The National Woman’s Party Research Fellowship Committee, coordinated by the Manuscript Division, has awarded its second annual research grant and is excited to welcome this year’s fellow, Katie Rose Quandt, a freelance journalist and M.A. student in biography and memoir at The City University of New York Graduate Center. Quandt’s research on “Hull House: The Hidden History of the Women Who Built the Social Safety Net” will center on a “group biography” of several women who lived and worked at Hull House, the well-known social settlement in Chicago, from 1890 to 1930. This group of female friends and collaborators included Florence Kelley, Grace Abbott, Alice Hamilton, and Julia Lathrop. The National Woman’s Party Records and the National Consumers’ League Records will provide the basis for Quandt’s research on a chapter about social reformer Florence Kelley. Quandt will investigate Kelley’s lobbying and legal strategies to support women workers and oppose child labor, including Kelley’s resistance to the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Quandt’s approach as a freelance journalist will offer a new perspective on this history, provide approachable biographies of these women’s lives, and offer additional insights into the ERA debate of the 1920s and 1930s.
The National Woman’s Party (NWP), founded as the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage in 1913 by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, fought for women’s suffrage and equal rights for women for more than a century. The NWP collaborated with the Library of Congress throughout much of the twentieth century to preserve the organization’s history by donating collection materials for scholarly research. In 2020, during the centennial year of the Nineteenth Amendment’s ratification, the NWP donated its remaining archival and book collections to the Library of Congress. Before ceasing operations as an independent non-profit, the NWP also established a fellowship to ensure long-term support for future research within the National Woman’s Party collection and other unparalleled women’s history collections at the Library of Congress.
The Manuscript Division is currently seeking applicants for the 2024 National Woman’s Party Fellowship (applications due by February 15, 2024). One fellowship will be awarded annually (with a stipend of up to $2,000) to be used to cover travel to and from Washington, D.C., overnight accommodations, as well as other research expenses. Awards will assist fellows in their ongoing scholarly research and writing projects on the NWP or on broader topics within the fields of women’s and gender history, equality studies, women’s studies, or other subjects areas linked to the legacy of NWP. Proposals must demonstrate the need for onsite access to collections that are not yet completely digitized or readily available remotely. In the interest of increasing awareness and extending documentation of Library of Congress collections, fellows are required to make use of the Library’s extensive collections and be in residence for a minimum of at least five business days during the award period. For more information on application requirements, collection availability, and how to apply for the NWP Fellowship, please see the Manuscript Division’s Fellowships webpage.
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