There’s a local effort to help more people learn about New York state’s deep connection to the women’s suffrage movement and encourage more conversations about voting and elections.
A new website, www.WomenAndTheVoteNYS.com, is an interactive site where you can find gravesite locations of suffragists who are buried at cemeteries around the state, as well as a brief bio on each of the women and men listed who were active in the suffrage movement.
The initiative was led by local documentary filmmaker Linda Moroney, co-owner of Low to the Ground Productions, who collaborated with several other people as they looked for a way to honor these individuals, particularly in a year which marks the centennial of the 19th Amendment, which helped guarantee women the right to vote.
Moroney says this is also a follow-up to a short film done in 2016 about the thousands who visited Susan B. Anthony’s gravesite at Mount Hope Cemetery.
But she notes there are many other people in cemeteries around the state with connections to the suffrage movement.
“(We're) Building a database - an interactive map - so that come election day if you are in Watertown or Montauk or Rhinebeck or Brooklyn or Buffalo, you can go out within your own community and pay tribute to suffragists that paved the way for the right to vote,” Moroney says.
Moroney says the website features individuals who were active long after suffrage was passed.
"People that were pushing for political equality post-19th Amendment," Moroney said. "People that were pushing for the ERA and making great strides like Shirley Chisolm, Bella Abzug, there are all sorts of other people that are in this database.”
Moroney says the team behind this new website will have filmmakers stationed at a number of cemeteries on Election Day, Nov. 3, to record interviews with visitors paying their respects at suffragist gravesites.
The idea is to use that material for a new documentary about election day titled Election Day 2020 NYS.
