Her Hat was in the Ring!-U.S. Women who ran for office before 1920
http://www.herhatwasinthering.org/index.php
I wanted to share with you all this wonderful website that I recently learned about. Her Hat Was in the Ring! allows us to find and research women in the US who had run for public office before the year 1920. When you take a second to think about it, how many women’s names come to mind when you think about elections in the 1800s? Five, Ten, or maybe none? Now, how many men’s names can you think of? This is why this website was created. It is estimated that over 7,000 women ran for office before 1920. Currently, 3,950 women are listed on this site. This is impressive but shows that women’s contributions are still being overlooked.
The beauty of this site is that it is not overreaching for information and that fact makes it easier to manage and navigate. Created by Dr. Wendy E. Chmielewski, Dr. Jill Norgren, & Dr. Kristen Gwinn-Becker, the website functions without a large staff and funding is provided through grants.
Primary and secondary resources were used. Although, due to the fact that history did not always record women’s contributions, there may only be one resource for an entry. There is also a disclaimer on the website that, due to the lack of written history for women, there are some entries that have no resources cited. The website is accessible to all in that it does not require any permissions although with all online sites, accessibility is limited to those that have access to the internet. One wonderful part of this project is that you, as a user, may also contribute. Users may submit their own entries so that all women who may have been overlooked up until now may no longer be forgotten. This project is helping us to rewrite history and is an example of how digital public history is enabling us to retrieve information that would not be available in a solely written history project. An added feature is the upcoming calendar which allows viewers to access upcoming events that involve past and present female politicians.
