Time Capsule at the Crossroads: the Howland Suffrage Poster Collection

Emily Howland was in the forefront of all the significant movements for social change in America, particularly for the disenfranchised—women, blacks, and disadvantaged children. She was a significant player in that she was either directly involved in or funded developments for suffragist, educational, and abolitionist causes. As a tireless fundraiser and grass-roots worker for these causes, she provided an important bridge between traditionalist American society and the more radical feminist stance of someone like Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She had direct ties to key people and in all areas including Booker T. Washington, William Henry Seward, the underground railroad, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman. Her educational causes included schools for blacks and women, but she also encouraged coeducation in a diverse academic curriculum. Selflessly dedicated to the pursuit of social change, choosing to remain unmarried so as not to dilute her energies in the pursuit of women’s issues, temperance, and education, Howland represents the importance of the individual in grass-roots organization and the role of philanthropy in obtaining local change creating the momentum for significant national reform. She exemplified the importance of informal networking among marginalized populations whose persistent efforts effected significant social change despite the opposition of entrenched traditional interests. Howland’s local efforts brought her to national prominence. She was offered an office with the WCTU which she passed to her niece: the offer was a tacit recognition of her significance as an organizer and fundraiser. Nationally her work with Freedmen’s Bureau and contraband camps encouraged the education and empowerment of blacks. In the process, rigid gender-specific roles were eroded and paved the way for more opportunity for women to engage in the professions. Her support of the education of many young women proved that she was more than a spokesperson: she was a national activist who backed her support with significant financial resources. She was a woman who broke man’s rules, and by entering the man’s world despite hostility, challenged traditional stereotypes facing women. She was a role model and activist appearing in national forums in support of women’s causes and supported education for the disadvantaged well into her advanced age. She herself said, “A purposeless life is the most dreary on in the world” (qtd. In Breault 149).

Educated at the Marriot School, Aurora, New York, and, for a time, Mary Grew’s School for Young Women and Mary Robinson’s School in Philadelphia, Emily Howland took some lectures at the Philadelphia Women’s Medical College, the local anti-slavery society, and the Ethical Union in Philadelphia. Her first real employment was in the contraband schools in Washington, DC in teaching, organizing, and fundraising. She purchased land for freed blacks and established communities and schools to teach not only basic skills but responsibility and self-sufficiency, including Howland Chapel School in Heathville, Virginia, two "Arcadia" settlements, one in Virginia and another on Cat Island, So. Carolina. She brought several young black women from Virginia to Howland Seminary in Union Springs and funded several more to receive college degrees from Howard University and Oberlin. She funded the Sherwood Select School (1882-1954) and was instrumental in opening the doors of Cornell University to women in 1870s. Howland funded the establishment of the Manassas Normal and Industrial School for blacks and the educations of many women, particularly in the medical field, such as Amanda Sanford Hickey and Katy Munhall. She contributed to over 30 struggling black institutions including Tuskegee to which she made frequent donations and established an annual scholarship, and her generosity is recorded in the records of schools from Weiser, Idaho to Montgomery, Alabama. On October 29, 1929, Howland received an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters for her work in New York and national education, being the first woman so honored by the University of the State of New York. Howland was a community leader, state leader, and national and international figure. She spoke before Congress in 1904, she attended and spoke at many suffrage meetings, including the Rochester Suffrage Meeting in 1878 with Anthony, Stanton, and Mott, she was elected in 1891 as the first female bank director in the United States, she carried petitions for women’s property rights, she attended the Boston 1883 Suffrage Convention, she was elected state Vice President for the Association for the Advancement of Women in 1891, and she was the local organizer of the Cayuga County Equal Rights Association. In 1891 she was elected President of the Cayuga County Political Equality Club, representing the group at the National Suffrage Convention in Washington in 1893. She gave a speech at the New York State Convention for Suffrage in 1894. She hosted many like-minded reformers such as Sojourner Truth (1878), Pandita Ramabai (1886), Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Tubman. And Booker T. Washington.

