Highlights Archives
March is Women's History Month
"Remember the Ladies and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors."*
That's what Abigail Adams advised her husband John on March 31, 1776, when he was designing the U.S. government with the other Founding Fathers. Like many husbands, though, John didn't pay enough attention to his partner's advice, and women's rights were left out of our constitution for 150 years.
Women's History Month is a chance to be not only more "generous and favorable" than our ancestors but also more accurate and truthful. At our new Web page on Wisconsin women, we bring you letters, diaries, pictures, memoirs, museum objects, and other authentic evidence about women's lives in the Badger State. It's about much more than suffrage. Women worked shoulder-to-shoulder with men (and often without them) to build Wisconsin as we know it today.
Discover Glory-of-the-Morning, 18th-c. Ho-Chunk chief. Learn what it was like to come to Green Bay or the lead region as a young French woman in the 1820s. Turn the pages of a letter by a farm wife caught in the Black Hawk War during the summer of 1832. Read the stories of the first German women who came to Milwaukee in 1833. Follow a teenage girl's diary as she travels to Wisconsin by wagon in 1846. Retrace an Ojibwe woman's footsteps during the Sandy Lake Tragedy of 1850. Peruse an entire book about Wisconsin women's work on the home front during the Civil War.
Of course, you'll find plenty of suffrage material, too — photographs, campaign flyers, recollections, and even a tunic worn in a women's voting rights parade. Other 20th-c. materials you can see there include memoirs of Milwaukee reformers Lizzie Black Kander and Meta Berger, pictures of women in World War II factories, and the Vietnam War photographs of Dickey Chappelle.
Most of these original documents by and about Wisconsin women are drawn from our new digital collection, Turning Points in Wisconsin History. You can find even more by typing "women" or "female" into the search box on that page. During March we're also featuring women's lives in our daily blog, Odd Wisconsin. Get Odd Wisconsin as an RSS feed on your own Web page, or sign up for the Society's email newsletter to receive a week's worth every Friday.
Either way, we won't let you forget the ladies — or the immigrant girls, factory workers, Indian mothers, farm wives, rural school teachers, and other women who helped create Wisconsin.
* "... in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation." You can see the original manuscript letter and a typed transcription on the Web site of our sister organization, the Massachusetts Historical Society.
:: Posted March 16, 2005
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