American Women’s Suffrage, Alice Stone Blackwell Autograph Letter After the Nineteenth Amendment, 1923

Alice Stone Blackwell

Manuscripts & Autographs

Blackwell, Alice Stone autograph letter signed, 1923, is a handwritten post-suffrage letter by one of the central editors and organizers of the American women’s rights movement. Daughter of Lucy Stone and Henry Browne Blackwell, Alice Stone Blackwell grew up within a family immersed in suffrage and reform, joined the Woman’s Journal after graduating from Boston University, and became one of the movement’s most important publishing figures. The letter’s text is personal, but its authorial significance is substantial: Blackwell helped bridge the rival suffrage traditions that became the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and her career links nineteenth-century abolitionist and women’s rights reform to twentieth-century post-ratification civic activism.

Blackwell, Alice Stone. Autograph letter signed to “Dear Howard.” September 12, 1923. One page, written in pencil. Blackwell writes, “thanks for the checks. All’s prepared for Kitty to start tomorrow. Lizzie Rogers is all used up and has put in today resting. Your aff. cousin, Alice.” Though brief and domestic in content, the letter preserves Blackwell’s hand and familial mode of address three years after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. Blackwell edited the Woman’s Journal, the leading suffrage newspaper founded by her parents, from 1883 until 1917, and she also edited suffrage material distributed to newspapers, making print one of the central mechanisms through which she advanced the movement.

The 1923 date places the letter in the post-suffrage period, when figures associated with NAWSA and the Woman’s Journal continued to shape women’s civic participation after voting rights had been secured. The letter does not itself discuss suffrage strategy, but it offers an autograph example of a reformer whose work helped consolidate the American suffrage movement, reconcile former organizational divisions, and carry women’s rights activism into the League of Women Voters era. Light handling wear; written in pencil and legible, very good. A concise personal letter by Alice Stone Blackwell, valuable for its direct connection to the editorial and organizational infrastructure of American women’s suffrage.

Item #15994

Price: $485.00