Activists for women’s voting rights raised money for their cause by selling their handmade items, among other things, at the National Suffrage Fair in New York City. Knitting, crochet, and the movement’s own history played prominent roles at this event.
The “suffragists of the country, the home wreckers, the unsexed, the women who have lost all feminine instincts,” expounded the New York newspaper The Sun, “are hard at work dressing dolls, fashioning baby clothes, embroidering doilies, painting calendars, crocheting and knitting” for a national fair to raise funds for women’s suffrage. “The best joke of all,” the newspaper proclaimed, was that “the editor of the oldest and largest suffrage paper in the country keeps a pile of wash-cloths beside her, and in the intervals between writing editorials she crochets a…
