This teen and adult program uses Library of Congress women’s suffrage primary sources, alongside your library’s own databases and physical holdings, to explore the non-conformist, creative and subversive ways that suffragists educated and agitated for the right to vote.
The zine has its roots in the feminist movements of the 20th century, serving as a creative vehicle for knowledge acquisition and transfer. Traditional and mainstream methods of communicating ideas were often off-limits to grassroots social and political movements such as the women’s suffrage movement.
Suffragists, like later feminists of the women’s liberation movement and the Riot Grrrl era, created magazines (zines) to establish their own means of production to broadly communicate their ideas. These methods of information production and distribution often serve to disrupt norms and call out institutions that perpetuate systems of oppression and inequality.
Dive into the history of zine-making and how to use digital collections to make your own.