The picture most people know of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the women\u2019s suffrage movement in America is one painted in broad strokes and grand designs. Beyond the vision, grit, and heroism, however, the workaday details of how the movement was actually run\u2014the backroom negotiations, convention planning, grassroots organizing\u2014are largely unknown to history.<\/p>\n
Until now.<\/p>\n
A recently discovered trove of letters, speeches, petitions, photographs, and pamphlets\u2014forgotten for a century in attics, barns, and on porches\u2014now opens a window onto the quotidian details of that historic movement. Originally owned by suffragist Isabella Beecher Hooker, the collection includes dozens of letters from fellow movement leaders Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The collection has now found a new home in the\u00a0University of Rochester’s Department of Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation <\/a><\/strong>(RBSCP).<\/p>\n Part of a notable family of reformers, Hooker was the daughter of the Reverend Lyman Beecher and a half-sister of social reformer and abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher, educator Catharine Beecher, and novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe.<\/p>\n