Howland’s work extended beyond the borders of the United States. Reasserting her Quaker and pacifist principles, her work in the peace movement included opposition to the Spanish American war. At age of 89 (from 1899--) she lectured and wrote tracts protesting US imperialism and aggression in Philippines and Central America. She supported the National Armenian Relief and opposed American involvement in WW1 and encouraged sober reflection at a time of national hysteria, discounting propaganda stories of German atrocities. She was intimately involved in the American Ramabai Association, helping to establish Ramabai circles which funded mission work with Indian women, the indigent, prostitutes, orphans, and famine victims. Her work spread outward from Sherwood, NY, embracing educational reform and women’s rights, moving in an ever widening circle from Sherwood to Philadelphia, to Washington, DC, to India. Ramabai herself invited Howland to come to India to see the fruits of her work, but age prevented her going. In terms of global impact, Howland’s biographer says it best: “She saw herself as part of an active national and international sisterhood.”

Emily Howland and Suffrage

Emily Howland had “strong ties of friendship with women in both the National and American Women’s Suffrage Associations.”[1] From 1844, when she made her first public political statement on women’s rights, until her death, Emily Howland did the kind of grass-roots work so necessary to any political movement. Elected President of the Cayuga County Political Equality Club in 1891[2], she was also the State Vice President of the Association for the Advancement of Women. Howland circulated petitions, arranged lectures and political meetings, wrote legislators, attended state, national, and international conventions, distributed literature, and read The Woman’s Journal.[3] Her home, “Tanglewild,” became a retreat for many suffragists, including Susan B. Anthony, Anna Howard Shaw, Elizabeth Smith Miller, Eliza Wright Osborne, Amanda Sanford Hickey, Ida Husted Harper, and Harriet May Mills.[4] Howland helped establish the Women’s Education and Industrial Union in Auburn, marched in suffrage parades in 1912 and 1913 in New York, and formed the Sherwood Equal Rights Association as early as 1893.[5] Emily Howland’s home was the center of reformist activity that included abolition, suffrage, and education; hence it is not surprising that her home became a repository for much of the publicity that these causes engendered. The Howland Suffrage Collection at the Sherwood Stone Store Museum in Sherwood, New York may be the most impressive, if unacknowledged, collection of suffrage posters in the country. The Sherwood Stone Store Museum sits at the crossroads if the town of Sherwood on Route 34B. A treasure-trove of artifacts and information, the museum has been sadly overlooked by women’s organizations though it has been lovingly cared for and restored by the Friends of the Sherwood Stone Store Museum. Now that the Museum has been included on the new Underground Railroad Trail (Howland was also a staunch abolitionist), perhaps more people will finally visit see the amazing collection of suffrage posters it houses.

Suffrage Posters

Paula Hays Harper, in an early seminal article on suffrage posters, argues that they are “among the earliest manifestations of a new phenomenon in the twentieth century: the political picture poster.”[6] She goes further, saying that the suffragists were the “first group to adapt this ubiquitous commercial art form to a political function and set the precedent that was so quickly followed, on a massive scale, by the makers of official government propaganda posters.”[7] Although the suffragists were clearly brilliant propagandists, in fact the political use of posters goes back at least to the French Revolution when “the walls became animated, alive with posters. Some called for an assembly of citizens, others for an uprising.”[8] Once the Revolution was over and the “newly middle class [ . . .] recognized wealth as a prime mover [. . . .]The commercial and economic function of the poster became more and more evident [. . . .];commercial posters of the empire used symbols to encourage potential buyers to make certain favorable associations.”[9] What the suffragists did was to shift the function of the poster back to the original purpose: political agitation and propaganda.

In fact, even earlier than the suffrage push of the twentieth century, French feminists were using posters to further their cause. As Gallo notes,

During times of revolutionary upheaval—the Revolution of 1848 or the Paris Commune, for instance—posters in Paris posed fundamental questions. As one poster asked, ‘Will women enjoy political and social rights and will they be recognized as men’s equals?’ Other posters demanded divorce. The socialist movements of the 1880s made women the theoretical equal of men.[10]

Art nouveau fan

Sponsored by local Auburn, New York clothing store

Stylized art nouveau background, almost in halo form around woman’s head. Figure emphasizes femininity of woman with a sense of purpose in the facial expression.

One of 5 different fans in the Sherwood Collection.

Sponsored by local Auburn, New York clothing store.

Suffrage artists of the twentieth century used a variety of images and techniques in their poster art: “Emulating the commercial marketplace that had attempted to visually stimulate women since the 1880s, suffragists covered the urban landscape with billboards, placards, electric signs, window displays, banners, buttons, and badges.”[11] (Harper notes that they made “use of current advertising styles, which were dilutions of fine arts styles.”[12] Some show the direct influence of art nouveau forms;

others exploit the use of political cartoons, while yet others use children’s books illustrators to “soften” the images and frame them in a kind of maternal “language.” Some use stark, simple, bold lettering with no graphic images to get their points across quickly and powerfully.

