We are pleased to announce that a new digital collection of historical woman’s suffrage research materials from the Katharine Kennedy Brown Papers (MS-146) are now freely available online, anytime, through the Wright State University Campus Online Repository, at CORE Scholar: Katharine Kennedy Brown Papers.
Katharine Louise Kennedy Brown (1891-1986) was a prominent and powerful figure in Ohio politics and Dayton society for over fifty years. Katharine’s political career began in 1920, immediately after women won political suffrage, when women were initially denied a place on the Montgomery County Republican Executive Committee. She decided that she was tired of being “given things” by men and determined to “take what was legally ours.”
Katharine Kennedy Brown voting for the first time in 1920 (ms146_82_01_16)
Katharine eventually became a member of the committee, but did not stop there. She helped build Montgomery County’s Women’s Ward and Precinct Organization in 1920 and formed the first Women’s Republican Club in the county as an added support to the county organization. She became a member of the Republican State Committee of Ohio in 1928, representing the 3rd Congressional District, a position to which she was elected every two years for forty years. She was a founder of the Ohio Federation of Republican Women (see MS-549). Katharine served as a Delegate-at-Large to eight Republican National Conventions from 1932 to 1968 and as an Alternate-at-Large from Ohio in 1928. (Additional details of Katharine’s political activities and family life can be found in the MS-146 collection finding aid.)
The digital collection currently includes a photograph of Katharine voting for the first time in 1920 (shown above), as well as two speeches Katharine delivered in support of Herbert Hoover in the 1928 presidential election (which he won).
This digital project has been a collaborative effort between the University Libraries’ Special Collections & Archives and the University Libraries’ Digital Initiatives and Repository Services (DIRS) Department, which provided the digitization, metadata encoding, and uploading of digital content to CORE Scholar.
Please visit the Special Collections & Archives’ CORE Scholar page to browse additional digital collections. Don’t forget to check out the University Archives’ CORE Scholar page as well.