Traces of History: Pencils and the Suffrage Movement

Traces of History: Pencils and the Suffrage Movement

My earliest heroes were the women behind the United States suffrage movement. Susan B. Anthony, Carrie Chapman Catt, Julia Ward Howe and Lucy Stone weren’t just stuffy figures in a history book to me; they were strong, fearless and intelligent women who showed me that every woman has a voice, and that every voice has power.

I hadn’t given much real thought to those childhood heroes until my junior year of college, when an assignment for a class on the history of food led me to cookbook compiled by suffrage activists. Fifteen weeks of class, countless cups of coffee, one exhaustively-researched term paper and three all-night grant-writing sessions later, I found myself in Cambridge, MA at the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

The Schlesinger Library is home to the Women’s Archives, a rich resource of materials that chronicle everything from the suffrage movement to the rise of feminism, as well as a 20,000-title collection of cookbooks and other food-related miscellany. I requisitioned the documents I needed, settled down in the reading room, and prepared for a day of hard work.

I had expected hermetically-sealed documents in little plastic sleeves, all carefully stored in meticulous order. Instead, the first box I opened contained a riot of letters, notes, shopping lists, musings, notes and bills. The words flew across the pages with electric energy, as though the pen or pencil could barely keep up with the racing thoughts of the writer. The words of all of my heroes were contained in those innocuous-looking boxes, though contained is perhaps the wrong word – they were practically bursting out with an energy all their own.

Their thoughts were scribbled in pencils, crowding the margins of old invoices, squeezing between the lines of political fliers, and tumbling across the borders of newspaper articles. The women who wrote these letters were incomparable multi-taskers; their thoughts couldn’t be confined to time at home over a lady-like desk where they could be neatly organized on personal stationery.  Whatever paper and time was at their disposal was what they would use to communicate.

I sat back in my chair, breathless at the expanse of wisdom and courage in front of me. These weren’t dead documents covered in dust; they were living, breathing examples of their ingenuity and integrity. Women didn’t have many tools at their disposal in the early days of United States history; the law didn’t count them as citizens, and society told them that to be meek, quiet and submissive was to live to their fullest potential. But they had spoons, and they had pencils, and from those two humble tools they built the campaign that would win women the right to vote.

Taking a deep breath, I reached for my pen to begin taking notes, but suddenly I remembered – no pens in the reading rooms, only pencils.

I stopped, and I smiled. And I haven’t picked up a pencil to this day without remembering Lucy, Susan, Carrie and the women who fought for the vote. The lines they left behind – some faint as a cobweb, some as bold as a lightning bolt – have stayed with me, and remind me that one’s voice, and one’s words, have the power to change the world.