First Reflection of the Black Suffrage Research Project
“If you're doing a biography, you try to stay as accurate as possible to reality. But you really don't know what was going on in the person's mind. You just know what was going on in the minds of people around him.” by Clint Eastwood.
Since my freshman year in college, I knew that at some point in time, I would be required to write a biography. However, I did not know that this opportunity would come in such a delightful way where I would be writing a biographical sketch of an African American Woman Suffragist. The moment I came to know that our Biography sketches would be published in a public database on Women and Social Movements in the United States, I was very excited that I would get to learn the educated approach Historians use and contribute to society. Before even starting I had to make sure that I understood - what the project was about, the aim of the project, how I should approach it with my peers, and how perfectly we can execute the plan within the due date. All the guiding information we needed was posted on Canvas and we carefully read through those. Clearly, we are required to research and write a biographical sketch on suffragist Mrs. M. A. Lee based on primary sources that will help us to include the date and place of birth and death, family information, lifetime accomplishments, major events of life, and historical significance. I and my other two group members shared contacts and have been keeping in contact through social media and the Canvas site. We know that teamwork is the best work and we all want to work smarter than work harder. We started riffling through several online databases such as Proquest, Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers, and Alexander Street, but could not find any single clue of Mrs. M. A. Lee. We realized that searching on those websites is way more challenging than simply using Google search in the beginning. Therefore, we started looking up only by the name Mrs. M. A. Lee but the search led us mostly to Mary Lee, who was a woman suffrage in South Australia and definitely is not the person of interest. Then we were desperately looking for the full name of her thinking that might help us narrow down our search. Another clue led us to The Ulster Historical Foundation which is a highly reputable research and publishing agency from Ireland that offers help to discover Irish and Scots-Irish ancestors, which is not our topic of interest. We finally found our first clue about her in the book Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State by Susan Goodier, and Karen Pastorello which can be purchased and accessed in Google Books. It was kind of the Eureka! moment for us. We found that she was from Rochester City in New York State. To keep track of the project, we kept a record of all the sites that led us to any single clue of Mrs. M. A. Lee. Even though we found only one clue, at this moment we are a little nervous about the progress of the project. The main concern is how we will be able to find all the clues needed about her while we have found only one clue after three people vigorously searching for hours. However, we have a plan. I have had a membership in Queens Public Library in New York and know a librarian who I believe is an expert on references and can potentially help us if I contact her. Besides that, we will continue our search in the library and other online databases more thoroughly. We also planned the writing style. The biography should include all the basic information, as I mentioned above, yet appeal to the readers. I needed to mention, that I already feel like an investigator who has been given a project to profile a person and finish within a time limit, which actually is encouraging and challenging me in a good way to keep myself on track.
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“If you read enough biography and history, you learn how people have dealt successfully or unsuccessfully with similar situations or patterns in the past. It doesn't give you a template of answers, but it does help you refine the questions you have to ask yourself.” – Jim Mattis.
I believe history provides the context of today. The biggest advantage history gives us is the ability to formulate new ideas based on having all the information from the past. If you are to know a certain event by studying history, then that 'Certain Event' will give you the absolute understanding and it will result in having to understand why an event is happening right now. Not only you will be able to understand how things work but you will also attain knowledge that our ancestors wanted us to grasp the knowledge that they had wished to pass on. And that knowledge will contribute greatly to the present generation. That is the reason why we have time and there are many things you can do with time. Therefore, we should be thankful for the immense contribution of historians and even those people who preserve and represent past events. If you can read the story of one single person who lived back then around the time when the suffrage movement took place, you'll know what happened. History, biographies to be very specific, gives us the chance to find ourselves within those people and almost to live through those experiences. It helps us to develop a sensitivity to the experiences of others and to appreciate their sacrifices and contributions to the betterment of the many lives of women in the U.S. today and how they helped to shape the bright future that we are living in today. I specifically want to mention the photographs we have observed in this class till today. A photograph is a capture of the moment lived. The one photograph that speaks a volume is of a prison cell in Occoquan (Cell) seen through a door with bars. When I looked at the photo, I could visualize women suffragists being held in their jail time and how desperately and fearlessly they fought for suffrage. It is kind of an eye-opener for me that what I think is a very simple duty of voting was actually won by enormous sacrifices and dedication of hundreds and thousands of women in the past. We should all vote as if our rights depend on it. I am a woman and am grateful that I am given an opportunity to represent and preserve a woman who participated in the suffrage movement, whose life story, I believe, has not much been looked upon and that we will shed light upon her life and appreciate her contribution to us.
Works Cited
- “Cell at Occoquan [Workhouse].” Planning D-Day (April 2003) - Library of Congress Information Bulletin, Victor, www.loc.gov/item/mnwp000236.
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