March 6, 2006	Volume 5, Number 7

Women’s History Month Resources

The Wisconsin Historical Society (WHS) has put thousands of pages about Wisconsin women on its Web site, free for teachers to use during March, Women's History Month. Many of these documents recover "forgotten" voices, including minority women, factory workers, maids, laundresses, teenagers, farm wives, and others.

These resources include lesson plans based on original documents; primary sources by or about women, with annotations explaining their content and significance; and background essays about Wisconsin women. WHS invites you to copy, print, or download this material for any educational, non-commercial use. A new, comprehensive 500-page history of Wisconsin women also is available.

Lesson plans

These lesson plans are based on, and include links to original documents available on the WHS site. Unless marked as elementary, these materials are better suited for middle and high school students:

• Wild Rice Harvest (elementary)
• 1830: Early Women Settlers in Wisconsin
• 1846: Should Women Be Allowed to Own Property?
• 1846: A Teenage Girl's Diary, from Ohio to Wisconsin (elementary)
• 1850: An Indian Woman in the Sandy Lake Tragedy
• 1854: A Real-Life "Little House" Girlhood on the Wis. Frontier
• 1863: Wisconsin Women Help Civil War Soldiers: It's a "Fair" Thing (elementary)
• 1910: Should Indian Girls Be Mainstreamed?
• 1911: Should Women Be Allowed to Vote?
• 1921: Let's Vote on It (elementary)
• 1943: The All-American Girls Baseball League
• 1988: From Laos to La Crosse, A Hmong Girl's Memoir
• 14 Ways to Use Original Documents in the Classroom

Documents by or about Wisconsin women, with an explanation of where the document came from and why it's important:

• 1702: Indian women and French men in the fur trade era
• 1766: Glory-of-the-Morning, a Ho-Chunk chief
• Brief life of Glory-of-the-Morning
• 1824: A metis girl comes to Green Bay as a new bride
• Brief life of Elizabeth Baird
• 1827: Exploitation of Indian women by white traders at Prairie du Chien
• 1826-1841: Recollections of a young mother in the Lead Region
• 1829-1834: Juliette Kinzie's memoir of life at Fort Winnebago
• 1820s: Wisconsin's first public school teacher, Electa Quinney
• 1832: Sarah Bracken flees from the Black Hawk War
• 1833: The first German women to settle in Milwaukee
• 1839: A pioneer mother's life in Sheboygan
• 1842: Fugitive slave Caroline Quarlls escapes through Wisconsin
• 1856: Margarethe Schurz opens America's first kindergarten in Watertown
• 1864: The diary of domestic servant Addie Tripp in Onalaska
• 1860s: A former student recalls Milwaukee Female College
• 1860s: Documents of women on the Civil War home front
• 1875: Lavinia Goodell becomes Wisconsin's first woman attorney
• 1880: Temperance advocate Frances Willard of Janesville
• 1880: A Milwaukee activist testifies in favor of women's voting rights
• 1882: A secret women's suffrage club in Richland Center
• 1891: 19th-century women journalists in Wisconsin
• 1895: Ojibwe girls learn to use sewing machines, 1895
• 1900: Early women office workers in state government
• 1910: Excerpts from Milwaukee's "Settlement House Cookbook"
• Brief life of Lizzie Black Kander
• 1911: What the government thought Indian girls needed to know
• 1911: Pictures of the woman suffrage movement in Wisconsin
• 1911: Suffrage publications from the Wisconsin Woman Suffrage Association
• 1911: Reminiscences of suffragist Olympia Brown
• 1914: Hearing testimony by shop-girls and working women around the state
• 1917: An African-American woman describes coming to Beloit from Mississippi
• 1918: The World War One letters of nurses Helen Bulovsky and Margaret Rowland
• 1918: Women's contributions to the World War One home front
• 1920: State regulations for women workers
• 1920: A sketch of Meta Berger, Milwaukee socialist
• Life of Meta Berger
• 1921: Wisconsin passes the nation's first equal rights bill
• 1935: Black women join the Milwaukee Handicraft Project
• 1930s: Kenosha women's lives during the Great Depression
• 1938-1941: a maid, laundry worker, and "cigarette girl" describe their jobs in unemployment hearings
• 1940s: World War Two photographs taken by Dickey Chapelle of Shorewood
• Life of Dickey Chappelle
• 1940s: World War Two letters from WAC Luida Sanders, of Wittenberg
• 1940's: The Racine Belles baseball team
• 1946: Women metal fabricators in Fort Atkinson
• 1991: Hmong women are greeted by racist taunts in Lacrosse

Biographies and background essays by historical society staff:

• A short history of women in Wisconsin, with some links to original documents
• Hundreds of pictures of Wisconsin women throughout history
• Brief lives of some famous 19th-century Wisconsin women
• 1760: Ho-Chunk chief Glory of the Morning
• 1848: German "Forty-eighter" Mathilda Anneke
• 1870: Attorney Lavinia Goodell
• 1890: College president Ellen Sabin
• 1900: The Suffrage Movement
• 1912: Suffragist Theodora W. Youmans
• 1920: Belle Case La Follette
• 1920s: Author Zona Gale
• 1950s: Novelist Laura Ingalls Wilder
• 1960's Civil rights activist Vel Phillips

Last updated on 3/6/2006