Image Gateway
Female graduates of Dickinson College in 1910
Discussion Questions
- How might some Americans of that era, male or female, perceive this type of parade down Fifth Avenue on a Saturday afternoon to be dangerously provocative?
- Can you put the mobilization of suffrage parades, like this one by Harriot Stanton Blatch in New York City in 1912 into the context of other political rights struggles from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century?
Women’s Movements
Through A Dickinson Lens
- For background information on the Jim Crow South, see Origins of Jim Crow (Ferris State) and for the “Jim Crow North,” see Dickinson & Slavery
Esther Popel (1896-1958 was a teacher, poet, editor, activist and the first female African American graduate of Dickinson 
College (Class of 1919). She married a chemist named William Shaw in 1925. The couple had one daughter. Popel used her married name, but typically wrote and published under her maiden name. She identified with the Harlem Renaissance literary movement and is probably best known for her searing poem, “The Flag Salute” (1934), about a lynching that had occurred the previous year in Maryland. However, Popel also wrote a short, fascinating memoir entitled, “Personal Adventures in Race Relations” (1948) that is available online through the Dickinson College Archives and which probably conveys her smart, witty but subtly combative personality as well as any source. To learn more about how students at Dickinson are engaging with the legacy of Esther Popel in their own lives, visit the Popel Shaw Center for Race & Ethnicity.
General Timeline
- 1882 // Chinese Exclusion & Immigration acts
- 1883 // Supreme Court invalidates 1875 law in Civil Rights Cases
- 1883-86 // Tom Torlino attends Carlisle Indian School
- 1886 // Protests and violence at Haymarket Square in Chicago
- 1886 // Statue of Liberty dedicated
- 1887 // Dawes Allotment Act
- 1892 // Peoples’ Party organizes for presidential campaign
- 1892 // Ida B. Wells launched a national anti-lynching campaign
- 1893 // Panic begins with an even deeper downturn than 1873
- 1894 // Federal government intervenes in railroad strike
- 1896 // McKinley defeats Bryan in heated presidential contest
- 1898 // War with Spain
- 1898 // Hawaii annexation
- 1899-1902 // Philippine Insurrection
- 1900 // US leads world in manufacturing output
- 1900 // McKinley defeats Bryan in presidential rematch
- 1901 // J.P. Morgan organizes US Steel, the first billion dollar company
- 1901 // Roosevelt becomes president after McKinley assassination
- 1903-1914 // Panama Canal
- 1904 // Roosevelt Corollary to Monroe Doctrine
- 1917 // New York becomes first eastern state in US to grant women’s suffrage
- 1917 // US entry into World War I
- 1920 // Ratification of Nineteenth Amendment