feminist

Can I use this pic please full credit will be given. Thanks

Annie Kenney was a working class girl and mill worker in Oldham. She now has her own statue in front of the Old Town Hall in the town.

"It's not by strategy or stealth [that Australian women won suffrage.] It's actually by accident.” Clare Wright, historian, La Trobe University, Australia To start from the beginning: In the late 1800s, women around the world were organizing for voting rights. The first breakthrough came in the British colony of New Zealand. Women there won the vote through a combination of petition drives and male allies in leadership. Their success inspired one of the neighboring colonies in Australia to also introduce a suffrage bill. A conservative lawmaker tried to squash it by expanding it to give women the right to hold office. “He thinks that this is what will sink the bill, because nobody is asking for that,” Wright said. But he was wrong — the plan failed. In 1894, the bill passed, giving women an opening to fight for much more. The colonies were in the process of coming together to create Australia, and South Australia’s representatives insisted they would join the new country only if women kept their voting rights. “So, effectively, women's suffrage is made the precondition to a federated Australia, to this whole process of nation building,” Wright said. Source: theworld.org/stories/2019-12-17/remembering-australia-s-r...

Henrietta Rodman was a feminist and teacher in New York City, vice president of the League for the Civic Service of Women, who protested the ban on married women teachers by marrying a friend in 1914, SOLELY to challenge the law (her husband's girlfriend was cool with this plan). Friend Floyd Dell noted wryly, “she couldn’t even do so conventional a thing as get married, without creating a terrific sensation.” She was suspended for more than a year. The clothing above was typical of her dress-reform style -- heavy sack-like tunics and boots (linen sacks and sandals in the summertime). Sources on Henrietta Rodman include: Julie C. Laible, “Henrietta Rodman and Other Modern Feminists: Redefining the New Professional Teacher,” Journal of the Midwest History of Education Society 22(1995): 229-239; June Sochen, “Henrietta Rodman and the Feminist Alliance, 1914-1917,” Journal of Popular Culture 4(1)(Summer 1970): 57-65.

Thanks, pennylrichardsca, for the information and sources. 1914 seems to have been a big year for challenging the status quo in the New York City school system, given the information you and swanq also supplied about Mrs. Lora Wagner ( flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/6358159445 ).

Indeed! I ran into Henrietta Rodman in an earlier project on the married-women-teachers ban, so I was excited to see her come up, and it was easy to find my old sources on her to share here. She's quite a character, plenty of news stories about her doings. And she knew a lot of the 1910s bohemian set in Greenwich Village, so she turns up on the margins of a lot of biographies and memoirs covering that era. If I get a chance, I'll gin up a wikipedia entry for her soon.