HST 202 web assignment

This assignment looks at the early years of the women's suffrage movement from a biographical perspective. For at least three decades, historians have paid increasingly more attention to women's role in history. Women make up approximately half the human race. Women have had an impact on and been affected by every major historic event and trend, sometimes as key players. This web assignment focuses on Victoria Claflin Woodhull Martin, an extraordinary social reformer - and one who is absent from many American history survey texts.

assignment

• read the article "Legal Contender: Victoria C. Woodhull" and the other two Online Woodhull Biographies
• review at least 6 website listed below in the Woodhull Herstory Sites
  • = primary source documents written by Woodhull or her contemporaries during the 1870s
  • = secondary source materials about Woodhull written by historians, librarians, journalists, novelists, and playwrights
  • Examine these sites, reading at least one link about each aspect of Woodhull's career.
• questions for thought and discussion
• What have you learned about Victoria Woodhull from these websites?
• Compare and contrast the Internet-based information with the library-based information in Dr. Kullmann's article.
• Based on this experience, how would you evaluate the Internet as a source of information about history? about women's history?

online Woodhull biographies

Legal Contender: Victoria C. Woodhull....: historical profile from The Women's Quarterly written by Dr. Kullmann (Puz)

Victoria Woodhull biography in the National Women's Hall of Fame

Who is Victoria Woodhull? - biography from Victoria Woodhull, the Spirit to Run the White House website

Woodhull herstory sites

Woodhull the politician suffragist and first woman to run for President	Library of Congress American Memory Collection primary source document: A lecture on constitutional equality, delivered at Lincoln hall, Washington, D.C., Thursday, February 16, 1871, by Victoria Woodhull. LOC American Memory Collection book, A history of the national woman's rights movement, for twenty years.... from 1850 to 1870, with an appendix containing the history of the movement during the winter of 1871, in the national capitol, the memorial of Victoria Woodhull to Congress, 19 December 1870, and her "Great Secession" speech before the NAWSA at Apollo Hall, May 11, 1871. The Equal Rights Party History Project - this is a "limited version of an older site. See below
Woodhull Progressive Era reformer	Web (lecture) notes from the University of Wisconsin, "Women, Feminism and Sex in Progressive America," From a History 102 television-lecture course.
bourgeois feminist Woodhull as a Marxist	Excerpted from Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly, "Notes on the American Split" of the 1870s First International Workingmen's Association; From the 1st International Internet Archives. Also see: "Resolutions on the Split of the U.S. Federation," published in Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly, May 4, 1872. Letter from Karl Marx to Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly: Marx sent a letter that provides an interesting glimpse into the personal life of the Marxes after the Paris Commune, written by his daughter Jenny(age 27), along with a cover letter by Marx himself. September 23, 1871. Interview with Karl Marx, head of L'Internationale: Revolt of Labor against Capital...., reprinted Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly, August 12, 1871
newspaper editor and social reformer: Woodhull and the Beecher-Tilton Scandal	Library of Congress American Memory Collection primary source document: "And the truth shall make you free," A speech on the principles of social freedom, delivered in Steinway hall, Nov. 20, 1871, by Victoria Woodhull. Brown University Library page on the Beecher-Tilton Scandal, "an example of a nineteenth-century sexual scandal that did not involve murder." From the Library's 1996 exhibit, "She is More to be Pitied than Censured: Women, Sexuality and Murder in 19th Century America." SIU's short overview of The Terrible Siren, Emanie Sach's 1928 biography of Woodhull, from the perspective of freedom of the press.
obituary	Victoria Woodhull Martin's 1927 New York Times Obituary

Woodhull from a late 20th-century perspective

Equal Rights Party History Project -- collaborative history from University of Toledo. This site does not seem active anymore, so the above description of The Scout Report is included here.

The Equal Rights Party History Project, provided by Professor Timothy Messer-Kruse of the University of Toledo, is an "experiment in participatory research" on the 545 women and men who founded the Equal Rights Party in May of 1872. Members such as Victoria Woodhull and Belva Lockwood are well known, but most are anonymous to history. This site attempts to address that oversight by encouraging interested Internauts to adopt a founder of the ERP who once lived in a place close to their hometown as a subject, research that subject, and report the findings back to the ERP project. At present the site contains a geographical database of ERP members, a brief history of the Party, research tips, and an explanation of how to send your information to the site. The ERP page is an interesting attempt at collaborative primary history that hopes to "level the ivory tower walls that have long isolated professional historians and the history they write from everyone else who make it and live it.

go back

cruise....

• American memory
• internet archives
• US census +
• traffic
• syllabus