The Manuscript Division is currently seeking applicants for the 2025 National Woman’s Party (NWP) Fellowship. Applications are due by February 1, 2025. 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 subject areas linked to the legacy of the NWP. Proposals must demonstrate the need for onsite access to collections that are not yet completely digitized or otherwise available remotely. Fellows are required to 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.
The National Woman’s Party, 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 nonprofit, the NWP established a fellowship to ensure long-term support for future research within the NWP collections and other unparalleled women’s history collections at the Library of Congress.
The third and most recent annual fellowship was awarded in spring 2024 to Magdalene Zier, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Stanford University. Zier’s research project, “Splitting the Difference: Alternative Theories of Women’s Legal Equality, 1920-1954,” revisits the idea that post-Nineteenth Amendment feminists either took an “equalitarian” position (advanced by the NWP) or a “protectionist” position (supported by the National Consumers’ League) on rights for women. Zier aims to spotlight women’s rights advocates whose views did not fit neatly into either camp and to investigate issues that complicate the divide, such as whether states could and should ban women from certain occupations like bartending. She is also interested in Black women’s viewpoints on the debate over the Equal Rights Amendment and protective labor legislation, and on the intersections and tensions between feminist and civil rights legal strategies in the 1930s and 1940s. With the support of the NWP fellowship, Zier visited the Manuscript Division in September and began consulting the records of the National Woman’s Party, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, League of Women Voters, and National Consumers’ League, as well as the papers of Nannie Helen Burroughs, Maud Wood Park, Mary Church Terrell, Anna Kelton Wiley, and of several Supreme Court justices, all of which are held by the division. She will share some of her early findings in a future blog post.
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