Retrospective and Prospective America!…Under the Auspices of the Independent Women Voters and Woman's Publishing Co." program.
[Suffrage Ephemera]. Program: “Retrospective and Prospective America!...Under the Auspices of the Independent Women Voters and Woman’s Publishing Co. Music Hall, Boston, Thursday, April 26th, at 7.45 P.M. [N.P., but Boston]: Press of Geo. E. Crosby & Co., [1894?].
8vo, 23 pp.; buff wrappers (stapled) printed in black; illustrated with engravings of Julia Ward Howe, Wendell Phillips and others; interior generally fresh, excepting 5 which is darkened and a bit foxed; some foxing and staining to front cover; about very good.
[We tentatively have dated the program based on internal evidence, a perpetual calendar to locate the year when April 26 fell on a Thursday and the fact that Mrs. Livermore markedly reduced her public activities after 1895]. Programs which combined music, song and as well as recitations or speeches were staples of the woman suffrage movement toward the end of the 19th century. Dramatic tableaux, more complicated and costly to mount, were reserved for more elaborate occasions. This program with “Mrs. Mary A. Livermore...the Historian of the Occasion” is organized into five parts: “The Discovery of America” (through “The First Woman’s Rights Convention”); “Slavery Period” (“Burns' return to slavery. Mrs. Mary A. Livermore will give a graphic description of this scene of which she was an eye witness.”); “Rebellion Days”; “Progress of the Colored Americans”(with a section also on the “W.C.T.U. Period”); and, “The Living Flag” with a tableau of “States and Territories,” and the figure of “Woman made free by Enfranchisement.”
Mary Livermore (1820-1905), Civil war worker, temperance and suffrage advocate, writer and lecturer, had co-founded the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association in 1870 and with Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe led the women’s rights movement in New England. The program reflects her involvement in three great 19th century movements—abolition, temperance and women’s rights, which she, and others, saw as arising out of a commitment to human rights.
“The Independent Women Voters” who co-sponsor the evening evolved from the “Ward and City Committee of Women Voters” which organized after women gained the right to vote in Boston school board elections. Its advertisement indicates that in 1890 “the Independent Women Voters became a recognized political party,” though its functions appear to have been more akin to the League of Women Voters. The “Woman’s Publishing Co.” was the publishing arm of The Woman’s Journal and, during this period, of the NAWSA as well.
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