Biography
Elisabeth Freeman was born in 1876 to Mary Hall Freeman in England, who was estranged from her husband. Her mother, Elisabeth and her two siblings emigrated to the United States and lived on Long Island in New York. Mary worked for an orphanage, and the children lived there for a while. Growing up poor, Elisabeth Freeman did not get a College education and found only her activities for the Salvation Army "uplifting". After moving back to London, Elisabeth helped a woman that was beaten by a police man and both got arrested. The woman brought her into the suffrage movement. In the movement, she learned to fight for the cause, speak publicly and bring new members to the movement. The skills she learned in London, she brought back to the US, where she got employed as as organizer by the suffrage movement. Besides her organizing skills and her hands-on approach to recruiting, her abilities talking to the media were especially recognized. One prominent example happened in 1913, when she took part in the national Suffrage Hike to the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson in Washington, D.C. As a publicity stunt in New York City she wore a gypsy costume and drove a wagon piled with women's suffrage literature and stenciled with 'Votes for Women' slogans.
While working in Texas for the suffrage movement, on May 16, 1916, one day after the lynching of Jesse Washington she was brought in to investigate by the NAACP. For a week, she talked to people in Waco, and her documentation of the lynching to W. E. B. Du Bois was the base for garnering national attention.
In the years between 1917 and 1919, she was active for the peace movement, where she lobbied Congress, and continued her work organizing, speaking and fighting for the cause of civil rights, although speaking up against US policies concerning the war garnered strong reactions by the media and the public.
Not much is known of her life after 1920, partly due to the political and cultural oppression of radical civil rights movement. Elisabeth Freeman died of pleurisy in February 1942.
Read more about this topic: Elizabeth Freeman (suffragist)
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