Women’s Suffrage and Movement Print Culture, Woman Suffrage Leaflet with Garrison Address to Rhode Island Suffragists, 1896

William Lloyd Garrison

Pamphlets

Garrison, William Lloyd, Woman Suffrage Leaflet, 1896, documents the suffrage movement’s use of periodical networks, state association meetings, and reform genealogy to advance universal suffrage at the end of the nineteenth century. Published from the office of the Woman’s Journal, the leaflet records suffrage communication systems through a reproduced address delivered before the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Association, showing how local speeches were converted into portable campaign literature for wider circulation. The Woman’s Journal was founded in Boston in 1870 by Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell as the official publication of the American Woman Suffrage Association, making this leaflet part of a larger print infrastructure that connected meetings, arguments, leaders, and readers across the movement.

Woman Suffrage Leaflet. Vol. V, No. 6. Boston: Office of the Woman’s Journal, November 1896. Four-page folded pamphlet in original paper wrappers, published bi-monthly, approximately 8.5 by 6 inches. The pamphlet reproduces a speech given by William Lloyd Garrison at a meeting of the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Association on October 15, 1896; given the 1896 date, the speaker was necessarily William Lloyd Garrison Jr., since the elder abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison died in 1879. The speech reviews the history of women’s suffrage in America and looks toward the coming century as a period for political progress, using the Garrison name to connect abolitionist moral reform, women’s rights advocacy, and the continuing campaign for universal suffrage. Library of Congress suffrage records include correspondence for William Lloyd Garrison Jr., confirming his continued presence in National American Woman Suffrage Association circles.

The leaflet’s value lies in its evidence of how suffrage organizations circulated public addresses beyond the meeting hall: a Rhode Island association speech became a Boston-published campaign text through the Woman’s Journal network. That mechanism supports research into suffrage print strategy, regional organizing, reform family legacy, and the movement’s effort to frame women’s voting rights as part of a longer democratic struggle. Small losses at bottom left corner and along bottom right edge, with clean, crisp paper and minimal toning; overall very good. A concise suffrage pamphlet linking Rhode Island organizing, the Woman’s Journal publishing apparatus, and late nineteenth-century arguments for universal suffrage.

Item #16199

Price: $495.00