This is a guest post by Janet Lindenmuth, Reference Librarian at Widener University, Delaware Law School.
I’ve been using the collections of the Library of Congress to research Ruza Wenclawska, also known as Rose Winslow. (She generally used the name Rose Winslow as a labor and suffrage activist, and the name Ruza Wenclawska in her later career as an actress.) A Polish-American labor activist and socialist, she was active in the women’s suffrage movement and was a popular speaker on labor and suffrage. In 1917, she was one of the National Woman’s Party “silent sentinels” who picketed the White House in support of women’s rights. She was arrested and sentenced to seven months at Virginia’s Occoquan Workhouse, where she and Alice Paul led a hunger strike. She was also a poet and actress in the 1910s and 1920s, appearing on Broadway and with the Provincetown Players, an experimental theater group in Greenwich Village. Her poetry was printed in The Masses, a radical magazine published in Greenwich Village.
I first learned about Ruza Wenclawska from the Broadway musical Suffs. As portrayed by actress Kim Blanck she was funny and outspoken, one of the most memorable characters in the show. But what was she like in real life? When I first started my research, very little was known about Wenclawska’s life. She was active in the suffrage movement, later became an actress, and then seemed to disappear after 1920. I was determined to find out more about her.
But how do you research someone who left no archive of her own? There is no collection of Rose Winslow’s papers. She moved frequently and once claimed that she owned no more than could fit in a suitcase. She died in 1934 in a New York State hospital at about the age of forty-five and seems to have left little behind.
I’ve been looking at the archives of organizations and people with whom she worked, many of which are held at the Library of Congress. The first suffrage group Ruza worked for was the Women’s Political Union (WPU), founded by Harriot Stanton Blatch in New York. One of the WPU’s goals was to bring more working-class women into the suffrage movement. Ruza, who started out as a child factory worker, was one of the young women the group recruited. The Harriot Stanton Blatch Papers in the Library of Congress Manuscript Division consist of scrapbooks created by Blatch that contain newspaper clippings, letters, advertisements and flyers, and photos documenting the activities of the WPU. There I found several advertising flyers for meetings featuring Ruza as a speaker, along with photos of a group of women, marching through Coney Island to advertise an upcoming suffrage meeting. The woman at the end of the line of marchers is Ruza.
Ruza also worked as an organizer and speaker for the National Woman’s Party (NWP). The Manuscript Division’s National Woman’s Party Records, which I’ve been able to access through ProQuest History Vault, contain telegrams to and from Ruza about her employment and speaking engagements, lists of salaries and expenses, advertisements for her meetings, photographs, and the occasional letter that mentions her.
The Library’s Prints and Photographs Division has been a source of previously unknown photos of Ruza. One example is from a 1914 delegation of working women who marched to the White House to meet with Woodrow Wilson about women’s suffrage. A photo of this event shows Ruza holding a banner reading, “We Demand an Amendment to the Constitution of the United States Enfranchising Women.”
There are probably more discoveries to be made in the archives about Ruza, especially as additional collections are digitized. I’m grateful to institutions like the Library of Congress for making these resources available.
More information on Ruza Wenclawska is available on Valentine Smith-Vaniz’s Instagram account @rememberingruza and in a biographical sketch of Rose Winslow (Ruza Wenclawska) in the Biographical Dictionary of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States.
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