Suffrage imagery itself can be classified into a number of different propaganda categories. Some use a very feminized version of a kind of symbolic woman—the draped figure, the woman with the scales of justice, Joan of Arc, Miss Liberty—classical images from traditional art sources or from Pre-Raphaelite and art nouveau concepts of woman. Such images perhaps attempt to assuage male fears that the vote would masculinize women; and they counter the anti-suffragist propaganda that depicted women as hard, shrewish, masculine viragos who needed to be kept in their places. British posters often tended to “place more stress on the intellectual achievements and professional accomplishments of women and less on the importance of motherhood and the womanly nature.”[13] A good number of American posters use maternal images, tying suffrage to reformist questions of household management, hygiene, proper conditions for the raising of healthy children soon to be citizens, and so forth.

In America, gold background and purple lettering were the colors of the National Women’s Party, and, in general, yellow/gold was the color chosen by most suffrage groups in the States. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had used the color gold in their campaign to help pass the Kansas suffrage referendum in 1867, and the color stayed with American suffragists.[14] Many of the posters in the Howland Collection show a preponderance of yellow and gold. The New York State posters show this tendency especially and the yellow is paired with blue—the state colors, to make a more dramatic point. Although Americans tended to use yellow as the primary suffrage color, British suffragists used color to indicate the association affiliations. Purple, white, and green were the colors of the Women’s Suffrage and Political Union; while the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies used red, white and green. The Women’s Freedom League used green, white and gold; The Artists’ Atelier, blue, black, and orange.[15]

The Howland Collection

It is difficult to identify the exact printing techniques of the suffrage posters. By the end of the 19^th century, much of the lithography was still being done on stone although techniques using zinc and the aluminum plates had been developed. The Artists’ Suffrage League and the various American suffrage organizations sent their posters to commercial printers. By 1911, offset lithography was still in its infancy, and by the 1920s photoengraving was another technique that might have been used. Easier to identify, the Atelier in London, heavily influenced by the Arts and Crafts Movement of William Morris and others, favored wood-engraving and wood-cuts that gave a hand-printed, primitive look. Wood engraving uses “an engraver’s burin to carve the fine lines across the grain of a very hard wood, traditionally box [….The effect] of a wood engraving is usually that of a series of white lines on a dark ground.” Wood cuts leave “black masses on white ground,” the engraving leaving areas to print in relief.[16] Many of the woodcuts made by the Atelier were hand colored. The one Atelier example in the Howland Collection seems to be such a woodcut.

Lisa Tickner lists a total of 65 extant posters housed in the Fawcett Collection and/or Museum of London (59 posters), The Communist Party Archives (2 posters), and the Schlesinger Library of Radcliffe College (1 poster). All posters in Tickner’s catalogue are British. Paula Hays Harper discusses 35 posters which are preserved in a number of places: the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, the Schlesinger Library, Smith College, the Laidlaw Collection of the New York Historical Society, and the New York Public Library. Hays mentions that suffrage posters “have long lain in the archives undisturbed and unpublished;”[17] this makes the Howland Collection even more valuable. Although it includes five British posters, the Howland Collection is primarily American, ranging from local to state to national posters, with a total of 90 posters and some duplicates, one metal sign, and 17 ephemeral suffrage items. This may well be one of the largest extant collections of suffrage posters in the United States.The posters in the Sherwood Collection cover international, national, state, and local examples.

The International Posters

Lithograph 40” x 30”

Artists’ Suffrage League

Printed by J. Weiner Ltd. Acton W

Signed bottom left: Emily J. Harding Andrews

According to Tickner, the poster was printed in 1908-9 and reprinted in 1910 “in response to urgent demands” (Tickner 250).

Top right reads: “She. It is time I got out of this place. Where shall I find the key?”

The theme of convicts and lunatics “was a popular one. At least since Frances Power Cobbe’s ‘Criminals, idiots, women, and minors, is the classification sound?’ in Fraser’s Magazine 78 (1868)” (Tickner plate iv).

