying something!

Hester was a free woman of color in 1820s New York City. She was an entrepreneur, a leader, and a liberator.

I am ridiculously excited about a suffrage conference next week...

IHO 150 years of 15th Amdt & 100 years of 19th Amdt, the Massachusetts Historical Society is hosting a 🏅 panel *each day.* @MHS1791 @MHS_Research

Free! Registration at bottom.

Select highlights to tempt you: Monday @ 2 ET

@EllenDubois10’s new work on the long relationship between ElizCadyStanton & Frederick Douglass;

Thomas Dublin with new discoveries & interpretation on #BlackSuffragists

@LynnEckert4 on doctors

and @ProfMSinha tying it all together.

We gotta talk about lesbians. Specifically, about lesbian erasure.

Queer is cool, right? It’s 2020! 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️etc., etc. So why is the lesbian reality of the suffrage movement barely part of the #19thAmendment centennial conversation?

A thread. The movement for women’s liberation was run largely by unmarried women - some never married, some widowed.

Why? Because marriage was a prison for women, legally and socially. Unmarried women were exponentially freer to do the work of organizing and building a national movement.

Suffragists picketed the White House from 10am-6pm every day but Sundays. They continued - attacked by mobs, arrested constantly - for more than two years. But in their first months, the pickets were greeted warmly.🧵 Until January 1917, no one had ever done what they were doing. Frustrated at President Wilson’s refusal to support a federal suffrage amendment, they were the first Americans to stand outside the mansion in protest.

They walked 4-hour shifts, leaving only when relief arrived.

Ida B. Wells could vote for President years before Alice Paul or Carrie Chapman Catt.

How?

Read on . . . Changing state constitutions is hard. Who votes & who doesn’t is determined by each state; big changes almost always need constitutional amendment. Of course, this is why the state-by-state fight took so damn long. But in 1913, Illinois successfully used a different strategy.

Obama’s 2d inaugural invoked a throughline “from Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall.” Brett Kavanaugh has surely been itching to object since. In dissent yesterday he wrote: “Seneca Falls was not Stonewall.”

I know more about both of those things than he does. So, a primer.🧵 Things the women’s rights conference at Seneca Falls in 1848 & the Stonewall uprising of 1969 have in common:

* Both were led by radicals

PART II.

In 1865 Pres. Andrew Johnson awarded Dr. Mary Walker the Medal of Honor. Dr. Walker wore the medal pinned to her suit coat every day for the rest of her life. In 1917, her medal was rescinded along w/those of 911 men, for want of direct combat. She wrote a letter of protest, and simply continued to wear the medal until her death in 1919.

Pres. Jimmy Carter reinstated the honor in 1977, thanks to feminist protest. Dr. Walker is still the only woman ever to receive it.

The only woman ever awarded the Medal of Honor - the US military’s highest decoration - was a genderqueer Civil War surgeon named Dr. Mary Edwards Walker.

Walker was a suffragist, a veteran and POW, and a talented doctor who challenged convention in every way. She campaigned for dress reform for decades, before & after the war and as an officer of the Dress Reform Assoc. She was deeply disappointed in Lucy Stone, ElizCadyStanton & others who agreed with the cause but gave up on it.

She was briefly married to a man, a fellow doctor.

Julia Hooks bought a ticket at a downtown Memphis theater. It was 1881 and "Hermann the Magician" was a hit. She was making her way to her seat when two policemen grabbed her. They ripped her dress in the struggle, arresting her as she cried: “Let go of me, I am a schoolteacher!” Hooks filed a complaint against the officers, but they weren’t punished.

Instead, Julia Hooks was fined $5 for disorderly conduct - particularly ironic, because she was about the least disorderly person in Memphis.

A woman who wanted to be a doctor in the 1850’s more or less needed to start her own medical school.

When Elizabeth Blackwell applied in 1847, she was turned down everywhere. Harvard, Yale, Bowdoin, and every medical school in New York City and Philadelphia refused her. Thread. Blackwell was overjoyed when Geneva College in western NY accepted her. When she arrived she learned that the student body had been invited to vote on her admission. The men had voted yes as a joke. They were sure the application was a prank by a rival school.

Susan B Anthony voted 147 years ago today. For this she was arrested, and tried in federal court in Canandaigua NY the following June. She was represented by Henry Selden, a retired judge who laid out her case for why the 14th Amdt provided her the right to vote as a citizen. 1/ Judge Ward Hunt was a recently-appointed Supreme Court justice riding circuit in the Northern District of NY. He refused to allow Anthony to testify in her own defense, and directed the jury to find her guilty. To Hunt’s regret, he then asked if she had anything to say. 2/