TPS Spotlight: Voices for Suffrage
Voices for Suffrage, part of the Congress, Civic Participation, and Primary Sources Project supported by a grant from the Library of Congress, is an interactive web application for students in grades 7-12 that promotes primary source analysis, reading comprehension, and supporting inferences with evidence. This web-based learning application contains over 700 primary sources from the Library and other digital archives and includes a research section, interactive timeline detailing the story of suffrage both on national and state levels, guided lessons, and a game.
Five guided tours—20-minute guided lessons—include videos and interactive activities and teach specific aspects of the movement: Origins, Diversity, Opposition, Tactics, and Influences.
In the game They Persisted!, students analyze primary sources to support their decisions and successfully lead a chosen suffrage group.
Voices for Suffrage encourages students to think not just about the impact of the 19th Amendment, but also about the decades of work that went into winning the vote, the obstacles suffragists faced, and, most importantly, the broad range of voices that made up the movement. With primary sources that range from national parades to local county conventions, the contributions of upper-class white women to escaped slaves, and the influences of British suffragettes to Native American tribes who inspired the movement, Voices for Suffrage includes multiple perspectives to tell a fuller and more complete story of the woman suffrage movement.
Watch the webinar, Using Voices for Suffrage in your Classroom, for an overview of the application and some ideas about how to use it in your classroom. We’d love for you to share Voices for Suffrage with your colleagues and students and provide us feedback through surveys so that we can further improve our application. Access the Teacher Survey and Student Survey.