The British posters in the Howland collection are well-known examples of suffrage posters. Four are published by the Artists’ Suffrage League, one by the Suffrage Atelier. The Artists’ Suffrage League was founded in 1907 to “further the cause of Women’s Suffrage by the work and professional help of artists.”[18] Early posters were colored by hand to save the cost of expensive color printing, but by 1909 the ASL was offering prizes of L 4-5 for “the best design for a poster, suitable for use at elections.”[19] These posters were professionally printed by Weiners of Acton, David Allen, and Carl Hentschel of Fleet Street; most were printed in editions of 1,000 with a retail cost of 4 pence. Artists made no profit.[20]

The Atelier was established in 1909 by Clemence and Laurence Housman “to encourage artists to forward the women’s movement, and particularly the Enfranchisement of women, by means of pictorial publication.”[21] Although Atelier artists who designed postcards, cartoons, and pictures received 50-75% of the profits from the sale of these items, posters were not intended for sale; hence artists and the Atelier negotiated a set price for the artist. The Atelier was “most closely associated with the Women’s Freedom League and [Emmeline Pankhurt’s] Women’s Social and Political Union.”[22] The Atelier encouraged women to “share their skills and work collectively [. . .]and set out to train women in the printing techniques it was still difficult for them formally to acquire.”[23] In fact, the artists of the Atelier not only designed but also printed their own posters.

Lithograph 39” x 30”

Designed and printed by the Atelier, 6 Stanlake Villas, Shepherd’s Bush, London W.

No artist listed, but Tickner identifies designer as Louise Jacobs (Tickner 214).

The Suffrage Atelier was established in 1909 “to encourage artists to forward the woman’s movement, and particularly the Enfranchisement of women, by means of pictorial publication” (Atelier constitution qtd. In Tickner 241). A mother, a laundress, and a chainmaker are visible behind the woman in front of the Houses of Parliament.

Poster is direct parody of anti-suffrage poster. The poster’s theme responds to the White Slave Traffic Bill of 1912.[24]

Many of the artists and members of the Atelier came from Fabian and Socialist Circles. The Atelier ran its workshops until 1914. [25] It is not surprising that five British posters wound up in Sherwood, New York in the Howland Collection. British posters were available to NAWSA; in fact, the Artists’ Suffrage League is said to have “supplied the California campaign of 1911 and the Suffrage Atelier advertised posters printed on yellow paper for American use.” [26]

The National Posters

The posters in the national collection can be categorized into various types and were printed by different organizations. Adolf Treidler’s liberty loan poster, famous for its codified image of Lady Liberty, and Egbert Jacobson’s poster contain no printing or publishing information. But most of the other posters are connected with national suffrage organizations. NAWSA printed a number of different kinds of posters, including convention calls, a series originally printed as cartoons in The Woman’s Journal and other periodicals, a series of yellow posters with text only, reprints of newspaper articles, and a series of map posters showing suffrage victories. Different strategies were used in the posters with images, some directly confronting anti-suffrage arguments, others highlighting women’s roles in “home, children, morals, and business.” The McConnell Press of New York printed “Suffrage Sacrifice Week”;

Lithograph 33”x23”

McConnell Press, Inc.

52-58 Duane Street, New York City

union label

Refers, perhaps, to what Finnegan calls “So much dash and color, a virtual spectacle of suffrage advocacy” (Finnegan 45). “During the last decade of the movement, suffragists appealed to outdoor audiences in other ways emulative of commercial businesses. They constructed huge billboards on busy city streets; they plastered their organization names across urban skyscrapers; they rented advertising space on streetcars; and they paraded up and down crowded sidewalks wearing sandwich boards and selling suffrage newspapers[. . . . They] laid claim to public space” (Finnegan 45). Perhaps this poster refers to a sort of public demonstration of solidarity. The writing on the bank/house reads: “Won’t you give us just a mite?/Some small coin or other?/ Won’t you help us win our fight/ Vote for Home and Mother.”

since it is undated and had no printed source information, it is difficult to determine whether or not this is a national or state-level campaign poster. The “Watch her Grow” poster from the 1913 Woman’s Journal of Boston may have been distributed to various state campaigns via NAWSA even though NAWSA’s name is not on the poster itself.

Lithograph 30”x46 ½”

Unsigned but identified by Sheppard as Rose O’Neill (Sheppard 136).[27]

National Woman Suffrage Publishing Company, 505 Fifth Avenue, New York

Union label

Stylistically simple, the poster uses children’s book illustration to target ideas of hygiene, household management, and education.

