The Manuscript Division is currently seeking applicants for the 2026 National Woman’s Party (NWP) Fellowship. Applications are due by February 1, 2026. 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 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 fourth and most recent annual fellowship was awarded in spring 2025 to R. B. Tiven, a civil rights lawyer and a Ph.D. candidate in history at CUNY Graduate Center. Tiven’s project, “One Person, One Vote: The Politics of the Nineteenth Amendment,” is a political history of the Nineteenth Amendment that aims to uncover why politicians shifted to support the amendment between 1912 and 1920. One aspect of the project investigates how lobbying techniques by both the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and the NWP impacted members of Congress, especially the NWP’s strategy of targeting the party in power during election campaigns. During summer 2025, Tiven consulted the National Woman’s Party Records; the NAWSA Records; and the congressional papers of William Borah, James Mann, Key Pittman, Thomas Walsh, and several others. She will share some of her early findings in a future blog post.
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