Marguerite Kearns was the recipient of three first-place awards at the New Mexico Press Women’s annual conference at Ghost Ranch, April 24-26, 2015. The NMPW’s 2015 communications contest attracted an unprecedented number of entries this year, an 85% increase over 2014.
The NMPW, the largest inclusive media organization in the state, is also the largest state chapter in the national organization, the National Federation of Press Women. Diane J. Schmidt of Albuquerque served as the contest chair for the 2015 awards. Cheryl Fallstead is the NMPW state president. The NMPW has a chapter in Santa Fe. The other two chapters are in Albuquerque and Las Cruces.
Marguerite Kearns received first-place awards for her Votes for Women or suffrage movement coverage in three categories: video for a nonprofit web site, a nonprofit blog, and her personal opinion columns on Suffrage Wagon News Channel.
Suffrage Wagon News Channel (SuffrageWagon.org) has been publishing since 2009, and SuffrageCentennials.com has been online since 2013. Both are multi-media channels that include videos, audio podcasts, as well as weekly news and views updates about trends, events, and perspectives on the women’s suffrage movement in the United States.
NMPW judges said that the personal column and storytelling perspectives on Suffrage Wagon News Channel are “an original and timely contribution in light of the upcoming 2016 campaigns. The importance of making history matter for the present are highlighted by this blog.” The music video, “’Spirit of 1776’: A Suffragette Anthem” was noted as “a high-quality, engaging video with a great story well done.” And the Suffrage Centennials features earned recognition as a noteworthy “introduction to a great topic.”
Kearns earned first-place recognition of a web site video in her role as producer of the music video “’Spirit of 1776’: A Suffragette Anthem” that is available on YouTube. https://youtu.be/Aga11k5s0Bc
All three award-winning entries highlight the story of how American women campaigned for voting rights from 1848 to 1920. Because of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, millions of women across the United States voted on November 2, 1920. The New Mexico state legislature voted to ratify the 19th Amendment in 1920. See NM suffrage history (http://theautry.org/explore/exhibits/suffrage/suffrage_nm.html).
Awareness of suffrage movement history is gathering steam as suffrage centennial celebrations approach, according to Marguerite Kearns. This year, 2015, is the 95th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. This will be celebrated on August 26, 2015. The story of how American women won the vote will take on increased importance in the 2016 election as a woman candidate campaigns for the U.S. Presidency and the resulting attention stimulates awareness of women’s voting rights and the 72-year campaign to win them.
The year 2016 is the centennial observance of the death of Inez Milholland, the nation’s suffrage martyr who died in 1916. And in November 2020, American women will have been voting for 100 years, another opportunity for national observances and celebrations. Women voters already vote in higher numbers then men, a trend that has remained consistent since 1980. More women register to vote than men, and women tend to take more time than men deciding on their choice before heading to the polling place. Women’s voting trends are tracked by the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.
The “Spirit of 1776” wagon featured in the award-winning music video is an actual artifact now in the collection of the New York State Museum that was used by Marguerite Kearns’ grandmother, Edna Buckman Kearns. The wagon is considered an icon of Votes for Women campaigning because of its 1776 message of taxation without representation and a call to return to the spirit of equality and freedom that was written into the Declaration of Independence. This vision of all men and women being created equal had not yet been realized by the time of the Seneca Falls, NY women’s rights convention in 1848. The music video highlights the tens of thousands of grassroots activists throughout the nation that it took to win voting rights over the period of 1848 to 1920.
“Patriotic protest was a significant theme during the 72-year Votes for Women campaigning,” Kearns said. She explained that her grandmother wrote columns and provided suffrage news for NYC metropolitan newspapers. Edna Kearns also organized in NYC and in Long Island’s towns and villages. Her horse-drawn campaign wagon, the “Spirit of 1776,” will be exhibited at the New York State Museum in 2017 during the state’s centennial celebration of the win for women’s voting rights in 1917.
“This extraordinary grassroots nonviolent social revolution was the largest in the nation’s history,” Marguerite Kearns said. “And the anticipated release of the ‘Suffragette’ film from the UK starring Meryl Streep and others in October 2015 has brought considerable attention to the women’s suffrage movement in both the UK and the United States. In both countries, Votes for Women activists were arrested and sentenced to prison time.”
FOR MORE INFORMATION:
Marguerite Kearns (505-423-0387). Email: [email protected]. Resources: http://SuffrageWagon.org http://SuffrageCentennials.com
New Mexico Press Women: http://newmexicopresswomen.org/