The one poster (”Give Mother the Vote”) published by the National Woman’s Suffrage Publishing Company may also, because of its blue and gold coloring, be a New York State poster, but it uses imagery typical of all levels of suffrage campaigning and could have been used in any state campaign.

One poster, also without printing information, advertises Jane Addams’ Ladies’ Home Journal article and was apparently used by bookstores to sell the magazine. Finally, the famous “Give her of the Fruit” poster, published by the Munro and Harford Company, is a classic example of the art-nouveau, feminized and romanticized figure reminiscent of the Atelier poster with a similar figure.

P 96-1

Lithograph 41”x23 ½ “

Copyrighted by Evelyn Rumsey Cary[28]

Signed ERC

Printed by The Munro and Harford Company

Color and gold leaf

Feminized art-nouveau painting reminiscent of Suffrage Atelier poster in international section.

Text reads:

Give her of the Fruit

Of her hands, and let

Her own works praise

Her in the gates[29]

The State Posters

According to Kathryn Finnegan, nothing

compared to the Empire State Campaign. In response to the New York State Woman Suffrage referendum of 1915, the Empire State Campaign Committee formed a press and publicity council dedicated to making the movement visible. One hundred volunteers made it virtually impossible for pedestrians, motorists, and onlookers to ignore the suffrage messages. Suffragists covered the visual landscape with advertisements. They distributed 149,533 posters—“thousands” hung from the trees, on fences, and in the windows of houses, apartments, and storefronts. Other posters decorated the interiors of banks, moving picture and vaudeville theaters, and other businesses. New York women gave away a million suffrage buttons. They convinced “thousands” of movie house operators to show suffrage slides between entertainments. In the last weeks of the campaign, they placed 400 small electric signs in shop windows and they hung “large net campaign banners” at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-first Street and at Columbus Circle. The Street Railways Advertising Company gave suffragists $8,000 worth of free advertising space on city streetcars.[30]

Most of the posters in the state collection are tied to particular election years. One is a large instruction sheet for casting ballots in the 1914 primary. Fifteen are tied to the 1915 election and six to the 1917 election. Two posters were apparently used in both elections since the 7 in 1917 is clearly pasted on to an old poster. The majority of state posters were printed by J.M. Tooker, one of three of the major New York printers in the early part of the century. The Tooker posters are distinctive, banded in yellow and blue with large letters and simple messages.

Lithograph 40” x 29”

J.M. Tooker 38^th & 1^st NYC

Lithograph 40” x 29”

No printer identification: looks like Tooker

“7” pasted over old number

Lithograph 40” x 29”

J.M. Tooker 38^th & 1^st NYC

Lithograph 40” x 29”

J.M. Tooker 38^th & 1^st NYC

“7” pasted over old number

Most of the posters appear to have been published by the New York State Woman Suffrage Party. The state collection, like the national collection, includes posters that appeared originally in newspapers and magazines as well as posters made from cartoons. One is a convention call, one an endorsement from President Wilson, and one an example of one of the streetcar ads mentioned in the quote above.

The Local Posters

The local posters range from general suffrage voting posters printed in Auburn, New York to announcements for mass meetings in Auburn, Syracuse, and Seneca Falls to bake sales and fundraising activities. Some are printed posters and placards while others are hand-painted; one is a hand-painted metal sign. The main local organization sponsoring woman suffrage was the Cayuga County Political Equality Club. One of the co-founders of the club was Eliza Wright Osborne, daughter of Martha Coffin Wright and niece of Lucretia Mott. And both Emily and Isabel Howland were active officers and members, hence this collections of suffrage materials at the Howland Stone Store. Headquartered at 9 Exchange Street in Auburn, the CCPEC office was “always cheerful with yellow banners, yellow dolls, and other yellow souvenirs [to] draw the attention of many passersby [. . . .]sometimes there are meetings addressed by speakers from afar, sometimes ‘experience meetings’ [early consciousness-raising?] of women of the district.”[31] Included in the local poster collection are announcements of such meetings.

Hand-painted poster 22” x 14”

No signature

An example of a poster advertising one of probably many such fundraising events.

Suffrage “bazaars . . . offered a plethora of suffrage goods. A longtime staple of women’s benevolent associations, bazaars signified women’s traditional way to raise money” (Finnegan 116)

Other posters show the variety of speakers who came to the area. Some announce the Syracuse visits of Carrie Chapman Catt (May 16,1915), Harriet Stanton Blatch in Seneca Falls, and Frances Bjorkman in Auburn. One hand-painted sign announces a suffrage tent at the New York State Fair in Syracuse. Two of the hand-painted posters focus on national images while using the state colors of blue and gold. One for the November 6 election (1917) features a Liberty Bell while a two-piece, double-large hand-painted poster uses World War I servicemen to highlight women’s roles in the war effort. This one is a copy of an advertisement for street railways posters.

