{"id":1179,"date":"2017-02-08T21:22:14","date_gmt":"2017-02-09T02:22:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/magazine\/?p=1179"},"modified":"2025-07-26T14:58:34","modified_gmt":"2025-07-26T18:58:34","slug":"suffragette-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/magazine\/suffragette-city\/","title":{"rendered":"Suffragette City"},"content":{"rendered":"

D<\/span>espite spending four years here, Hannah Spiegelman \u201915 says her education about the college didn\u2019t start until she graduated.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s when the history and art history major was tapped by history professor Tina Sheller \u201974, along with fellow history major Clara Hartman \u201916, to work in the college\u2019s Special Collections and Archives, researching Goucher\u2019s role in the women\u2019s suffrage movement.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s amazing the amount of history I\u2019ve learned about Goucher that I just didn\u2019t know,\u201d she says. And through the work she\u2019s done, soon others will know it as well. In addition to an exhibit opening this month in the library, the state of Maryland will honor early Goucher professor Lilian Welsh by inducting her into the state\u2019s Women\u2019s Hall of Fame.<\/p>\n

\u201cLilian Welsh seemed to do everything,\u201d Spiegelman explains. \u201cOriginally she was hired\u00a0to do physical examinations, but she became a professor in multiple different areas. She built our physical education department, which was the model for other schools. She was really beloved by everyone here and inspired her students to seek out their dreams and seek out all opportunities, even ones she didn\u2019t have the chance to get herself. And within the Baltimore community she was a real proponent for public health, she worked on a plan to eradicate TB and STDs, just so many things.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition to her health work, Welsh was\u00a0an ardent suffragist, which is where Spiegelman encountered her in the Goucher library\u2019s archives. Welsh was one of 100 students and faculty members who took part in a Washington, D.C., suffrage parade on March 3, 1913, the day before Woodrow Wilson\u2019s inauguration.<\/p>\n

Research into Goucher\u2019s support of suffrage was inspired by a crowdsourcing project run by the journal Women and Social Movements in the United States to create a biographical database of suffrage protestors. One of the SUNY Binghamton professors in charge of the database reached out to Goucher, knowing that a large number of students had taken part.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis project shines a light on one of Goucher\u2019s jewels that frequently goes unnoticed: Special Collections and Archives in the Goucher library,\u201d says Sheller. \u201cThrough the efforts of College Librarian Nancy Magnuson and Special Collections Curator Tara Olivero, Special Collections and Archives has developed an outstanding collection of books, manuscripts, and artifacts. This collection has greatly enriched the educational opportunities of Goucher students, faculty, and alumnae\/i.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pro-suffrage opinion was strong on campus, but not unanimous, and the college administration went back and forth in its support of the cause. President William M. Guth, while he seemed to support suffrage in the abstract, balked at connecting the college to protests. Spiegelman says this was especially true during the \u201cmore militant\u201d phase of suffrage protests, beginning in 1917, when protesting the White House during a time of war was seen as unpatriotic. A Sun editorial cited by Speigelman was sympathetic to the college president: \u201cIf Goucher is to be considered merely a nursery for militant suffragists, it will be apt to suffer and its expanding usefulness will be greatly checked.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, 30 Goucher women attended a February 1917 march, the largest delegation of any college. They met with a stern rebuke from Guth on their return to Baltimore, but after the war, Speigelman found, he resumed his support for the cause, eventually granting students a day off from classes on November 2, 1920, to exercise their hard- won right to vote.<\/p>\n

Sheller hopes this project will lead to more research into Goucher\u2019s history. This sort of research, she says, not only \u201callows [students] to hone the skills they gained in their undergraduate history courses and to apply them to a meaningful historical project where they can gain experience writing for publication. It also allows them to experience the joy of discovery, and to gain a deeper understanding of Goucher\u2019s past.\u201d<\/p>\n

The project, which was supported by the Class of 1960 Rhoda M. Dorsey Archives Endowment and the Brooke and Carol Peirce Center for Undergraduate Research, reclaims what had previously been a\u00a0lost part of the college\u2019s story. Suffrage protestors\u2019 perceived militancy led in part to their exclusion from the official histories of the college.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith the current college emphasis on innovation, new technology, and the future,\u201d says Sheller, \u201cit is more important than ever that Goucher students, faculty, and staff have a clear understanding of its past. Ever since the college became coeducational in 1986, it has tended to downplay its single-sex past. It is now time to revisit Goucher\u2019s history as an outstanding women\u2019s college.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition to a paper on her findings, which\u00a0is in the editing stages, Speigelman and Hartman\u2019s series of biographies of Goucher suffragists are available online at goucherspecialcollections.tumblr. com<\/a>. They will soon be added to a large database of suffragist biographies at Binghamton University. The library exhibit \u201cA Nursery for Militant Suffragists\u201d will be on display in the library through June 5.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Untangling the past of a “Nursery for Militant Suffragists”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":312,"featured_media":1184,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[12633,87510,56332],"tags":[12633],"ppma_author":[87492],"class_list":["post-1179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-feature","category-features","category-women-of-goucher","tag-feature"],"yoast_head":"\nSuffragette City | Goucher Magazine<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/magazine\/suffragette-city\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" 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