Elizabeth Cady Stanton first issued a call for women’s suffrage in 1848, inspiring a crusade that would finally extend the vote to all American women in 1920. The strategies of the suffrage movement–posters, pamphlets, parades, and state-by-state campaigns–are on display here along with items from the English suffrage movement.  Emboldened by victory, and armed with the skills they acquired in mass organization and protest, American women went on to seek equality in many other arenas.  Whether in finance, law, government, or aviation, they pursued the right to participate equally in all realms of society and to take charge of their lives.

Eleanor Roosevelt dedicated her life to many of these campaigns for equality. She launched her public career as soon as women gained the vote. In her Democratic Party activities, she mobilized voters, campaigned, and helped shape public policy. Memberships in the Women’s City Club and the Women’s Trade Union League introduced her to important issues affecting women in the city, the workplace, and the family, and friendships with the leaders who worked for those causes.  From her positions as First Lady of New York State and First Lady of the Nation, she learned more about the legal and social challenges facing women and other marginalized groups like African Americans. She formulated a progressive position on civil rights, and her human rights advocacy culminated in the writing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its adoption by the United Nations in December 1948, exactly a century after Elizabeth Cady Stanton launched the suffrage movement.

Late in her life, Eleanor was appointed by President John F. Kennedy to his  Commission on the Status of Women. She died just months before the 1963 publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.  This book helped ignite the next phase of the women’s rights movement, leading to prominent roles for women in the other great social movements that have transformed American society from the mid-20^th century onward.  Whether it was civil rights or the environment, disability rights or LGBT rights, or winning campaigns or appointments to high office, new leaders emerged decade by decade following in the paths of Eleanor Roosevelt and many of the pioneers showcased in this exhibition.

This online exhibit expands on the popular success of the exhibition at Roosevelt House which was presented in 2016. The Women Take the Lead website presents image of artifacts from the Dobkin Family Collection, along with video and audio on topics relating to the women’s suffrage movement and women’s rights writ large.