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Famous Sites in the History of Women's Rights

In August 1920, the 19th Amendment was ratified, giving some women—but not all—the right to vote at the national level. Celebrate the centennial of suffrage with a tour of New York locations that were important in the history of women’s rights.

ByNew-York Historical Society logoNew-York Historical Society
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Brooklyn Bridge
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Brooklyn Bridge

A plaque on the bridge's Brooklyn Tower honors Emily Roebling, the wife of chief engineer Washington Roebling, who stepped in when her husband fell seriously ill and oversaw the construction of the iconic bridge. It's since been the site of countless protests, including recent Black Lives Matter marches.
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44 Broad Street
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44 Broad Street

Victoria Woodhull and her sister Tennessee Claflin made this address famous when they opened a women-run brokerage house in 1870. Two years later in 1872, Woodhull would run for President, decades before women got the vote.
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Potter Building
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Potter Building

The Potter is a landmark building downtown that was built in the 1880s. But a previous building on this location was the site of an auspicious collaboration: "The Revolution," a newspaper founded by suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, had its offices at 37 Park Row, where it published from 1868–1872. The intersection is now designated "Susan B. Anthony & Elizabeth Cady Stanton Corner."
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466 Pearl Street
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466 Pearl Street

This building sits near the intersection of Pearl St. and Park Row downtown, near the location where Elizabeth Jennings made history in 1854. A Black woman and teacher, Jennings refused to leave the whites-only trolley that she'd boarded and was forcibly ejected. She later sued the trolley company for damages—and won.
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336 Broadway
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336 Broadway

This area is now the heart of downtown's Civic Center. But in the 19th century, this address was near the site of the Broadway Tabernacle, which hosted a two-day Women's Rights Convention in 1853. Abolitionist and activist Sojourner Truth was among the speakers, and she shot back at hecklers in the crowd. "We'll have our rights; see if we don't," she said. "You may hiss as much as you like, but it is coming."
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Ellis Island
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Ellis Island

In 1902, a pregnant, 21-year-old widow named Isabel González migrated from Puerto Rico to New York. Upon her arrival on Ellis Island, she was detained by inspectors who judged her to be an "undesirable alien" and ordered her deported. She fought back in the courts in a landmark case that would pave the way for Puerto Ricans to claim U.S. citizenship.
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Statue of Liberty
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Statue of Liberty

Tip your hat to Lady Liberty and the bronze plaque in her pedestal that's inscribed with the famous lines from poet and activist Emma Lazarus: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free..." The Statue of Liberty has also been the site of many famous protests, including one at its 1886 unveiling for women's suffrage and one in the run-up to the 1970 Women's Strike for Equality when feminist activists hung a banner at the pedestal that read "Women of the World Unite!"
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Cooper Union Foundation Building
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Cooper Union Foundation Building

During the Civil War, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell—the first woman to earn a medical degree in the U.S.—organized 4,000 women at Cooper Union into the Women’s Central Association of Relief where they coordinated the collection and distribution of supplies for the Union Army.
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Brown Building
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Brown Building

The Brown Building is the site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, one of the deadliest industrial disasters in U.S. history. One hundred and forty-six people died in the blaze—mostly young immigrant women who toiled in the factory's notoriously awful and dangerous conditions. The disaster further galvanized women workers in the garment industry who'd been organizing unions and rallying for labor and suffrage rights.
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Stonewall Inn
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Stonewall Inn

On June 28, 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar on Christopher Street. Rather than leaving quietly, the patrons fought back, rallied in part by transgender women like Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson who would go on to the found Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR). The ensuing riot catalyzed the movement for gay liberation.
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Madison Square Park
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Madison Square Park

Madison Square Park has been an important site for the city's social movements since it was opened in 1847. New York City's first open-air meeting calling for suffrage was organized there on December 31, 1907, by Maude Malone, a librarian and member of the Harlem Equal Rights League. The less radical Woman Suffrage Party established its office headquarters nearby in the Metropolitan Tower in 1910.
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Tammany Central Association
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Tammany Central Association

This 1902 building has a long history in New York lore: Originally the home of the Tammany Central Association, it later became the first offices of "New York" magazine in the 1960s, and later, "Ms." magazine. Founded in 1972 by Gloria Steinem (who served as its longtime editor), Dorothy Pittman Hughes, Brenda Feigen-Fausto, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Patricia Carbine, and other journalists, "Ms." helped bring feminist ideas before a wide audience. The block has since been renamed "Ms. Magazine Way."
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1095 Sixth Avenue
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1095 Sixth Avenue

This site was near the location of Lyric Hall, where journalist and activist Ida B. Wells addressed a full house on Oct. 5 1892, providing testimony on the horrors of lynching. Wells has a long history in New York City: A section of Gold Street in Brooklyn near where she once lived is called "Ida B. Wells Place."
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Cornelius Vanderbilt Mansion
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Cornelius Vanderbilt Mansion

The Vanderbilt Mansion was located on 57th St. and Fifth Ave. That was around where the NAACP's Silent Protest Parade stepped off on July 28, 1917. The event was organized to protest white-supremacist violence, particularly the racist massacre that had occurred in East St. Louis earlier in the month.
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Philosophy Hall, Columbia University
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Philosophy Hall, Columbia University

An immigrant from China, Mabel Ping-Hua Lee and her family settled in New York in 1905. As a teenager, Lee was a passionate suffragist, even leading a contingent of Chinese and Chinese American women at a massive 1912 suffrage parade on Fifth Avenue. A star student, she studied at Barnard College and later got a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University, the first Chinese woman to do so.
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135th Street Branch, NYPL
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135th Street Branch, NYPL

Ella Baker is best known for organizing a pivotal civil rights organization: the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Baker’s time in New York beginning in the 1920s was pivotal to her activism. She founded the Negro History Club at the 135th Street Library to hold forums and educational programs and this exposed her to a diverse African diaspora that produced the theoretical framework of a ground-up, poor peoples’ movement.
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