Women's Franchise League

This collection is comprised of archival materials generated by British and American women of the nineteenth century. This archive contains the 1890-1895 minutes book of the Women's Franchise League, London, which was founded in 1889. Also included is some correspondence to or from Jacob Bright, related to suffrage issues, 1870-1881, and to Miss Bright, 1926-1927. American materials in the collection are more personal and unrelated to the suffrage movement in Great Britain.

Included in the American files are ten letters Nellie F. Harvey received from friends and family members between September 1885 and March 1887 while she was away at school; these letters recounted small town events and gossip about the residents of Kenduskeag, Hudson, and Bangor, Maine. Sarah J. Wickes was a principal at the Saranac School in Willsboro, New York. She wrote poetry and local history, keeping a commonplace book of her writing as well as clippings and ephemera, between 1862 and 1902. Materials no longer securely tipped into the book have been placed in folders. Martha R. Tifft, a school teacher in Ovid, Seneca County, New York, writes to each of her parents, Wiatt and Sophronia Tifft in September 1845; she includes notes from other family members as well. Jennie Hamilton Irving (1860-1941) was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts. She attended the school which became the Cambridge School for Girls and kept a diary during 1878 which was donated to the McCormick Library by her granddaughter, Jane (Rice) LaRue in 2002.