Hand-painted poster in two pieces set one on top of the other. 54” x 41”

Picture copied free Street Railways Advertisement (see ephemera section).

Numbered 3087 at bottom.

The collection also includes a “How to Vote on the Voting Machine” poster from 1914 with Proposition 1: the suffrage amendment.

We have included in this “local” section four original drawings by Lou Rogers. Annie (Lou) Rogers (1879-1952) was born in Patten, Maine, and she is not a local artist. Since she took part in suffrage lecture tours, perhaps she had come to central New York to speak; or maybe Emily and Isabel Howland, who summered in Little Deer Isle, knew her from their visits to Maine. But Lou Rogers was “one of the country’s leading cartoonists with her pictures appearing in The Judge, Ladies’ Home Journal, New York Call, and the New York Tribune.”[32] Her suffrage cartoons were featured in Suffragist, Woman Citizen, and Woman Voter. Somehow, four large original drawings found their way to the Sherwood Stone Store.

Lou Rogers cartoons—text to side of cartoon
	Original drawing 24” x 35 ½” Signed bottom left corner: Lou Rogers[33]
Original drawing 36” x 24” Unsigned—by Lou Rogers
	Original drawing 36” x 24” Signed bottom right: Lou Rogers
Original drawing 36” x 24” Signed bottom right: Lou Rogers

Suffrage Ephemera

The Howland Collection in Sherwood contains not only posters but also some other suffrage items. The various suffrage organizations learned early on the value of marketing items that would push their agenda further than the newspapers and the Halls of Congress (when they could get there). A vast array of items was sold in specialized suffrage shops, in local headquarters that housed shops, and thorough catalogues:

Showing the colors—proclaiming dedication to female enfranchisement through the use of woman suffrage merchandise—had become commonplace. Colored ribbons, however, had given way to largely inexpensive and mass-produced commodities, including hats, blouses, badges, pins, valentines, kewpie dolls, playing cards, drinking cups, luggage tags, fans, hat pins, and much more. Suffragists eagerly purchased these goods.[34]

NAWSA was especially good at marketing and maintained a number of special NAWSA shops where women could purchase a variety of items. Local chapters could order items through catalogues and either display them in the windows of their local headquarters, sell them at meetings and fundraising events, or hawk them on the streets during parades and marches. The local organizers realized the power of such modern methods of organization: “Suffrage windows and other commercially emulative suffrage displays tapped into these new modes of attraction through color, commodities, and artful design.”[35] In some cases, local businesses recognized the benefit of supporting suffragists: they sponsored some of the items, knowing that the vote was likely to come eventually, that women were their major customers, and that suffragists would distribute the items widely so their businesses would benefit from mass advertising.

Fan two side one

Fan two side two

Yellow cardboard, wooden stick.

Text message

Stylized woman with justice scales, traditional feminine counterpoint to anti-suffrage versions of the “masculine” female, especially appropriate on a fan.

Bottom right corner: Ad.Nov.Co.Boone,Ia.

Text appropriates the various roles women play, stressing working women but showing as well the need for the enfranchisement of mothers.

Many businessmen recognized that such suffrage gatherings could be “a welcome source of revenue to their cities and an opportunity to win over women consumers.”[36] The Empire State Campaign Committee in 1915 produced and distributed 35,000 fans[37], five of which remain in the Howland Collection. Such novelties allowed suffragists to distribute their message not only to the converted but also to mass audiences that came out to watch the demonstrations and parades. Novelty items were often purchased in bulk, sometimes used as fundraisers; more often they were distributed free to crowds. Other items in the Howland Collection include photographs of various people involved in the movement, an advertisement for the posters placed for free in the city railcars during the campaign, and some scrapbook memorabilia. Also preserved in the files at the museum are the minutes of the local chapter.

