Women's Suffrage

This lesson plan will address women’s suffrage and the history of the ratification of the 19th Amendment in North Carolina in conjunction with present-day voter suppression. Students will explore primary sources including images, petitions, and recordings from the Southern Oral History Project. They will also be asked to think about the relationship between women’s experiences advocating for the 19th Amendment and current-day experiences with voter suppression. They will think through forms of protest and produce documents advocating for the right to vote, modeled after the advocacy work of the women seeking to gain suffrage. This lesson adds to existing content on the history of women’s right to vote by focusing specifically on the experience of suffragists in North Carolina and by working through the relationship between historic and present-day voting rights.

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Essential Questions:

Who in North Carolina opposed women’s suffrage and for what reasons?

In what ways was the Nineteenth Amendment neither the beginning nor the end to the story of women’s rights and voting?

Despite the Nineteenth Amendment’s passage, in what ways did states still restrict the voting rights based on race and/or sex?

In what ways did Indigenous and Black women influence the suffrage movement?

Why are the contributions of black women and women of color less known than the contributions of white women who fought for suffrage throughout history?

What did it take on the part of women of all races to finally secure the right to vote? In what ways do people today still need to continue the fight for voting rights?

In what ways are historically marginalized group’s right to vote still challenged?