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The trials during the Women's Suffrage Movement that rocked the beginning of the United States is reaching their one-hundredth anniversary, making this an imperative time to begin, add, or renew any collection. As this is a world-wide and continuous struggle, a collection such as this will continuously need to be upgraded as seen fit, but here are some amazing resources to begin any collection.-Editor
While the word suffrage, derived from the Latin "suffragium," simply refers to the right to vote, the modem connotation specifically calls to mind the women's suffrage movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Part of the larger social movement of Women's Rights and the fight for equality within patriarchal societies, the Women's Suffrage Movement in the United States spans a seventy-two year period that mirrored similar struggles throughout Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. After World War I more countries throughout the world, including those in South and Central America, Africa, and Asia, began including women in the electoral process. An important note is that not all countries have elections due to their national form of government.
A focus on the United States and the United Kingdom is straightforward due to the sheer amount of scholarship; however, one must not ignore the histories of other countries and their own struggles with equality for women through the right to vote. Essay collections are one way to fill voids in this area, though there are still gaps, particularly in the study of the enfranchisement of African and South American women.
Because the Women's Suffrage Movement was a social, grass-roots movement, the arts play a significant role-it is important to choose materials that reflect not just the political aspects of the movement, but also to touch on the music, plays, literature, and visual imagery of the movement.
One can find a multitude of information online. More libraries and archives are participating in digitization projects to increase the accessibility and visibility of their collections. Included here are a number of suffrage-movementrelated collections available either entirely online or through digitized finding aids to assist in identifying documents and records for research. More digitization projects will undoubtedly occur in the years leading up to the suffrage centennial celebrations in various countries as more scholars begin looking back...