This year marks the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, passed by Congress in June, 1919 and ratified by the states in August 1920, giving women—at last—the right to vote.
In the second installment of its yearlong celebration of the women's suffrage centennial, the Bennington Branch of the American Association of University Women joins forces with the Bennington Free Library to invite the public to a "Suffrage Transcribe-a-thon" on Saturday, November 2, from 1 to 4 pm at the library, located at 101 Silver Street.
Participants will transcribe original source material from the suffrage papers held by the Library of Congress. Volunteers without typing skills are also encouraged to come and help review transcriptions for accuracy, and tag key words and subjects to add to the collection's growing searchable database.
The words of the women who began the eight-decade-long march toward suffrage and carried the battle over the finish line are preserved in the Suffrage Papers of the Library of Congress, which include some 16,000 historic documents that were the underpinning of the Suffrage Movement. The Library of Congress has already scanned the documents into a digital library and is now asking volunteers to help transcribe them through a crowdsourcing platform called "By the People."
This crowdsourcing project, taking place in Bennington as well as other libraries, schools and homes across the country, will convert digitized materials—diaries, letters, speeches-- into files that can be made available to scholars and the public as searchable databases.
According to AAUW Bennington Branch President Kathy Wagenknecht, "This meeting may be as close to encountering women suffragists face-to-face as we may ever get."
"No experience is necessary," adds Karson Kiesinger, Reference and Adult Services Librarian at the Bennington Free Library. "We will provide the overview and training and have floating volunteers available to help. Participants may work on their own or in small groups to help decipher cryptic handwriting, review transcriptions for accuracy and suggest subjects to tag."
Refreshments throughout the afternoon and during periodic breaks will fuel the effort.
Transcribe-a-thon volunteers are encouraged to bring their laptops, with batteries charged, and get ready for a deep dive into the words that propelled the march toward women's suffrage. Additional laptops will be provided by the library.
The value of this nationwide project for scholars and the public is inestimable. It is often difficult and sometimes impossible to use a computer to search for a word in a scanned source, especially since decades-old documents often make for blurry scans. Transcribe-a-thon volunteers will type up the documents word for work, creating files that will make it easier to find and read original sources. The Suffrage Papers include diaries, letters and speeches from such well-known suffragists as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, as well as lesser-known activists. The Transcribe-a-thon and resulting searchable files will give today's volunteers and tomorrow's researchers a chance to engage in the collection and feel a connection to these pioneering women suffragists.
Among the examples of material included in the Suffrage Papers in the Library of Congress are:
*Accounts from Carrie Chapman Catt, who took over for Susan B. Anthony as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, about her experiences at the Congress of the international Woman Suffrage Alliance in Rome.
*Letters from actor and mountain-climber Anna E. Dickinson, the first woman to give a political address before Congress, probing the familial conflict that arose after her sister committed her to a Pennsylvania asylum.
*Diaries of Mary Church Terrell, a founder of the National Association of Colored Women, which shed light on minorities' laborious suffrage struggles and her own dealings with Civil Rights figures like W.E.B. Du Bois.
AAUW's lineup of suffrage-themed public programs will continue in January 2020.