The Howland Collection also includes a number of very fragile banners and fabric suffrage items that we were unable to photograph for fear of destroying them. There are three large parade banners that would have been carried by a number of women. One is fabric on netting that stretches across a parade line, identifying the Cayuga County Political Equality League. One, held on either side by wooden poles, is fabric with a paper poster glued on top. The poster, a map of states granting suffrage to women similar to the one in the poster collection, is published by the National Woman Suffrage Publishing Company. Both fabric and paper are frayed and very delicate. The third is printed on a cloth banner: “Men! Vote Yes on the Woman Suffrage Amendment Nov. 2. [Published by] Cook-Titus.” This too is on wooden poles.

There is also a box of items that includes the following:

5 yellow pennants with blue stenciled letters saying “Votes for Women.”
2 yellow pennants with stenciled letters (one in white, one in green) saying “Votes for Women”
1 white pennant with yellow letters sewn on, also saying “Votes for Women”
1 blue and white silk banner with gold letters: “Votes for Women”
1 yellow cotton banner with blue letters: “Vote Yes on the Suffrage Amendment Nov 2”
1 large banner letters painted on yellow cotton: “Mass Meeting Burtis Opera House 7:45 pm Noted Speakers Auburn’s Only Chance
2 crepe white paper banner with blue and yellow letters: ”Votes for Women Victory 1915”
1 white net banner with yellow glued on letters: “Suffrage Rooms Open Tonight until 9 pm”
4 white paper napkins with yellow print: “Votes for Women”
1 paper cup holder white with blue letters: “Drink to the Success 1915 Empire State Campaign”
8 yellow cards, approximately index card size, “Votes for women” with spaces blank to fill in time, date, speaker, place
1 silk flower with Votes for Women ribbon
1 box top from a box that held the flowers
2 half-moon hand painted signs: Vote for Woman Suffrage Nov 6
1 parasol, yellow and white fabric, blue letters: “Votes for Women”
1 white satin with gold dove at top, braid tassels, edging and lettering: “Cayuga County Political Equality Club”—with wooden dowel running across the top to be used at parades
2 Votes for Women yellow satin ribbons

Most of these items would have been used at parades and rallies; we imagine many of them would have been on display or for sale at the Suffrage Headquarters on Exchange Street in Auburn.

Conclusion

Emily Howland was “a doer and seeker . . . an intellectual and a reformer . . . and a humanitarian.” What Howland contributed to America and the world was the belief that one single person, even a 19^th century woman who was effectively powerless at the time, could make such a profound difference in the world. Howland did not let the mores of the day stop her: a single woman, she used her energy, her intellect, and her passion to achieve the goals she set for herself. She refused to sit back and let others, who may have had more power or more backing, do the work for her. She volunteered, she funded, and she worked in the trenches. In funding women in medicine, for example, she asked not to be repaid; instead she asked the recipients of her generosity to do likewise for others. During the 102 years of her life, she became model of activism on the local, the national, and the international levels. Remaining active throughout an entire century, she is a role model for feminists, but she also rejected the stereotypes of ageism. As such she inspired others to a life of commitment and activism. She proves to all of us that each one of us can make a difference in spite of where we come from and what our limitations are. She proves that informal networks can be the first step in bringing about social change. She advocated women’s equality in social as well as intellectual spheres. Her name and her legacy continue in such places as the Howland Chapel School (now on the Virginia State historical register), the Emily Howland School in Southern Cayuga, New York (the old Sherwood Select School), George Junior Republic, the Piney Woods School, and Tuskegee Institute. She was a pioneer in lifelong education, believing that when people reach the age of 70 “that is our opportunity. Since there is no such thing as a school for the aged, we must make our own school. We can teach ourselves” (qtd. in Breaut 143). Howland represents a first step in the move toward a more radical restructuring of the feminist critique of American society. Her life continues to inspire others to activism

Emily Howland worked long and hard for many causes during her lifetime. The Howland Suffrage Collection at the Sherwood Stone Store museum is one that will stun scholars, museum curators, and suffrage enthusiasts alike because of its enormous size, its surprisingly good condition, and its incomprehensible neglect by both preservationists and the general scholarly community. Thanks to the dedication of a small group of local citizens, the collection remains intact and relatively well-preserved. Since the Sherwood Stone Store has recently been added to the Underground Railroad Trail, it is hoped that oversight of this collection will soon be remedied. The collection remains a monument to the dedication of local historians who have worked so diligently to preserve the records of the activities of Emily Howland and her associates. The collection remains a time capsule at the crossroads, providing a fascinating visual image of the culmination of the seventy year struggle for women’s suffrage in America. It is one of the undiscovered treasures of any tour of central New York.

Works Cited

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