Ballot & Beyond

In the last 50 years there, Willa Bickham, her volunteers and supporters have fed more than one million people from Viva House in Southwest Baltimore, Maryland. Yet, she feels like she’s the one who benefitted, the one who received beneficence.

Nancy Grace Roman had a lifelong quest to become an astronomer. However, she had to overcome misconceptions about the intelligence, capabilities and proper role of women in society and academia. Despite this, she went on to become an executive at NASA. It was here that she became known as the “Mother of the Hubble” Space Telescope. Listen to this week’s episode of Ballot & Beyond to hear how Roman paved the way for women at NASA.

In the years leading up to what is known as the Women's Suffrage movement, strong female voices were coming together and laying the groundwork for women's political engagement. Augusta Chissell was a civic leader in West Baltimore, Maryland that leadership positions in the Women’s Cooperative Civic League, a club that addressed issues of housing and public health, including food and dairy purity, clean air, and refuse disposal. This position gave her close neighborhood ties and valuable connections that she could later draw upon as an officer in the Colored Women’s Suffrage Club.

Francis Ellen Watkins Harper is a legendary civil rights activist who saw the intersection of the fight for abolition and suffrage. Harper was a published poet and author who had been born free in Baltimore in 1825 and campaigned around the country for temperance, abolition, and women’s rights. In an attempt to create social unity after the American Civil War, American Equal Rights Association members like Harper believed it was the right time to integrate gender, race, and class-based advocacy in a broad push for equality. Harpers integrated goals and ideal was largely unheaded and the suffrage movement was highly segregated.

Historian and professor Jean Baker played an important role in making a place for women in the historical record. She rightly observed that women are too often excluded from historical and academic accounts and her work in the larger women's movement helped many see that the crux of history doesn't have to be primarily male political leaders; that a traditional women's role is also incredibly important to the understanding of past and current societies.

Senator Barbara Mikulski served longer in Congress than any other woman in U.S. history. During her tenure, she became known as Dean of Women. Not only did she gain this title for blazing a trail in government, including wearing slacks on the Senate Floor, but also for mentoring her colleagues. 

Lola Carson Trax and Edna Story Latimer led a hike of a dozen suffragists across Western Maryland in 1914. The noteworthy nature of a dozen women walking for two-weeks through hills and towns was a noteworthy occurrence and fed suffragists' goal to keep the fight in the public eye. Along their way, Trax and Latimer spoke to the press and the public and gathered signatures and new members for the Just Government League. Their suffrage hikes have gone down in history.