All library locations are closed Monday, May 25 in observance of Memorial Day.
Women's History Month, Part 2: Susan the Strong
Susan B. Anthony didn’t live to see women’s voting rights enshrined in the U.S. Constitution or guaranteed by all but a handful of states, but she helped lay the groundwork for those things to happen.
Her steadfast advocacy and the work of the suffrage movement in its early stages are commemorated in a four-volume set of books, signed by Anthony and now owned by Nashville Public Library.
The Library owns these books thanks to Judge Martha Craig Daughtrey, whose distinguished law career included becoming the first woman to serve on the Tennessee Supreme Court in 1990. Judge Daughtrey donated these works to NPL for the Votes for Women Room.
With characteristic directness, Anthony, who died 1906—more than a decade before women won the right to vote in every state with ratification of the 19th Amendment—inscribed one of the volumes with this handwritten dedication:
“With the hope and faith that women will ’ere long be reckoned as worthy to stand with honest men in the Constitutions of the States—not with lunatics, criminals and idiots.”
The four volumes are on display in the Votes for Women Room, the Library’s interactive exhibit that brings the hard-won struggle for women’s voting rights to life.
Visit the Votes for Women Room at the Main Library in downtown Nashville (which reopens on March 30) to see these books and explore the history of the 19th Amendment.
And don’t miss Women’s History Month throughout the Nashville Public Library system, where we are elevating women’s stories and voices and offering free community programming across Davidson County.
