Votes for Women: Selections from the National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection, 1848-1921
History
[Detail] Yellow ribbon from 1911 Suffrage Parade
5) Education
The Western College for Women Class of 1904, Oxford, Ohio. From Touring Turn-of-the-Century America, 1880-1921.
Significant advances in education for women took place during the period covered by this collection. As with other reforms, there was a struggle to gain advances in women's educational opportunities.
Search on education for documents about improving women's access to education. For example, the group of essays, "Women and the Alphabet" discusses women's education and employment opportunities. The first essay describes the differences between pay for male and female teachers:
But every female common-school teacher in the United States finds the enjoyment of her four hundred dollars a year to be secretly embittered by the knowledge that the young college stripling in the next schoolroom is paid twice that sum for work no harder or more responsible than her own, and that, too, after the whole pathway of education has been obstructed for her, and smoothed for him.
From, "Women and the Alphabet; a Series of Essays," by Thomas Wentworth Higginson. 1900.
